Best-selling novelist Chetan Bhagat is facing nationwide anger and flak on social media sites after he tweeted on Wednesday that the country’s plunging currency had been ‘raped’.
Best-selling novelist Chetan Bhagat is facing nationwide anger and flak on social media sites after he tweeted on Wednesday that the country’s plunging currency had been ‘raped’.
“The rupee is asking, is there no punishment for my rapists,” Bhagat tweeted after rupee touched new lows, inviting angry responses, accusing him of downplaying the enormity of rape crimes.
Netizens attacked the investment banker, who has one of the largest fan following on twitter, saying the word ‘rape’ should never be used nonchalantly. A user wrote ‘when the Mumbai rape survivor is still recovering in a hospital, using the ‘rape joke’ was ‘insensitive, crass and stupid’; another user put it straightforwardly ‘currencies do not get raped’.
The writer deleted the tweet after being slammed by Twitter users for his insensitive comparisons between rape and the falling rupee in the midst of a gang-rape in Mumbai of a 22-year-old photojournalist just last week.
However, even after deleting his tweet, he defended it strongly by saying ‘People are flipping out on using word rape as metaphor. Murder is Ok… Oh wait, chance to attack someone, Why miss?”
Another of his tweet read ‘Have people lost perspective totally? Can a word officially have several meanings and contexts? Or is twitter about looking for fight?’
I would like to make it clear Bhagat, no matter how low the Indian currency slips; there is no reason to compare it with what happened with the 23-year old photojournalist in Shakti mills or what happened with a physiotherapy student in a Delhi bus last year. Just when rupee and rape are in the news, you have made a joke by bringing out similarity between the two, which is not at all funny.
If the author kept on tweeting claptrap then the list of mistakes of his life would be endless.
