Apparently, a tweet by Shashi Tharoor, the minister of state for External Affairs, about some joke related to ‘holy cow’ has landed him in some shit. I kid you not – it has offended Indians and Indian politicos. So much so that Sonia Gandhi held a meeting with him about the ‘controversy’.Rumors also floated that he might lose his job.
Quite a number of tweets talking about the ‘controversy’.
Seriously, when will we learn to take ourselves a little less seriously ? The slightest mention of Indians / Indian society / religion riles us up to defend ourselves.
One needs to understand the sensitivity of that remark made by Tharoor. To save the tax payers money Pranab Mukherjee started a austerity drive and advised all MP’s to travel economy class, following which Rahul Gandhi’s train travel got much applause and news coverage.
Tharoor, without much thought made a categorical comment that implied indirectly that such austerity measures are done for the cattle class or poor class, which started an outrage.
The reason Sonia met him was to give him the stick and make him realize that when you are a public figure your words carry weight and they need to be thought out before they come out of your mouth.
She just re-iterated to him that you are no longer in UN where nobody cares to follow your tweets, but you are a sitting MP from Congress and cannot make rash comments.
Freedom of Speech is one thing, but when you are a public figure, rash comments have to be avoided or at the most sugar coated at least. Tharoor is a new kid on the block and will learn slowly.
Our Ministers really sometimes do irritating stuffs
thank god Mr. tharoor didnt get the job in UN