Clout is a hell of a drug. It makes people do strange things, like inventing elaborate systems for strangers they’ve never met. Kaveri Baruah found that out the hard way this week.

She folded. Fast.

The retreat came after Baruah, a self-styled branding expert and digital strategist, hit a wall made of high-priced legal talent. For those who missed the digital dust-up, Baruah had been circulating a series of "42 Rules" allegedly followed by Allu Arjun, the Tollywood titan whose face currently dominates half the billboards in India. It was the kind of content that thrives in the humid ecosystem of LinkedIn and "thought leader" Twitter. It was punchy. It was authoritative. It was also, according to Arjun’s camp, total fiction.

The "Rules" were your standard fare of hustle-culture gospel. They painted Arjun as a monastic devotee to his own brand, a man who supposedly micro-managed every pixel of his public existence through a rigid, proprietary framework. It’s a classic move in the influencer playbook: take a massive celebrity, project a "system" onto them, and then sell yourself as the person smart enough to have cracked the code.

Then the lawyers arrived.

Allu Arjun isn’t just an actor; he’s a corporate entity. When you’re the star of a franchise like Pushpa, your brand is a multi-million dollar fortress. You don't let people run around building unauthorized mythologies about your work ethic, especially if those mythologies might interfere with actual endorsement deals or production timelines. His legal team didn't send a polite "please stop" email. They threatened a full-blown suit.

Suddenly, the 42 rules became zero rules. Baruah issued a retraction that read like it was drafted at gunpoint, or at least under the heavy shadow of a potential defamation payout that would have cratered her bank account. She admitted the claims were "baseless" and wiped the slate clean.

This isn't just about a celebrity protecting his image. It’s about the friction between the "expert" economy and reality. We live in an era where everyone wants to be a curator of someone else’s success. It’s cheaper than actually building something yourself. You don't need a film studio or a decade of box-office hits; you just need a Canva account and enough confidence to tell people how Allu Arjun thinks.

The problem is that the internet doesn't care about the truth until it gets expensive. Baruah’s posts likely racked up thousands of impressions, fueled by the algorithm’s hunger for "secret success formulas." By the time the retraction hit, the "42 Rules" had already been digested by the masses as gospel. That’s the trade-off. The influencer gets the engagement, the celebrity gets a headache, and the audience gets a bunch of fake advice they’ll try to apply to their own mid-level marketing jobs.

Arjun’s move was aggressive, sure. Some might call it overkill. Why sue an influencer for making you look too disciplined? But that’s a naive way to look at the modern attention economy. In a world where AI can hallucinate a biography in three seconds, celebrities have to be litigious. If you don't own your story, someone else will rewrite it to sell a newsletter.

Baruah’s quick exit suggests she didn't have the receipts to back up the bravado. It’s easy to be a guru when you’re talking to a camera in your bedroom. It’s a lot harder when you’re facing a legal team that charges by the minute—and whose hourly rate probably exceeds your monthly revenue.

The "42 Rules" are gone. The posts are deleted. The digital footprint is being scrubbed with the kind of frantic energy usually reserved for a political scandal. We’re left with the same old reality: there is no secret code. There are no 42 rules. There’s just a guy who works hard, a team of lawyers who work harder, and a digital class desperately trying to find a shortcut to the top by hitching their wagon to a star who didn't ask for the lift.

If there’s a 43rd rule to be learned here, it’s a simple one. Don't invent a biography for a man who can afford to sue you into the next century.

I wonder which "branding expert" is currently drafting a thread on how this retraction was actually a masterclass in crisis management.