Shashi Tharoor, the Congress politician, has replied after an exchange in Parliament between him and NCP’s Supriya Sule drew the attention of netizens and spawned a slew of memes. In a tweet, the Kerala MP clarified what the topic of the conversation was.
It all started with Farooq Abdullah’s recent statement in Parliament. Shashi Tharoor was spotted bending over his desk as he chatted to Sule during the senior National Conference leader’s speech on the Russia-Ukraine war. The scene was captured on video, and netizens quickly picked up on it. People altered the video, and it quickly became meme material. Shashi Tharoor, who is known for cracking jokes online and for being able to laugh at himself, took to Twitter to clarify what was going on.
Sule was slated to speak next, so Tharoor tweeted that she was asking him a policy question. He went on to say that he had to bend in close to listen to her since she was speaking gently so Abdullah wouldn’t be disturbed.
Tharoor also made fun of netizens for interpreting their serious debate in odd ways. He continued by repeating the words from Kishore Kumar’s song “Kuch toh log kahengye.”
The first to pick up on the trend was a spoof Twitter account. The user gave Abdullah’s statement a ‘filmy’ touch by replacing it with the viral song ‘Srivalli’ from Pushpa: The Rise.
Others quickly joined in with video tweaks or related captions, and Tharoor-Sule jokes were all over Twitter before anybody knew it. Some attributed it to all of us being distracted by social media, while others related it to ‘work-life’ balance.
Tharoor has already expressed his displeasure with memes about him. In August of last year, when a photo of him breaking a coconut at a temple in Kerala went viral and sparked a meme frenzy, the Congressman stepped forth to offer his top selections.
