Shashi Tharoor- A hypocrite, a ‘webaqoof’?

Snigdha Raju

Shashi Tharoor, the twitter English professor for many, on Monday, went back on his word. He, who earlier called out the people for believing false claims on social media, became a hypocrite, a ‘webaqoof’, himself.

The Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram became the butt of everyone’s jokes as he tweeted a fake letter from University of Bern that was supposedly addressed to the physicist Albert Einstein. The letter is most definitely fabricated.

The timeline, the language, the seal, the Einstein stamps are all dead giveaways of this massive social media hoax, which our very own well-read, well-researched MP fell for. The irony of that turn-down was amplified by the letter’s criticism of Einstein’s now-famous theory of special relativity as “radical” and “more artistic than actual physics”

The former international diplomat has some advice to offer to losers, too; along with the photo. The forged letter has the letterhead of University of Bern and has a faded, crumpled appearance along with the typewriter font to give out the facade of authenticity. But the letter would have been written in German if it was genuine.

The archivist of the university called it a crude act of forgery by a ‘bored physics student’, while pointing out the evident errors in the letter- including the lack of a Professor ‘Wilhelm Heinrich’ in the history of the University of Bern. His tweet was a jab at the memes surrounding Rahul Gandhi’s speech calling the Coca Cola founder a ‘Shikanji wala’, and did not realize he became a meme himself.

From snollygoster to farrago, he has taught the twitterati quite a lot. Here are their reactions to this hypocritical act of his: