How #MeToo turned into a people's campaign in smaller Indian cities, too
It was a seemingly harmless tweet that enraged Mahima Kukreja and put the 28-year-old on the frontline of India’s # MeToo firestorm . The advertising professional was on her way to work Oct. 4 when she saw a message from popular comedian Utsav Chakraborty, who has a television show and nearly 50,000 Twitter followers, about a recent incident of Indian men behaving badly on a cruise ship in Australia, which he said was an “ embarrassment ” to fellow citizens. Wasn’t this the same person who’d sent her an unsolicited photograph of a penis two years ago? “I was like, ‘this is a man standing on some moral high ground after harassing me,” Kukreja recalled during an interview at a Mumbai cafe. “At that moment, I wasn’t thinking of consequences. I thought: ‘This is it. I’m just going to come out with my story.” She replied to his tweet with her allegations. Chakraborty issued a public apology within hours, in which he admitted to sending such photographs to several women and ...