It’s always good to see your favourite celebrities hangout with each other and turn the filmy camaraderie from Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and the likes into reality. Katrina Kaif’s birthday celebration pictures, featuring Alia Bhatt and Preity Zinta, give us the exact same impression; but the infamously pretentious nature of Tinseltown’s antics has us doubting the substance in these girl gangs.

(There isn’t a girl gang equivalent of ZNMD in Bollywood if you come to think of it)

Why be cynical when we’re all happy enjoying a bunch of good-looking women pose for the camera, you could raise the question? It’s simply because many a time, this amity is manufactured to creep up into your brains through your Instagram feeds.

The explanation is fairly simple. Any image consultant would tell you about how important it is for any B-Town celebrity to send out the message that they are socially accepted and politically correct.

In fact, the entire fabric of the industry is kept together on this premise. It’s what the directors want to show you, it’s what the producers want to sell to you and that’s exactly why the actors have to ultimately give in.

Under the cloak of this amicability though lies the dark reality of personal ambitions and plump egos leading into ugly spats between Bollywood’s leading ladies. What appears to be warm-hearted comradeship on the Koffee with Karan couch is actually a bomb waiting to explode.

Take for instance the 2014 display of friendship between Priyanka Chopra and Deepika Padukone on the show. We all know how that one ended after Bajirao Mastani.

It’s not the industry’s first girlfriend story gone wrong though. Historically, you’ve had the Kareena Kapoor Khan-Bipasha Basu catfight, the Deepika-Katrina Kaif spat, the Madhuri Dixit-Sridevi scuffle and even the Jaya Bachchan-Rekha rivalry, going all the way back to the 70s.

But we’ve seen some genuine friendships existing in the industry as well. Take the case of Kareena and her gang of girls that includes Amrita Arora and her sister Malaika. But the premise of this is the fact that these actresses belong to different leagues altogether. Kareena is the most pack’s most successful lady and everyone acknowledges the fact.

And while the love between Katrina and Alia could be real AF, Bollywood’s ruthless ecosystem makes us wonder whether it would have been the case had they been direct rivals?