‘So I hear some people in India still eat with their hands.’ When American chat show queen Oprah Winfrey made this remark on Oprah’s Next Chapter: India, little would she have anticipated the trouble thereafter. On the show aired last week, Oprah was visiting an upper middle class family in Mumbai for a meal when she made this statement, inviting the wrath of Indians for whom it’s an age-old tradition. From caricatures to trending topics like %fork and #replacehaathwithfork, Twitterati was all out to get her. ‘Using hands to eat is one ‘culture’, to shoot people in a theatre is another ... Oprah, I prefer to eat with them .. No
Thankyou,’ wrote Sash on Twitter. If only someone asked Oprah to eat sambar-rice on a banana leaf with a knife & fork, perhaps she’d underst’hand’ where we’re coming from.,’ wrote comedy central India. ‘I think it’s wrong on her part to say that. I mean it’s purely a personal matter, whether you use fork and knife or you eat with the hand,” says Mansa Jain, an NIFT student. “Don’t Americans eat chicken wings and burgers with hands? I have never seen an American tear into a bucket of chicken wings with their knives and forks,” lashed out Ambuj Kashyap, 25.