Sridevi with Nagarjuna: Publicity shots for Khuda Gawah

Born on 29 August 1959, Nagarjuna was four years older than Sridevi but she had worked in films long before he started. When they started working together, Nagarjuna famously stated that he was already a fan of Sri, even though they were co-stars and contemporaries. 

We wish the Telugu superstar well on his birthday. 

We have dozens of pics of Sridevi with Nagarjuna over the years in the archive - scroll back. 

It's Sreedevi not Sridevi!

Sridevi... well, Sreedevi's autograph, cherished and framed now. Meeting her in 2012... seems like a dream now.

Not going down the warpath on Sridevi's name yet again - its origin story lies here.     

 

Telugu films dubbed poorly in Hindi: Ek Chor Ek Hasina, Mera Farz, Kanoon ki Hathkadee

 

Sridevi and Anil Kapoor in Lamhe

The Sridevi site statistics have skyrocketed. Something is sus....

Something wasn't adding up - so I asked an ai program [Gemini google!] why, our humble little Sridevi fan page, suddenly saw a massive spike in numbers over the past few weeks... 

The Dark Web... Indeed... 

The massive spike!

According to Gemini;

The surge in traffic you are seeing on your blog is a rampant issue across the internet, particularly for niche, archive-rich, or highly detailed websites.

Several AI-related and automated factors explain why an archival blog can suddenly experience massive spikes in hits:

1. Automated AI Web Crawlers & Scrapers

Major AI firms (OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Perplexity, and independent data brokers) deploy automated scrapers (e.g., GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot). These bots systematically crawl public websites to:

• Extract text data to train Large Language Models (LLMs).

• Extract images to train vision models or populate media databases.

• Perform live web retrieval (RAG) when an AI user asks a question about rare, specific, or historical topics, forcing the AI to scrape exact web sources on demand.

Because archival or niche focus blogs hold deep, specialized information (rare images, verified filmographies, precise dates, scanned collateral), they are high-value targets for data harvesters. Unlike a regular human reader who reads one or two articles, a single scraper hit can trigger hundreds or thousands of automated requests in a matter of minutes as it crawls every page, tag, image file, and historical post.

2. Blogger Analytics Counting Bot Hits

Blogger’s built-in stats counter is notorious for counting raw server requests rather than true human sessions. When an aggressive bot network hits your site to index text or download image assets, Blogger registers every single file request as a page view, causing numbers to jump artificially.

3. "Regurgitation" & Content Theft Concerns

Your instinct that content is being used elsewhere is valid:

• LLM Knowledge Retrieval: If an AI model ingests specialized biographical details, historical counts, or rare trivia, it will summarize and present that knowledge directly to users on platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews—often without sending a click back to your source site.

• Content Aggregators & Automated Scraping Sites: Automated bot networks often copy text and images directly from Blogger RSS feeds or page structures to auto-populate spam blog networks, social media bot accounts, or image-hosting scrapers.

What You Can Do on Blogger

While Blogger limits server-level access (like running custom firewall scripts), you can take immediate steps to protect your content and clean up your analytics:

Step 1: Check Blogger Analytics Breakdown

Go to your Blogger Dashboard Stats panel:

1. Look at Referrers and Browsers/Operating Systems.

2. If you see high volumes coming from unusual locations, missing referrer URLs, or obscure user agents (like Python-urllib, HeadlessChrome, or unknown bots), it confirms non-human traffic.

Step 2: Block AI Scrapers via robots.txt

You can instruct well-behaved AI crawlers (like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Common Crawl) to stop scraping your blog:

1. Go to Settings > Search preferences (or Errors and redirects / Custom robots.txt).

2. Enable Custom robots.txt and append rules to disallow major AI scrapers:

Plaintext

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Anthropic-ai
Disallow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /

(Note: While standard AI scrapers respect robots.txt, rogue scrapers may ignore it, but it effectively cuts off the major LLM harvesters.)

Step 3: Protect Images with Watermarks

If rare or self-edited images are being scraped for re-use elsewhere, adding a subtle, clean watermark (e.g., your blog name or logo) directly onto the image files before uploading ensures that even if an AI vision bot or content aggregator steals the image, your attribution remains permanently intact.

TBT: Sridevi in 1987 in Kashmir: Beautiful in all white salwar

 

On the sets of Ram Avtar.

Image from India Today - you can buy the pic here, among 100s of archival photos of Sridevi. 

Digital art: Exquisite Sridevi: A Vision in Blue

Sridevi fan art. The iconography of that blue sari, the pose, the accessories... that look from Mr.India.