Maverick Bollywood director Anurag Kashyap just cant set a foot right. Yesterday, in a bizarre attempt to draw publicity to his friend Karan Johar’s movie, he tried to drag Prime Minister Modi into the troubles Ae Dil Hai Mushkil is facing from some film associations. The Cinema Owners and Exhibitors Association (COEA) had requested its members to stop screening any movies related to Pakistani artistes. This would obviously hit Johar’s movie. So for some reason, for this internal feud between Bollywood, Kashyap dragged in the Prime Minister, only to get slammed on social media.
Today he has once again landed in a soup, and worse, caused extreme harassment to a female journalist. The story goes like this: a young female journalist with CNN News 18 was trying her best to get Kashyap to talk to her on the controversy. Kashyap in his typical manner rudely rebuffed her. The journalist was in fact trying to allow him make his side clear. But Kashyap claimed he wasn’t at home.
And he wasn’t done with just attacking someone doing their job. In his frustration, he took to Facebook and posted a screenshot of the conversation he had with the woman. While posting a private chat is itself not very correct, he did not even bother to blur or cover sensitive personal information like the personal number of the female journalist:
No sooner did Kashyap post this information on his Facebook page, which his fans follow, the said journalist’s nightmarish ordeal began. Her colleagues took to Twitter to reveal that ever since Kashyap irresponsibly poster her number on Facebook, the journalist was getting harassed by SMS and calls:
#AnuragKashyap how cn u put no. of #IBN7 female reporter on ur FB page. She ws doing hr job askg 4 iv. Nw she’s being harassd by calls & SMS pic.twitter.com/HNbOdl1GdF
— Kirandeep IBN7 (@raydeep) October 18, 2016
Our reporter being harassed by calls and SMS after #anuragkashyap posted her no. on FB!!! @ibnkhabar @awasthis @singhppratap https://t.co/o53Ioo6jgX
— parul sabherwal (@parulsabherwal) October 18, 2016
Another colleague made an even more shocking revelation: The harassers were calling from Pakistan, Bangladesh and even Syria!
It’s simply @anuragkashyap72 fault. People from Pakistan, Syria, n Bangladesh are calling @thakur_shivangi now.This is #Shameful on his part https://t.co/mJ4K6BWfGk
— Sumit Awasthi (@awasthis) October 18, 2016
It is shocking that a celebrity like Kashyap could endanger the safety of a female journalist like this just because he didn’t want to talk to her. Worse, how does he explain harassing calls from places like Pakistan and Syria, when the information was only posted on his page which ideally should be catering to Indian fans. Kashyap later deleted the post.
Talking about the incident Prabal Pratap Singh, Consulting Editor of the national news channel said: “Anurag has deleted the post from his Facebook account, but we still want an apology from his end. My legal team is looking into the matter as to what action we should take.”
