Misogyny is not funny

Aunty ki Ghanti has been taken down from YouTube and a Mumbai event around it cancelled. With journalists who spoke up against the song receiving threats, comedians talk about the “Rap King’s” lyrics

When Delhi shouted out the lyrics of Aunty ki Ghanti, Mumbai was all set to follow suit. However, journalists and social thinkers used their respective channels and revealed the misogynistic nature of the song, which is full of utter disrespect and even veiled rape threats towards the ‘aunty’ in the song. When the matter was put in this context, Unofficial: Bombay High Court admin Aakash Shah, who had originally created the event, took it down immediately.

A week since these happenings, “Rap King” Om Prakash’s song has even been deleted from YouTube. “I had taken the event down a couple of days after the whole Delhi event happened. My idea was to be sarcastic about it and I did it as a prank. Others were also making memes about it and that’s where I had got the idea. But then, people took it out of context, so I also decided to take it down. If you don’t harm anyone with your humour and do something just for fun, then it’s one thing. But since this event was hurtful to a lot of people, I took it down even before all of this happened,” explains Aakash, whose event was supposed to take place on Sunday, September 17.

When the video was pulled down from Facebook, Om Prakash’s social media followers reacted violently. The rapper’s fans even trolled a journalist who had created a spoof of the original song, and even sent death and rape threats to her on her phone.

Comedian Sorabh Pant deplores trolls and says that serious action needs to be taken against them. “While the song itself is quite terrible, I think that the focus here should be on the trolls and the people who sent threats. Strict action needs to be taken against people who send such threats. The cyber cell should be involved in such cases and take immediate action against the perpetrators. I also think that someone should send snapshots of these threats to the employers of these people. I would love to know what Indian employers do when faced with the evidence that their employees do things like this,” he decries.

As for the song, Sorabh says that misogyny and rap go hand in hand in several contexts. “Rap is originally something that comes from African culture where it was a way of story-telling. However, the way we have adopted the genre into our music has been largely misogynistic to start with — just look at Honey Singh or Raftar’s songs. Just the other day I was humming a song in front of my son, and realised how offensive the lyrics were. So, it’s entrenched in our social set-up and the youth often likes songs like Aunty ki Ghanti simply because they are inappropriate. It’s unfortunate but true,” he signs off.

While the song itself is quite terrible, I think that the focus here should be on the trolls and the people who sent threats. Strict action needs to be taken against people who send such threats. The cyber cell should be involved in such cases and take immediate action against the perpetrators SORABH PANT