Rs 370 biryani row: Pranit More turned the woman into material; sexual coercion into a joke

People called it out, and rightly so. But the ‘paisa-vasool’ framing was still only the preamble. What happened in the park was the story. A woman who said no, a man who kept going, a physical contact she said no to — that is sexual coercion. And the crowd chose to cheer and laugh at that part.

The stage is never neutral

When a comedian runs crowd work, they control the room. The mic stays with them. The narrative stays with them. The responsibility for what happens with the material stays with them. When Jangra said “wasool toh karunga”,  before the park, before any of it, More could have pivoted. Instead the room was invited deeper in, given a prize.

This was not a passive failure. It was a sequence of active choices: the laugh, the prize, the edit, the upload. Each one a deliberate escalation. Each one a decision to treat a man’s account of sexually coercing a woman something worth celebrating, packaging, and distributing under his own name.

His apology called it “a lapse in judgment” and cited the difficulty of “reacting in real time.” But the edit, the subtitles, the upload, none of that happened in real time. Those were deliberate decisions made after the show ended, after the lights came up, in the quiet of a room where someone was at a keyboard choosing to turn this into content. It is, in the most precise sense, an apology for getting caught.

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This is the pattern

The biryani incident did not emerge from nowhere. It came from a comedy ecosystem that has spent years treating women as material — their choices, their bodies, their existence mocked, reduced to a punchline, and rewarded for it.

When a female fan said “I love you” to Zakir Khan at a concert, he told her to say it to whoever paid for her ticket. Harsh Gujral’s “6000 joke” reduced women to a transaction so casually the room didn’t even pause. Samay Raina made such inappropriate jokes about Kusha Kapila’s divorce at a roast that she unfollowed him across every platform.

Kaviraj Singh went further. In a 2025 clip, he equated female influencers with sex workers, using the Hindi slur as if the comparison were self-evident. Kusha Kapila, who called him out publicly, wrote that the most chilling thing wasn’t the joke. It was the applause.

These jokes do not exist in a vacuum. A 23-year-old who believes Rs 370 entitles him to access a woman’s body and then tells the story into a microphone as a triumph — that person was not born with that belief. It was assembled, piece by piece, in a culture that handed it to him as entertainment and called it relatable.

What stopping it looks like

At a large arena show called Vaca Fest, American comedian Rene Vaca was doing crowd work with a woman in the front row — praising her dress, asking her to spin for the audience, the room cheering. From somewhere in the crowd, a male heckler shouted “For the streets” — slang for a woman who belongs to everyone, a throwaway insult directed at a stranger who had done nothing except exist in a dress. Vaca immediately hunted the heckler down in the crowd, called him out by appearance, and roasted him in front of the entire arena. The woman in the front row was defended. The heckler was humiliated by his own logic. And Vaca did all of it without breaking the show.

In November 2019, Courtney Pong walked onto the stage of her own comedy theater in Boston mid-set, rang a bell to silence the comedian performing, offered the audience full refunds, and shut the show entirely. The comics had spent 40 minutes on domestic violence jokes, “this b*tch” constructions, and a punchline about making female Uber passengers ride in the trunk. “No woman comedian in the world would have wanted to stand in that room last night,” she said afterward. The principle underneath it is simple: the person with authority over the room is responsible for what happens in it.

More had that authority. He had the mic, the edit suite, the upload button, and two million subscribers. He used all of them in one direction.

In India, the reckoning tends to stop at the Instagram story. More posts an apology and the conversation moves on. But the question worth sitting with is not about one comedian’s lapse in judgment at one show. Several of the most watched names in Indian stand-up have built their audiences, at least partly, on jokes that treat women as a subject — not a person in the room, but a category to be mocked. The word for that is misogyny. It just travels better with a punchline attached. That is a pattern, not a coincidence. And it is worth asking what it says about the kind of room Indian comedy has decided it wants to be.

The woman with no name

Himanshu Jangra has a name. Pranit More has a name. Starvik Design, the company that fired Jangra, has a name — its founder quoted at length on workplace culture and accountability.

The woman in the park has no name. She may not know, or she may know precisely, that a room full of strangers cheered when a man described pressuring her into physical contact she had refused. She has received no apology. She is not part of the public conversation about her own experience.

She is still just the girl from the biryani date. The transaction. The crowd cheered, the prize was handed out, the clip went viral. In none of that was she a person. She was always just the material.

Disclaimer: This article discusses sensitive themes involving sexual coercion, emotional distress, and non-consensual behavior reflected in viral social media content. The perspectives shared are intended for informational and cultural analysis, and the underlying social claims have not been independently verified. It does not constitute legal or professional advice.