Dead people don’t trend unless someone helps them.

Usually, it’s a brand. Or a bot. But today, it was Jackie Shroff. The man they call "Bhidu" decided to mark the 57th death anniversary of Madhubala with a digital nod that felt surprisingly human in an era where "human" is a premium subscription tier.

We’re living through the Great Flattening. Everything that ever happened, every face that ever graced a silver screen, is now just another tile in the infinite scroll. Madhubala, the "Venus of Indian Cinema," has been dead since 1969. In tech years, that’s several geological epochs. She died before the microprocessor was a thing. Before the internet was even a glint in DARPA’s eye. Yet here she is, surfacing on your feed because an aging action star hit "upload."

It’s a strange ritual. Shroff’s tribute isn’t just a memory; it’s a data point. It’s an interaction between a man who remembers the smell of celluloid and an audience that thinks 4K resolution is a basic human right. There’s a friction here that most people ignore. We treat these digital eulogies as organic expressions of grief, but they’re mediated by the same algorithms that try to sell you gym shorts and crypto-scams.

The mechanics are predictable. You take a grainy, black-and-white still—likely a low-res grab from a fan site—and you push it through the pipes. The engagement metrics spike. The "RIP" comments flood in from people who couldn’t name three of her films if you held a gun to their heads. It’s performance art for the algorithm.

But there’s a cost to this digital immortality.

A few years ago, the legal battle over Madhubala’s biopic rights turned into a cold war. Her sister, Madhur Brij Bhushan, has been fiercely protective of the estate, threatening legal action against anyone trying to "unauthorized" her life. That’s the friction. The family wants to control the narrative. The tech world wants to scrape the data.

In 2026, a face isn't just a face; it's a set of coordinates for a generative model. Every time a star like Shroff posts a tribute, he’s inadvertently feeding the beast. He’s keeping the "brand" of Madhubala alive in a way that makes her ripe for a deepfake revival. We’re only about eighteen months away from some startup in Bengaluru or Palo Alto announcing an "AI-driven" romantic drama starring a synthetic Madhubala. They’ll call it a tribute. It’ll actually be a grave robbery with better lighting.

The price tag for this kind of "legacy management" is getting steeper. Licensing the likeness of a dead icon for a digital campaign can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But on social media, it’s free. It’s the ultimate loophole. You get the cultural clout of the legend without paying the estate a dime.

Shroff himself is an interesting bridge. He’s one of the last few stars who carries the weight of the old world. When he pays tribute, it carries a certain "street cred" that a corporate PR account lacks. He’s not doing it for the SEO. He’s doing it because he actually cares about the lineage of the craft. But the platform doesn’t care about his intentions. It only cares that he kept you on the app for another three seconds.

There’s something inherently lonely about seeing Madhubala’s face on a smartphone. She belonged to a time when stars were distant, untouchable gods. You had to go to a dark room with three hundred strangers to see her. Now, she’s squeezed between a video of a cat falling off a shelf and a sponsored post for a productivity app. We’ve traded the mystery of the star for the convenience of the thumbnail.

Maybe that’s why Shroff’s post sticks in the throat a bit. It’s a reminder of what we’ve lost in the transition to the digital panopticon. We’ve gained the ability to "remember" everyone, every day, forever. But in doing so, we’ve made memory cheap. If everyone is immortal on the internet, does anyone actually stay alive?

Fifty-seven years is a long time to be dead. It’s even longer to be a JPEG. We keep dragging these icons back from the grave to validate our own tastes, to signal our "depth" to a bunch of strangers who are already scrolling past us.

Jaggu Dada probably meant well. He usually does. But the ghost in the machine is hungry, and Madhubala is just the latest vintage soul served up for breakfast.

If we can't let a legend rest after half a century, what chance do the rest of us have of ever being forgotten?