The Rs 370 biryani joke that wasn’t, and the men who didn’t see the problem

The distressing reality is: A man made a sexual assault joke, another man amplified it, and neither of them paused at the horror of what they had done

Girl meets boy gets biryani gets sexually assaulted. That is the pithiest summation of a recent rape “joke” gone viral. The incident in question took place several days ago, but the video got attention this week, resulting in widespread condemnation, calls for boycotting/deplatforming the comedian who hosted it, and the firing of the man who narrated the purported incident.

From narration to virality to consequences, the life cycle of this particular rape joke may be one of the shortest in history, perhaps because now, in 2026, you can’t turn the violation of consent into a punchline without facing a backlash. The glass-half-full-ers among us draw some comfort from this — the man who described sexually assaulting a woman paid, the comedian who encouraged his vile joke paid.

Which would leave the more troubling truth largely unexamined: That even in 2026, it is entirely possible to unironically narrate for an audience an incident about sexually assaulting a woman because you bought her biryani and therefore believed that she “owed” you sex. That the audience you perform this for then applauds your wit(?) and the comedian, who finds this “peak Gurgaon content” hilarious, shares the joy with millions of his followers.

But as the tide rises, so it falls, and already there are murmurs about an over-correction. Should the teller of the rape joke have lost his job over the incident? In a video message, his employer spoke about conducting an internal investigation into the man’s behaviour at work and finding nothing objectionable or incriminating, yet deciding to let him go because “what happened outside the workplace has now affected the workplace”. He ends his message with the hope that “we never become a society that believes that people cannot learn, reflect, apologise or change”.

It is a fair plea, but one that should not allow acknowledgement of nuance to be mistaken for absolution. Perhaps it is fair to assume that the Gurgaon man is entirely respectful of boundaries and that he exaggerated the details of the encounter for effect, but the fact that he appears not even to have registered that what he was describing was sexual assault is what makes this assumption hard to swallow.

Even harder to swallow is the part played by the comedian. Let’s call him by his name — Pranit More. Faced with the choice to shut down a troubling performance, he praised it, rewarded it, and then proceeded to share it online and profit from it. Even if the original performance could be written off as a “lapse of judgement” — an excuse that More deploys for his benefit in his apology video — what is to be made of the deliberateness with which an influential figure pushed the joke online?

In the meantime, another controversy related to More’s show has begun to brew, this one related to some off-colour jokes about cadavers made by a medical student at Mumbai’s King Edward Memorial College. The “disrespectful” remarks triggered an avalanche of complaints against her, with the student herself eventually apologising and the college constituting a committee to look into the matter. Combined with the incident of the rape joke, it may be tempting to draw a lesson about what you say when there is a camera in the room (and there are always cameras in the room these days). But that would only be half a lesson, and one that risks subsuming a more distressing reality: That a man made a rape joke and another man amplified it, and neither of them paused at the horror of what they had done.

The writer is senior assistant editor, The Indian Express. [email protected]