Singer and dubbing artiste Chinmayi Sripaada, who has been at the forefront of the #MeToo movement in the Tamil film industry, took to Twitter on July 27 to express her resentment against comments passed on a recent episode of season three of Big Boss Tamil.
She retweeted a video clip shared by a user, @sindhu0, with comments: “A Tamil channel aired a man proudly proclaiming he used the Public Bus Transport system to molest/grope women - to cheers from the audience. And this is a joke. To the audience. To the women clapping. To the molester. Damn.”
Earlier this week contestant Meera Mithun had accused director Cheran of ‘manhandling’ her during a task. In last night’s episode, a video was showed to prove whether the harassment allegation was right or not. The host Kamal Haasan’s explanation or way of consoling her was to say that such inadvertent shoves happen all the time.
The video shows Kamal Haasan saying that no one molests on purpose inside a bus and everyone on a crowded bus is in a hurry to get to work. He then adds that there are a few people who enter a bus just to molest women. To which one of the contestants in the house, actor Saravanan grins, raised his hand and says he used to do it all the time when he was a college kid. The studio audience found this funny and the camera pans out to a cheering and whistling audience which includes women.
Kamal then laughs and finishes with a dialogue from his movie Guna, “Avar adhaiyum thandi punidham aayitaar,” which roughly translates to “He (Saravanan) has gone beyond all that and is now become pure and holy”.
Over a hundred users commented under Chinmayi’s tweet expressing their anger.