A few days back, a former pilot and YouTuber, Gaurav Taneja, popularly known as Flying Beast, tweeted a picture of himself performing a housewarming ritual with his wife Ritu Rathee and younger daughter.
In his tweet, Gaurav Taneja said that Hinduism is a science-based way of life to reveal that two families remained unaffected by the Bhopal gas leak on December 3, 1984, as they performed regular Havan अग्निहोत्र (हवन), which is a natural antidote to pollution.
The tweet put out by the influencer went viral on social media, with close to 65,000 people liking it and over 9,000 people retweeting it.
However, Gaurav Taneja’s unapologetic display of his Hindu way of life seems to have not gone well with the ‘liberal-secular’ media. The usual suspects jumped onto the scene to criticise Gaurav Taneja for not being ‘woke’ enough. For them, a YouTuber with more than 14 million subscribers/followers across YouTube, Instagram and Twitter displaying his Hindu credentials openly was not a happy sight.
Several far-left Twitter trolls with large followings, such as Akash Banerjee and Abhishek Baxi, took to Twitter to hit out at Gaurav Taneja for making such claims, which according to them, were ‘unscientific’ and ‘WhatsApp university’ knowledge, a bogey used by the left often to dismiss prudent arguments made by right-wing intelligentsia and nationalists.
The attack on Gaurav Taneja, his wife and two daughters is not limited to a few specific trolls. The left-liberals media ecosystem has also descended upon him to criticise him for his tweets. They also want to ‘cancel’ him for the open display of his faith.
Mint, a subsidiary of Hindustan Times, has published an article calling for brands to disassociate with the popular YouTuber by claiming that Taneja peddled propaganda, apart from reeking misogyny, child abuse, and abuse of their pet dog.
The Mint article apparently called for popular brands such as Google India, Airtel, Tata Cliq, Realme, Dell India, Mamaearth, and Rage Coffee to disassociate from supporting the popular YouTuber. The Mint wants Gaurav Taneja to be ‘cancelled’ for his ‘politically motivated’ post.
“Their videos attract a vast majority of the Hindi-speaking audience who find this content real, relatable, and unfiltered. Naturally, major brands flock to collaborate with them for influencer marketing campaigns,” lamented Mint reporter Shephali Bhat in her report.
According to the ‘journalist’, several social media users on Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and YouTube have frequently pointed out that the content put out by Gaurav Taneja, aka Flying Beast, reeked of misogyny, child abuse, and abuse of their pet dog.
“This is about the brands that continue to associate with content creators who are called out for visibly bigoted content. Most brands don’t even seem to be aware of the content a creator produces, forget the criticism it fetches daily,” the report read, calling brands to ‘cancel’ the pilot-turned-YouTuber for being a Hindu.
Bhat claimed that she reached out to eight brands that have collaborated with Flying Beast or its associated channels recently. However, among them, only three brands responded to her. As the far-left ‘journalist’ lamented over the growing popularity of Gaurav Taneja and the way major brands ignored her demands of boycott, she called for a regulatory body to review the quality of the content creators like Gaurav Taneja puts out or the impact it has on society.
