A Bollywood Actress Inspires Hilarious Book Misinterpretations With Her ‘Animal Farm’ Gaffe

Collage from Flickr image by Celebrityabc. CC BY 2.0

Collage from Flickr image of Shilpa Shetty by Celebrityabc. CC BY 2.0

You might be seeing the hashtag #ShilpaShettyReviews in many tweets by Indians today. It refers to a blunder made by Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty in an interview, which quickly became viral.

The Twitter trend all began a few days ago when the new curriculum for the Indian School Certificate Examination was released in Lucknow at the 59th annual conference of the Association of Schools for the Indian School Certificate. It was announced at the conference that the syllabus for students of Class 3 to Class 8 will now include graphic novels “Asterix and Tintin”, JK Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series, Agatha Christie’s “Hercule Poirot” series, J. R. R. Tolkien's “The Hobbit”, Satyajit Ray's “Feluda” and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes” stories, among other books. Biographies of APJ Abdul Kalam, Anne Frank and Malala Yousafzai will also be on the reading list.

In an interview to English-language daily Times of India, Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty wholeheartedly supported the move and said:

Books like Lord Of The Rings (LOTR) and Harry Potter as part of the syllabus is a great move because it cultivates imagination and creativity at a young age. They should include books like Little Women, as it encourages respect towards women at a young age. Even a book like Animal Farm can teach the little ones to love and care for animals.

She obviously mistook that Animal Farm, an allegorical political commentary on the Soviet Union by George Orwell set in a dystopian society, was something good for animals.

The internet broke loose prompting one-liner reviews like the following, all bearing the hashtag #ShilpaShettyReviews, which quickly became a top trending topic:

And people had more fun reading the innovative tweets:

There were also tweets supporting Shetty:

And Sabit Aziz thanked Shilpa Shetty:

Join the conversation

Authors, please log in »

Guidelines

  • All comments are reviewed by a moderator. Do not submit your comment more than once or it may be identified as spam.
  • Please treat others with respect. Comments containing hate speech, obscenity, and personal attacks will not be approved.