Why Twitterverse is not very happy with RPG boss Harsh Goenka

RPG Group chairman Harsh Goenka is being lambasted by the Internet after posting a series of distasteful cartoons that poked fun at women battling fluctuating weight. In a now-deleted tweet, he shared cartoons of two women, One, hailing from 1995, is clad in a saree and grinds spices manually with a mortar. The other woman, from 2020, is seen sporting a navy blue dress and staring at a mixer grinder. She is noticeably overweight. The post had the caption, “The effects of modern technology.”

The sexist and body-shaming implications of this ‘joke’ were not lost on the netizens, and as expected, it did not go down well with his followers. Although he later tried to salvage the situation by sharing a male version of the joke, by sharing the cartoon of a lanky man from the ‘90s who is shown to put on pounds while his television screen goes from being bulky to being slender.

However, that did not spare him from facing the wrath of Twitterati. One Twitter user shared a picture of a bloated Goenka with the caption, “Irony harsh goenka.” Another chimed in, “But still, a man is supposed to watch TV while the woman cooks?”


As if that was not enough, Goenka continued to share more incendiary posts. He next shared a wife joke, this time again not so subtly poking fun at weight gain. “I was having a candlelight dinner, a rare occasion, with my wife. She told me softly, "Pass the wine, my divine. I thought to myself, ‘how clever, how poetic'... so I wanted the bread and reciprocated without thinking, "pass the roti, my m ...!"

Later again, he tried to make amends, claiming by the word ‘moti’ he meant ‘pearl’ and not an ‘overweight women’ but the damage was done, and he was again slammed by Twitter users. “Indian women do 10 times the unpaid work that Indian men do - abt the worst ratio in the world.
Harsh Ji, since your 'jokes' usually skew only one way in terms of gender, they should balance a bit, no?” wrote one user. “To have a good sense of humour you should try ridiculing yourself, not others, especially not women,” commented another.

For those that are not in the know, ‘wife jokes’ usually consist of the done-to-death, sexist trope of a nagging harridan who terrorises her husband. It also often includes a generous dose of fat-shaming.