Challenging the Ice Bucket Challenge
Many celebrities refused to take the challenge, consdering it a waste of resources.
Priyanka Chopra has been nominated by many to take up the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, but she doesn’t seem to be interested. The challenge involves dumping buckets of ice water over one’s head to spread awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord.
But Priyanka is not joining the league.
The link shows an Australian newsreader Lincoln Humphries, who firmly shuts the idea down. Humphries acknowledged the good that the ice bucket challenge has done, then suggested some other things that can be done to make a difference, including spreading the love around to other deserving causes such as cancer and fresh water charities, and not wasting so much ice.
Apart from Hollywood stars like Tom Cruise, Robert Pattinson and Nicole Kidman accepting it, Bollywood stars like Akshay Kumar, Bipasha Basu and Abhishek Bachchan also took up the challenge.
Earlier, Sonam Kapoor had refused to take up the challenge after being nominated by Fukrey fame Pulkit Samrat.
Hollywood actor Pamela Anderson also refused as she said she can’t support an organisation that does testing on animals.
And now the latest celebrity to join them is Matt Damon. However, instead of not following through at all, Damon used the viral fundraising stunt as a means of raising awareness of water and sanitation problems around the world, reported the Telegraph.uk.
The 43-year-old actor was nominated for the ice bucket challenge by his long-time friend and actor Ben Affleck and comedian Jimmy Kimmel.
The star felt the urge to seize the opportunity and highlight the plight of 800 million people “without access to clean water”, by fishing out water from every toilet bowl in his house.
“[The challenge] posed kind of a problem for me, not only because there is a drought here in California but also I co-founded Water.org and we envision a day when everybody has access to clean drinking water... so putting a clean bucket of water on my head seemed a little crazy,” said Damon.
“For those of you, like my wife, who think this is really disgusting, keep in mind that the water in our toilets in the West is actually cleaner than the water that most people in the developing world have access to.”
Published in The Express Tribune, August 28th, 2014.