How Twinkle-Sri Sri Twitter war landed Akshay Kumar in a soup

Twinkle Khanna clearly forgot a basic fact: Too many Indias exist within India.

Her sophisticated social media fan base, which her witty tweet on Art of Living guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar typically caters to, lives in a wholly different plane than the grassroot filmy type that hubby Akshay Kumar is banking on, to make his upcoming mass entertainer Housefull 3 a blockbuster.

Art of living teacher practising Art of intimidation? Didn't like my joke diss me-drag my husband,boycott etc #Shame https://t.co/yFdz8bKHJo

— Twinkle Khanna (@mrsfunnybones) May 8, 2016

It is a fact Sri Sri loyalists are smartly aware of, though. So, when it came to getting back at Twinkle, they chose to strike on Akshay’s film instead of attacking her on Twitter directly. They threatened to jeopardise the release of Housefull 3, which is round the corner.

Twinkle did not exactly say sorry, but she promptly went as far as to concede her tweet on Sri Sri was "an error of judgement".

Didn't mean to hurt anyone's feelings was meant to be a joke and am old enough to accept an error of judgement on my part.

— Twinkle Khanna (@mrsfunnybones) May 7, 2016

To refresh, the tweet was borderline cheeky but certainly not in bad taste. "Sri Sri got his nobel foot and half his beard stuck in his mouth in a yogic pose that Baba Ramdev perfected a while ago #Holy-MenAndHairyTales (sic)," she wrote, reacting to the godman’s criticism of Malala Yousafzai’s Nobel Peace Prize win.

Holy men and their hairy tales are clearly not funny business in India. Twinkle should have realised that like god, who is eligible for a blanket relief from jokes in this country, godmen too demand such a special status.

In the past weeks I have coincidentally interacted with three of India’s funniest men. Chatting up Kapil Sharma, Cyrus Sahukar and Cyrus Broacha, each conversation invariably veered towards how comedians — more than other artists — frequently end up at the wrong end of the intolerance stick in this country.

The Twinkle-Sri Sri episode finds an echo in Sharma’s observation that comedians in the West have the luxury of cracking jokes on just about anything — religion and country included — and not be heckled for it. That sort of a reality, he noted, does not seem to be happening in this country.

Perhaps it has become a fashion to be offended these days. Perhaps it is a way to wield clout. Silencing a joke aimed at you, after all, is also a way of silencing criticism that may be coming your way.

Humorously, Broacha calls for an anti-offence law, to ban people from getting offended. "We as a nation are happy only when the joke is on someone else. People are too quick to take offence if they are the butt of a joke," he said.

Maybe, different societal strata in our country are brought up to react differently to the same humour. "India’s reaction", as Cyrus Sahukar says, is a nebulous entity. "So many cultures co-exist in our country. There is always a group of people who will be offended by anything and everything," he explains.

Sahukar’s take actually brings to fore an interesting aspect about the Twinkle episode. If Twinkle has thrived doling out fine humour as @mrsfunnybones on Twitter, Akshay’s Housefull 3 will be a slapstick flick catering a bag of corny gags.

The last laugh in all this will ironically belong to the film’s producer Sajid Nadiadwala, if the entire hullabaloo over Twinkle’s posh humour works as publicity gimmick for Akshay’s ribald farce.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)