Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or worse been off social media for the past two days you have heard about how well known stand-up comic Tanmay Bhat’s snapchat video about two of India’s most revered people – Lata Mangeshkar and Sachin Tendulkar triggered an absolute uproar. Now we may think it was funny or unfunny; we may think it was insulting or not and we may have divergent views of whether something like this should be permitted. But what is undeniable is that this has been an excellent example of a tempest in a tea cup, राय का पहाड़ and a mountain out of a molehill.
What went down
So clearly, Bhat was having a bit of a boring day and decided to enliven it for himself by making a snapchat video called “Sachin v/s Lata Civil War”. For those not in the know, Snapchat is an image messaging and multimedia mobile application. He superimposed the faces of Tendulkar and Mangeshkar to create a supposed dialogue between the two about the possible superiority of Virat Kohli as a batsman. Predictably, the video was peppered with profanity and curse words.
Riteish Deshmukh was a first to come out in protest by saying the video was in poor taste. Our politicians promptly weighed right in too: Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) filed a complaint with the Mumbai Police and BJP legislator Ashish Shelar wanted to register a complaint under an non-bailable provision of the IPC. Various people have called for ban and removal of the video from YouTube and other social media platforms. Arnab Goswami of course did a debate on the matter as did every journo worth their salt. “Roast wale din yaad aa gaye by god” tweeted Tanmay.
The Streisand effect?
The Streisand effect is defined as a phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely. So consider how this Tanmay Bhat imbroglio qualifies: I searched for and watched the video though I wouldn’t have if there hadn’t been such brouhaha about it. So did millions of others, I expect. And was it funny? Actually no, I thought it was rather ho hum. It wasn’t particularly funny even if you do like your comedy rude and crude.
But that isn’t even the point. The fact that entire TV debates were dedicated to this silly video, the who’s who of the Twitterati had their take on it, political parties were up in arms against it … suddenly the whole nation knew who Tanmay Bhat was and his rather mediocre video had attained worldwide fame. Definitely the Streisand Effect and maybe even what Bhat intended all along. Hmmmmmmm.
Author – Reena Daruwalla
