It’s always a Tuesday when the sentiment hits. Ajay Devgn, the man whose cinematic brand is built on brooding silences and jumping between two moving cars, took to the digital town square this week to remind us he has a heart. The post was simple. A photo with his mother, Veena. The caption called her the "Shakti" of his life. "Everything we are begins with you," he wrote. It’s the kind of content that makes the algorithms purr.

It’s also a masterclass in the curated vulnerability that now governs our feeds.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting Devgn doesn’t love his mother. Only a sociopath would find fault with a son honoring his parent. But in the current attention economy, these moments aren’t just moments. They’re assets. We’ve reached a point where even the most primal human connections—the "Shakti" that supposedly fuels a man’s existence—must be compressed into a JPEG and fed to the Meta machine. If a Bollywood star honors his mother and doesn't tag it for a million likes, does the gratitude even exist?

The word "Shakti" carries weight. It’s power. It’s the feminine cosmic energy that keeps the universe from spinning into a void. In the context of the Devgn household, it’s a nod to the matriarchal spine that holds up a massive, multi-generational film legacy. But when that sentiment hits the glass of your iPhone, it undergoes a weird sort of friction. The trade-off is obvious: you trade a sliver of your private sanctity for a massive bump in brand sentiment.

Celebrity PR is a cold business. It costs roughly $5,000 to $10,000 a month just to keep a mid-tier influencer’s "authentic" voice humming along. For an A-lister like Devgn, the stakes are higher. The machine requires constant lubrication. Action trailers, brand deals for pan masala, and then—the pivot. The wholesome reset. The "I’m just a son" post. It’s the digital equivalent of a palate cleanser. After the high-octane violence of a film like Singham, the audience needs to see the soft edges. They need to see the Shakti.

We’re all participating in this theatre, though. We double-tap because we want to believe that behind the tinted windows and the private security, there’s a guy who still worries about what his mom thinks. We’re suckers for the narrative of the "family man." It’s the one thing the internet hasn't managed to fully kill yet, even if it has managed to commodify it.

The platform itself is the real winner here. Instagram doesn’t care about Veena Devgn’s influence on her son’s career. It cares about the dwell time. It cares that you spent six seconds looking at that grainy, nostalgic photo instead of scrolling past an ad for overpriced sneakers. Every "Everything we are begins with you" is just another data point in the great ledger of human sentiment. The friction comes when you realize that the more we broadcast these "grounding" moments, the less grounded they actually feel.

Devgn’s post is a symptom of a larger shift. We used to keep our altars in the corner of the living room. Now, we keep them in our pockets. We’ve outsourced our reverence to the cloud. It’s efficient, sure. It’s high-reach. But there’s a cost. The price tag for this level of public intimacy is the slow erosion of the thing itself. When you turn your mother’s influence into a headline, you’re inviting a billion strangers into a space that used to be sacred.

There’s a specific kind of irony in a man who built a career on being the "strong, silent type" having to be so loud about his inner life. But that's the tech-bro reality we live in. Silence doesn't trend. Silence doesn't sell tickets to a Sunday matinee. Shakti, apparently, needs a hashtag.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’ve spent too much time staring at blue light and reading quarterly earnings reports to see a nice gesture for what it is. But every time I see a celebrity share a "raw" moment of gratitude, I can’t help but look for the lighting rig just out of frame. I can’t help but wonder if the caption was written in a quiet moment of reflection or typed out by a 24-year-old social media manager sitting in a glass office in Bandra.

At the end of the day, Devgn’s mother is likely proud. His followers are definitely moved. The algorithm is fed. Everyone gets what they want, and the wheel keeps turning. But you have to ask yourself: when every intimate truth is shared for the sake of "engagement," what do these people have left for themselves when they finally put the phone down?