'Tukde-tukde' news: Man bites snake!

Journalism 101 taught us that when a dog bites a man, it’s not news. But when a man bites a dog, hell, yes, it’s a Page1-primetime-hashtag spree! But here’s the curveball: how will your inner media professional (read: Twitter or Facebook post) react to a man biting a snake, and that too chomp the critter, in today’s jargon, into tukde-tukde pieces?

Behind every breaking news, there is a sozzled story. It’s no different in the case of Raj Kumar, from Uttar Pradesh’s Etah district, who was brought into a hospital blind drunk on Sunday — after biting a snake and, in his father Babu Ram’s words, ‘crunched it to pieces’.

To be fair to the gentleman, Raj Kumar was first attacked by the snake that had slithered into the house like someone not on the National Register of Citizens list. So, it wasn’t really serpenticide but, in all probability, snakeslaughter.


But as people’s tendency to ‘read matters into their own hands’ goes these days, the man-bites-snake story isn’t great advertisement for UP and its perceived relations with flora and fauna, its much-touted reverence for the cow notwithstanding.

But, then, the sanctity of animal life — especially of hostile ones — probably falls under ‘Kaliya Daman’ law in the state. While there is little one can do about the fate of the more-fanged-uponthan-fanging snake, we wish Raj Kumar a speedy recover.