Former Defence Minister and current Goa CM Manohar Parrikar, was panned across social media over the past few days for one of his comments. At the state youth parliament, while speaking to college students through an interview, Parrikar had made a remark which was the centre of the storm.
“The reason I fear today is that even girls have begun drinking beer, which is scary. The tolerance limit has been crossed” was the controversial remark which got him into a soup. “Feminists” and others ganged up to trend the hashtag #GirlsDrinkingBeer to counter Parrikar’s alleged archaic thoughts.
As explained in this post, when one sees the full answer to the question posed to him, and sees the context, one realises that Parrikar might have been a victim of being misquoted or quoted out of context. The full quote by the Chief Minister shows that Manohar Parrikar was perhaps speaking of the larger drug menace and it was an innocuous remark made in the context of his larger observations. A rough translation of the speech, by a Twitter user who goes by the handle ‘@ThisPosable‘, is as follows.
Now, the journalist who had interviewed Parrikar in the above conversation has taken to social media to clear the air on this matter. In a Facebook post, Pramod Acharya, the journalist, has clarified that the example of “girls drinking beer” was given while speaking about the drug menace in colleges. Thus, as per Acharya, Parrikar was “ONLY referring to school/college going girls and boys”
Will this put the controversy to rest?
