Rishi Kapoor’s Attention Grabbing Tweets

Yesteryear film star Rishi Kapoor may not have lived up to his inherited thespian genes but he sure has the knack for attention-grabbing Tweets. He had showed it a few weeks earlier when the ‘non-saffron’ section had applauded him for lambasting the beef ban move of the BJP; now he has done it by lambasting what he sees as the Nehru-Gandhi monopoly in naming public places and national assets.

‘Do they (Nehru-Gandhi) think it is their father’s property’, he had asked rather inelegantly but in a language that perhaps comes naturally to out of work ‘stars’ of the past. Like or dislike such words, it guarantees headlines.

That it is not always necessary to use street language of the kind used by Rishi Kapoor to grab the headlines was demonstrated only a day before him by the former army chief, Gen (retd) V.K. Singh, who now serves as a junior minister in the Narendra Modi government. ‘Name Akbar Road after Maharana Pratap’, said he in a letter to the union urban development minister, Venkiah Naidu. What the good General was trying to emphasize was that the ‘Hindus’ see Akbar as a merciless killer, not a benign ruler.

Rishi Kapoor’s outburst naturally proved to be a hit with the sensation-seeking electronic media where the anchors fell over each other to praise him for his series of Tweets in which he took on the Nehru-Gandhi family. The BJP and the TV studio hoping political pundits were euphoric in their praise of Kapoor. His criticism came, as was to be expected, only from the Congress party spokesmen.

The verdict on the electronic media clearly favoured the podgy ex-Bollywood ‘chocolate boy’ because it is an undeniable fact that we have had an excessive reliance on one family for naming public places or whatever.

http://www.asiantribune.com/node/88994