Why Ram Gopal Verma's tweets on Ganesha shouldn't be taken seriously

New Delhi: A series of tweets on the Hindu god Ganesha seems to have upset a lot of people who follow director Ram Gopal Varma on Twitter. Varma, who later apologised for the seemingly innocuous tweets on the deity ahead of the Ganesha Chaturthi festival, asked if "Lord Ganesha eats with his hands or his trunk?"

For those whose religious sentiments have been hurt immensely, I would like to say please calm down and breathe and then put the tweets and the controversy around them in their proper perspective.

If you think rationally, Varma's tweets come off as more of a desperate attempt to reclaim the spotlight he has lost in the recent years. He isn't the pugnacious troll everyone seems to think he is. While his timing could not have been worse (millions celebrated Ganesha Chaturthi as Varma tweeted), I didn't find his tweets offensive at all. He questioned the origin of Ganesha Chaturthi and mentioned that his knowledge is limited.

If any offense is to be taken, it should be directed at the much-hashed, puerile jokes such as "Does Lord Ganesha eat with his hands or his trunk?" and "Did Lord Ganesha have a paunch in his childhood too or did it develop in the recovery time of the elephant head operation?(sic)". No one apart from himself probably thought it was funny.

As a society, have we become intolerant? India's success as the world's largest democracy lies in the truth that it accords its citizens equal rights to free speech. Varma is entitled to his opinion and he is expressing it on his Twitter page. Do you honestly believe a person's rants about religion, films, his peers and the world at large can change the way you think?

Varma hasn't delivered a hit in years. He hasn't been in news in a long time. The so-called controversy brought him back to the limelight. What good can come off filing a case against him?

For those outraging against a person's pointless jokes/ruminations on Twitter, the joke's on you. Varma needs to get off Twitter and direct a film. And we need to relax and not let any comment on religion get our hackles up.