Sawan is peak puja season for Bollywood, and this year it's Bhumi Pednekar who's ended up trending for it. The actress posted a set of photos and a video to Instagram showing her offering water to a Shivling, dressed down in a black top and blue denims. The one detail that set off the comments section: she kept her black sunglasses on through the whole ritual.
Her caption leaned spiritual and a little poetic. She wrote, “As Sawan begins, I pray not for an easier life, but for the strength to walk it with grace. Har Har Mahadev. 🔱🕉️” The visuals themselves were fairly simple with just Bhumi at the Shivling, phone camera catching her mid-ritual.
That didn't stop the trolling. Comments piled up fast, most of them fixated on the same question: why the sunglasses? One wrote, “Sunglasses utar ke pooja kar sakte the??”, another said, “Never saw anyone wearing goggles and doing Pooja.” The general mood in the replies was less outrage and more bafflement.
There was a smaller counter-current too. A handful of users argued that how someone dresses for personal prayer is nobody’s business but their own, and that judging the sincerity of someone’s faith based on eyewear says more about the commenters than about Bhumi.
Bhumi herself hasn’t said anything publicly since the comments started rolling in, and there’s no indication she plans to. Actors have historically let this kind of noise pass without engaging, and given how quickly these cycles move on social media, this one will likely fade the same way once the next controversy takes its place.
Career-wise, she’s got bigger things on her plate right now. Bhumi is set to appear in The Pride of Bharat: Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, a two-part historical drama, where she’s playing the warrior queen Belawadi Mallamma — a fairly big swing for an actress mostly known for grounded, small-town roles.
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