Her number was printed as Katrina Kaif's: Gurgaon woman gets a thousand calls a day

It was not charming. When Shipra Seth, a 33-year-old software professional in Gurgaon, started getting thousands of phone calls a day from strangers addressing her as Katrina Kaif, it robbed her of her peace \u2014 and, by her account, her sleep and her health.

The cause, she said, was a soft-drink company's advertising campaign featuring the actress. A TV commercial running since February promised "Katrina ka number label ke andar" \u2014 Katrina's number inside the label \u2014 and the number printed on the labels was, erroneously, Shipra Seth's own cellphone number.

For four weeks she received more than a thousand calls a day, plus a flood of text messages, some of them obscene, from across the country. "I am tired of telling people I am not Katrina," she told the Times of India. When she asked the company to remove her number, it responded that it had not provided the number and could not be held responsible if consumers dialed a wrong one. She began collecting labels sent to her by callers from different parts of the country \u2014 labels bearing her number \u2014 and sent the company a legal notice. The Times of India reported it had seen both her phone bill and one of the labels sent by a caller from Chennai, carrying the same number.

What made it worse: Seth had been on medical leave since January with chronic back pain and had been advised bed rest. The relentless calls aggravated her condition; she could not sleep and was on medication.

It is a story with a particular texture in India, where the emotional investment in film stars runs so deep that thousands of people will dial a number printed inside a soft-drink label on the chance of reaching one \u2014 and one woman, entirely by accident, gets to absorb all of it.

Based on the Times of India's March 2012 reporting.

The confusion that arises from shared names took an unusual and somewhat charming turn for a Faridabad resident who found himself receiving a steady stream of phone calls intended for Bollywood superstar Katrina Kaif — the calls arriving because his phone number was apparently similar to or identical with what some of her fans believed to be hers.

The phenomenon illustrates something about celebrity culture and the specific intensity of Bollywood fandom: that a significant number of people genuinely attempt to contact film stars by phone, whether through numbers shared in unverified corners of the internet or through elaborate guesswork.

For the Faridabad resident, the experience ranged from amusing to exhausting, depending on the caller. Some were simply confused and apologetic when it became clear they had the wrong person. Others, apparently unwilling to accept that Katrina Kaif was not available on this particular number, were persistent or creative in their responses.

Stories of this type — regular people receiving misdirected fame, whether through number mix-ups, name coincidences, or the occasional social media account confusion — have a particular texture in India, where the gap between celebrity and ordinary life can be enormous while the emotional investment in stars can be intensely personal.

The Faridabad resident reportedly handled the situation with good humor, occasionally playing along, occasionally explaining the error, and eventually deciding that the story was worth telling precisely because it captured something true about the peculiar dynamics of fan culture.

Katrina Kaif, for her part, was presumably unaware of the entire episode — as, presumably, she is of most of the attempts to reach her by unconventional means.