Nepotism may be a part of our mindset

The term “nepo baby,” which refers to people whose quick rise to success and fame is partially due to their family’s influence and status, is a relatively recent addition to the extensive list of internet lexicons.

- ATANU BISWAS

It gained enormous popularity after New York Magazine’s December cover package offering an “all but definitive guide to the Hollywood nepo-verse”, featured famous “Nepo Babies” in diapers and offered an absurdly detailed examination of society’s love-hate obsession with them. It all started with a February 2022 tweet by Meriem Derradji, a 25year-old Canadian tech-support worker, who coined the term itself after discovering that Maude Apatow had two famous parents.

From Jane Fonda to Angelina Jolie, the list of Hollywood’s nepo babies is long. Yet, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the son of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and the stepson of Mary Pickford, the world’s best-known pair in the 1920s, was Hollywood’s first example of a nepo baby. Paramount’s Jesse L. Lasky gave the 13-year-old Fairbanks Jr. a contract worth $1,000 a week and began working to establish him as a star. Yet Fairbanks Jr. never came close to matching his father’s legacy; in his memoir, he stated, “I have, since maturity, known full well the limits of my capabilities.”

While celebrities like Lily-Rose Depp (the daughter of Vanessa Paradis and Johnny Depp), Kendall Jenner (the daughter of reality TV star Kris Jenner and Olympic gold medalist Caitlyn Jenner), Gigi Hadid (whose mother, Yolanda Hadid, is a reality star), Hailey Beiber (the daughter of Stephen Baldwin and the niece of Alec Baldwin), and Maya Hawke (the daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke) are the targets of criticism in Hollywood, we in India have had similar situations for the past few years, possibly on a more intense scale.