Comedy platform All India Backchod (AIB) has stirred up a controversy by sharing an edited video of a scene from the famous movie ‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’. In the video shared by the AIB on their Facebook and Instagram pages, a minor girl is shown as smoking a joint on stage during a school competition in front of a crowd
https://twitter.com/D_silent_poet/status/1149595509276852224?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Twitter user @D_silent_poet had shared the video that was in AIB’s Instagram and Facebook pages. However, following outrage on social media, AIB seems to have deleted that video on Facebook.
In the actual scene in the movie, the girl participates in an extempore speech competition. She was supposed to pick a slip from a glass bowl and speak on the subject mentioned in the slip. When the girl reaches on the stage and takes out a slip from the bowl she fails to speak anything and gets emotional. She apologises and leaves. This happens because the subject mentioned in the slip was ‘mother’ and the girl’s mother had passed away when she was an infant.
However, AIB thought it would be a fun idea to show the child smoking weed instead. They made the scene appear as if the minor girl standing on the stage rolled up a joint a smoked it. And she did this in front of a crowd in which her father and grandmother were also sitting.
Following the sexual harassment allegations raised against the co-founders and collaborators of AIB, the comedy platform had announced that their future is uncertain as they deal with the situation on hand. Amidst all this, AIB thinks it is hilarious to show the minor girl smoking up weed.
Tanmay Bhat, one of the co-founders of AIB was also accused of sexual harassment. He was also accused of overlooking the complaints against one of their collaborators, Utsav Chakraborty. Bhat himself has had a history of making distasteful ‘jokes’.
Bhat had shared tweets in the past which contain perverse statements regarding the sexualisation of children. Though Tanmay Bhat is no longer the CEO of AIB, the recent edited video only adds to the opinions that the so-called ‘comedy’ portal has a perverse and twisted idea of what is acceptable as ‘comedy’.