June 8, 2010 (Sampurn Wire): Shahid Kapoor‘s impersonator on Twitter was removed last year and he got his actual name as his Twitter handle. The same was done when someone started spewing nonsense from Deepika Padukone‘s fake id. Anjana Sukhani also got her real ID after her impersonator was removed. But these are simple cases where their teams got into action and made it happen.
But if you think you’ve heard all stories about impersonation of celebrities on Twitter, think again, because this guy really takes the cake! There was a fake Chunky Panday in Twitter till last week, who was diligently replying to fans, updating status on Chunky’s whereabouts and even welcoming the senior Bachchan on Twitter! The guy managed to fool Chunky’s friend Ritiesh Deshmukh who actually announced his entry on the Twitter bandwagon. Boman Irani, Sania Mirza and Celina Jaitly all started to tweet Chunky, thinking it was the real person. In fact, so convincing was the chap that when the fake guy announced Chunky’s wife Bhavna’s entry into Twitter, she too was misled. It took a while before Bhawana realized that her husband had no idea about Twitter and the person online was a fake!
Finally the real Chunky made his debut 2 weeks ago and his friends started tweeting him. This made the fake person so uncomfortable that he has started projecting the genuine Chunky as fake! To counter this, Bhavna tweeted, introducing her hubby once and for all, clearingall doubts. But this didn’t keep the impersonator quiet. As soon as Bhavana introduced the real Chunky the impersonator had the audacity to say that Bhavna was playing the prankster!
So bizarre was the guy, that he has actually had the audacity to question both Bhavana and Chunky and asked for proof of their identity. Bhavana’s public announcement not withstanding! The bane of this confusion lay in the fact that Bhavana and Chunky use different spellings for their surnames. While Bhavana goes with ‘Pandey’ (which the fake uses too) Chunky is comfortable with ‘Panday’.
Chunky says ‘When my friends told me there was a fake posing as me I had no problem, in fact, I thought he was doing a better job than me of keeping in touch. Why would I mind – after all he is a fan and imitation is the best form of flattery! But this guy’s demeanor irritated my team so much that my publicist complained to the Twitter headquarters and got the fake removed. But I can tell you this much, he didn’t go quietly at all, there was some kicking and screaming involved too!’
-Sampurn Wire
