With over 4.5 million views on Instagram and nearly 1.5 million on YouTube, stand-up comedian Vir Das’s video is trending across the country- Not entirely for good reasons. The clip titled “I come from two Indias” was the last piece of his performance at Washington DC’s Kennedy Centre.
The video has been receiving equal shares of love and hate, which many have described as a perspective and identification of the part of India he/she belongs to from the two mentioned. It has just not been trolled but also triggered a police complaint from a BJP leader with the Delhi Police.
While Mr Das stated two forms of India that exist parallelly, the BJP leader chose to ponder on the pointers that allegedly put the nation in a bad light in front of the foreign audience. Tweeting a part of the video, Aditya Jha, a spokesperson of BJP in Delhi, expressed his anger and wrote that he “will not tolerate anyone insulting our nation in any other country”. He added that he will fight to ensure Vir Das gets arrested. Further urging people to support him in his battle to punish the comic, Jha wrote, “I will take this fight to a decisive end. I want Vir Das to be arrested so that no one can malign the nation like this.”
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The accusations came following Monday’s video post of Vir Das. The 6-minute-long clip was from his recent show in the US where he draws a comparison between the different faces of India. Controversies happening in the country were also covered in a subtle way.
The monologue was shared widely across all social media platforms, also in the form of written excerpts and images. “I come from an India that has the largest working population under 30 on the planet but still listens to 75-year-old leaders with 150-year-old ideas, I come from an India where we worship women during the day and gang-rape them during the night, I come from an India where we bleed blue when we play green but when we lose to green, we suddenly turn orange” were some of the pointers gone viral, gathering thousands of likes.
Amid the blow-up of his post and several opinions being formed around it, Vir Das took to Twitter to share a clarification, highlighting that the video was a satire and contains elements and mentions that doesn’t contain any point that is a secret.
“There has been a sizeable reaction to a video I posted on YouTube. The video is a satire about the duality of two very separate Indias that do different things. Like any nation has light and dark, good and evil within it. None of this is a secret. The video appeals for us to never forget that we are great. To never stop focusing on what makes us great. It ends in a gigantic patriotic round of applause for a country we all love, believe in, and are proud of. That there is more to our country than the headlines, a deep beauty. That’s the point of the video and the reason for the applause,” his statement read.
Requesting people to “not be fooled by edited snippets”, he said that people cheer for India “with hope, not hate” and clap for the country “with respect, not malice”.
“I take pride in my country, and I carry that pride across the world,” he said. Mr Das urged everyone to “focus on light, remember our greatness and spread the love”.
While his trollers made up for a good number, his supporters came in too in sizeable amounts. Congress leader Kapil Sibal was one of them. “Vir Das, none can doubt that there are two Indias. Just that we don’t want an Indian to tell the world about it. We are intolerant and hypocritical,” Mr Sibal wrote, extending his support to the comedian.
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