Katrina Kaif spent this week being talked about for her body rather than her career. Salman Khan has spent much of this year fielding comments about looking his age. Long before either controversy, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan went through almost exactly the same cycle after the birth of her daughter.
Three people who were once linked romantically, three separate moments, and the same script playing out each time. It is worth asking whether that is coincidence, or whether it says something about how Hindi cinema’s biggest stars get treated once the cameras catch them looking anything less than perfect.
What happened to Katrina this week
Katrina Kaif and Vicky Kaushal welcomed their son, Vihaan, in November 2025, and Katrina largely stayed out of the public eye afterwards. Her first appearance came on August 26, at filmmaker Kuku Kohli’s funeral, and it drew immediate comment about her post-pregnancy appearance. Actor Shivaleeka Oberoi, who has recently become a mother herself, called the criticism ridiculous and reminded people that postpartum recovery includes the bloating and exhaustion that nobody glamorises.
The commentary resurfaced hard this week when Katrina and Vicky attended the Ambani family’s Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations at Antilia. Trolls picked apart her physique and her face, with some comparing her unfavourably to Aishwarya Rai’s own post-pregnancy period and others making cruel age-based comparisons to younger actresses.
Fans hit back forcefully, pointing out that a woman in her forties looking her age is not a scandal, and Alia Bhatt was among those who publicly showed support by liking Katrina’s recent pictures.
Salman’s parallel year
Salman Khan’s version of this has been running for longer and has flared up repeatedly through 2026. In July, a viral video of him in public triggered a wave of comments about visible signs of ageing, grey in his beard and lines on his face prompting claims that the star was ageing badly. He responded by posting his own unfiltered pictures and later, at a public event, addressed it directly, joking that when he goes a few nights without sleep, social media users pounce, and that he has to prove he is still here. It was not the first time.
Earlier pictures from a private screening showing him clean shaven drew similar comments about looking too old, and even his Bigg Boss season teaser this year was picked apart by viewers convinced the visual effects were doing more work than his actual face.
Aishwarya set the template over a decade ago
If this feels familiar, it is because Aishwarya Rai Bachchan lived through a near identical episode more than ten years ago, and it is still referenced today as the reason Katrina’s comparisons landed the way they did. After giving birth to her daughter Aaradhya in November 2011, Aishwarya faced sustained media and public criticism over how long she was taking to lose the weight, with tabloid headlines at the time bluntly calling her fat.
She addressed it years later in an interview, and her husband Abhishek Bachchan has spoken publicly about how upsetting the coverage was for her at the time, noting that nasty things were written just after their daughter was born. Her eventual Cannes red carpet reappearance was treated by the same press as a comeback, as though recovering from childbirth were an event that needed to be won.
Is it destiny, or is it just how the machine works
The instinct to see a mysterious thread tying Salman, Aishwarya and Katrina together is understandable, but the more mundane explanation probably fits better than fate. All three are among the most heavily photographed people in the country, with decades of tabloid history and paparazzi economics built specifically around their appearances.
Any visible change in any of their faces or bodies becomes content, and each of them carries the added weight of having been public romantic partners at some point, which gives commentators an easy, lazy way to draw comparisons between them whenever one resurfaces in the news.
There is also a harder truth sitting underneath the coincidence. The commentary aimed at Aishwarya and Katrina has consistently been about their bodies after childbirth, while the commentary aimed at Salman has been about simply looking his age.
That is not really the same conversation, even though it gets reported as though it were. Ageing is treated as decline for men in the industry, uncomfortable but survivable. For women, and specifically for new mothers, it is treated as a lapse that needs explaining, and often as a countdown they are expected to win against.
Sameera Reddy, Neha Dhupia, Patralekhaa and Bipasha Basu have each gone through versions of the same treatment Aishwarya and Katrina have faced, which suggests this is a pattern built into how Bollywood’s audience relates to its most famous women rather than something unique to any one star or any one relationship.
None of the three needed this attention this week, and none of them asked for the comparisons being drawn between them. What connects them is not fate. It is simply that they have spent three decades as some of the most looked-at people in the country, and looking-at, in this industry, rarely stays kind for long.
Key takeaways
Katrina Kaif was body-shamed this week following her appearance at the Ambani family’s Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations, continuing criticism that began after her August public reappearance following childbirth. Salman Khan has faced repeated age-related trolling through 2026, most notably in July. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan endured a similar cycle after her daughter’s birth in 2011, and her case is still cited as the template whenever a Bollywood actress is criticised postpartum.
The recurring pattern likely reflects the intense scrutiny placed on Bollywood’s most photographed stars, and a longstanding double standard in how the industry’s men and women are judged for visible age or physical change, rather than any coincidence tied to the three having once been romantically linked.