Noted industrialist Harsh Goenka incurred the wrath of netizens after he shared on Twitter an image that, many pointed out, amounted to body-shaming, and reeked misogyny.
The tweet—which now stands deleted—with the caption, “the effects of modern technology" had two pictures, one of a lean sari-clad woman looking at a stone mortar in 1995 and another plus-size woman wearing maxi next to a mixer-grinder in 2020.
Another tweet from him read: "I was having a candlelight dinner, a rare occasion, with my wife.
She told me softly "Pass the wine, my divine".
I thought to myself ‘how clever, how poetic'... so I wanted the bread and reciprocated without thinking "pass the roti, my m _ _ _!
Writing from the hospital"
One of the users reacted to his tweet, saying, "You are quite conservative man."
"Sad that in 2020 also, the one running the mixer shown in the pic is a woman. Something are hard to change," said another user.
"Not conservative, disgusting!," wrote another.
"He is neither conservative nor liberal! He just shares everything what he receives on WhatsApp!," another user responded.
"You mean cheap misogynist ???? ...can he post same thing with cartoon of his great grandfather with cycle and and his father with car???," a user wondered.
Another tweet read: “Implying that women are getting fatter because of access to modern machines instead of having to physically grind everything is "perfectly ok" it seems. No wonder Harsh Goenka has an active audience for his regressive posts.”
Goenka then tried to undo the damage by tweeting another picture which showed a lean man next to large television (1993) and a plus-size man next to a flat television (2023), and captioned it “balancing act.”
The industrialist went on to call those criticizing him "feminazi"— a pejorative term for radical feminists popularised by politically conservative American radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.