Engagement is a hell of a drug.

We’ve reached the point in the lifecycle of the attention economy where a global movie star isn’t just a person anymore. They’re a hidden object game. Alia Bhatt, fresh off her appearance at the BAFTAs, decided that simply posting a photo of her looking expensive wasn't enough to satisfy the hungry gods of the Instagram algorithm. Instead, she dropped a "100-point challenge," essentially turning her red-carpet presence into a digital scavenger hunt.

Find Alia. Circle the blur in the background. Get a cookie.

It’s a brilliant, desperate move. The mechanics of it are simple, almost insultingly so. By telling her millions of followers to hunt for her in a series of crowded frames, Bhatt isn't just sharing a career milestone; she’s hacking "dwell time." That’s the metric the suits in Menlo Park care about. If you spend three minutes pinching and zooming on a grainy JPEG of a London foyer to find the crown of a celebrity’s head, the algorithm registers that as high-quality engagement. It thinks you’re in love. In reality, you’re just doing free labor for a PR machine.

The internet loved it, obviously. "Viral" is the word we use when a million people collectively decide to waste their lunch break on the same shiny object. But look past the heart emojis and you’ll find the specific friction of our current era. We used to look at stars. Now we scan them like QR codes.

There’s a cost to this, and it’s not just the data plan you’re burning through. It’s the death of the "star" as an aspirational figure and the birth of the star as a content farm. Bhatt is talented. She’s arguably one of the biggest draws in Indian cinema. Yet, here she is, gamifying her own existence to ensure she doesn't get buried under a deluge of 15-second recipe videos and AI-generated thirst traps.

The trade-off is dignity. There’s something inherently undignified about asking your audience to play Where’s Waldo? with your face. It reeks of the same "please like and subscribe" energy that defines the mid-tier YouTuber, yet it’s being deployed by a woman who probably doesn't need to worry about her rent. It tells us that no one, not even the elite, is safe from the treadmill. If you stop moving, if you stop generating "points" for your fans to collect, you cease to exist in the feed.

Meta and TikTok have spent years training us to be lab rats. We want the dopamine hit of the "find." We want to be the first to comment "Found her at point 47!" as if it confers some kind of social status. It’s a closed loop of meaningless activity. The platform wins because you stayed on the app. The celebrity wins because their "reach" numbers go up, which they can then pivot into a five-crore brand deal with a luxury watch company. You lose because you spent ten minutes of your finite life looking for a woman who wouldn't recognize you if you were standing in her living room.

We are seeing the complete commodification of the "candid" moment. This wasn't a mistake. It wasn't a quirky whim. It was a calculated play to maximize the ROI of a plane ticket to London. Every frame was vetted. Every "point" was likely mapped out by a social media manager who understands that a static photo is a dead photo.

It works because we’re bored. We’re bored and we’ve been conditioned to think that "interaction" is the same thing as "connection." It isn't. It’s just clicking a button in a digital cage. We’re all squinting at our screens, trying to find a person who is increasingly disappearing into the very tech she’s using to stay relevant.

If a movie star falls at the BAFTAs and nobody circles her in a 100-point Instagram challenge, did she even go?