Social Butterfly

Her Instagram captions — wittily concise or an expertly selected emoji — present an intriguing combination of millennial insouciance with profundity that is beyond her years. The enigmatic yet instantly relatable Sobhita Dhulipala’s inner self emerges as Richa Kaul Padte peels back the layers of everyone’s new favourite ‘webtertainment’ celebrity, on the heels of the actor’s upcoming Netflix release, Bard of Blood

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Sobhita Dhulipala wants to feed her enemies to the pigs. That’s when I learn that pigs can eat entire human beings, leaving no trace behind. Teeth, bones, guts. All gone. It’s the perfect way to knock one or two people off your hit list. Dhulipala proposes this idea while she’s looking out of a car window, white earphones tucked firmly in, long hair sweeping across her face.

Well, actually, she proposes it on the internet. This scene takes place on Instagram, in a post that Dhulipala concludes by saying that since pigs are so cute, she’d rather feed them yummy things instead. In fact, could we please all just google pictures of piglets? She insists. So I do just that. They’re incredible.

This post is not an outlier on Dhulipala’s internet. Dark humour, a self-deprecating tone and the pairing of a windswept photo with an ironic caption are all hallmarks of the 27-year-old actor’s digital persona. In one post, she wears a white hotel bathrobe, gold stilettos, and a double string of pearls around her neck. The caption reads: ‘I’m going to hell Ma’. In another, she’s in a large striped shirt, hair hanging loose, with a disgruntled expression on her face. The caption? ‘Every time I type lmao’.

My favourite, though, is a picture of the