The 10-year challenge has taken the social media by storm, with people posting side-by-side photos of their present-day and decade-old photos. Several celebrities such as Shruti Hassan, Diana Penty, Sonam Kapoor, Reese Witherspoon and Anne Hathaway have also participated in the same and shared photos.
Tamil and Telugu actor Raashi Khanna also posted 10-year challenge photos on Wednesday, but there was a difference. While several people awed over how most actors looked different but nice 10 years ago, the Jai Lava Kusa actor used the social media trend to speak about bullying and body shaming.
Raashi, who made her film debut with the 2013 film Madras Café also starring John Abraham, shared a picture of hers from 2008 and another from 2018. She revealed that she had been bullied and body shamed at a certain point in her life. The picture of her from 2008 showed a bespectacled school girl in two pigtails.
“It only made me wonder how shallow some people can get,” she wrote. Fortunately, it did not affect her mentally, she said, due to the values she had imbibed from her family. She was taught that there was more to her than her appearance. “So, I never let anyone make me believe that I wasn’t good enough,” she said.
Raashi’s experience shows how important it is to have family support. “They showered so much love on me and that gave me so much strength and an ambition to make them proud one day. So, I always held my head high and worked on my strengths silently, forever believing in myself. I loved myself then and I love myself now and it has nothing to do with the way I look,” the caption read.
The 28-year-old actor concluded the post with a wish to touch people’s hearts and make them believe that they are special in their own way, regardless of what others would like them to think.
Read her full post here.