The flop list

Tweeples flipped the (blue) bird at the Twitter CEO after he posed with a placard that read ‘Smash Brahminical Patriarchy’ on a visit to India in November.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (Photo: File / AP)
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (Photo: File / AP)

Jack Dorsey Tweet Overheat

Tweeples flipped the (blue) bird at the Twitter CEO after he posed with a placard that read ‘Smash Brahminical Patriarchy’ on a visit to India in November. Dorsey met Indian female journalists for a powwow on the social media environment in the wake of #MeToo. Some outraged souls interpreted ‘smash’ as a call to violence, while others were riled by ‘Brahminical’. Some figured ‘Patriarchy’ smelt of ‘man hater’. The kerfuffle kicked the cans around for a while, until the next Dorsey gaffe came along. Fresh off the boat from Myanmar, he was so smitten that he posted a series of glowing tweets about the country and its people. But he got called out for ignoring the plight of the Rohingyas over there.  

Tej Pratap Yadav
State Actor

Lalu Yadav’s country-bumpkin son Tej Pratap got mud on his face at an anti-Nitish Kumar bicycle rally after taking  an inglorious fall in front of the entire media. Now, he wants out of his six-month-old marriage with city girl Aishwarya Rai. Papa had leveraged sons Tej Pratap and Tejashwi into the political world in 2015. Tej is obsessed with showbiz and announced his Bollywood debut with a poster of Rudra—The Avatar, wearing aviators. He would dress up in corny outfits and play the flute, calling himself ‘Krishna’ and Tejashwi ‘Arjuna’ in a cooling bromance. In a new video, he is seen astride a chariot as Arjuna while Lord Krishna holds the reins at Kurukshetra. So much for brothers in arms.

SatyaPal Malik 
Fax Pas

Jammu and Kashmir Governor Satyapal Malik will go down in the record books as the proud possessor of the first non-functional fax machine in his office. In the middle of the political snowstorm he had caused by dissolving the Assembly and ignoring the claims of others, the fax machine proved to be the dark horse. PDP’s Mehbooba Mufti and People’s Conference’s Sajad Lone couldn’t get through to him since the gadget ‘was not working’. Though Mufti had the numbers and was the first to tap the guv, Malik sacked all the MLAs. After the public screamed, the Raj Bhavan resident asserted the independence of his fax machine by saying had he looked to Delhi for instructions, he would have had to make Lone chief minister, and history would diss him as a “dishonest man”. 

Vajubhai vala 
A Week Case

In May, Karnataka Governor and RSS product Vajubhai Vala cooked up a constitutional crisis with ill-advised spices. Since no party had won the majority in the Assembly elections, he invited the single largest party, the BJP, which had 104 seats in the 224-member legislature to form the government. He ignored the Congress-JD(S) combine which boasted 117 MLAs against the majority mark of 112 seats. Vala also gave BJP’s Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa a fortnight to prove his legitimacy in the House. This enraged the Congress-JD(S) buddy club, which went to the Supreme Court, alleging that a fortnight was a long enough time in politics for horsetrading. Bala had to eat crow when the court slashed the 15-day window given to Yeddyurappa by half. Despite the ‘unfair’ advantage, Yeddyurappa had to quit after six days without even facing a floor test, leaving the chair to the new CM, HD Kumaraswamy of the JD(S). 

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