A 22-year-old Indian tech worker was fired from his job after he suggested during a stand-up comedy show that spending £3 on a date entitled him to physical intimacy, inviting fierce online backlash.
The controversy began last week when comedian Pranit More posted footage from a crowd-work segment at his stand-up performance in Gurugram, a city in the north Indian state of Haryana. In the clip, audience member Himanshu Jangra recounted taking a woman on a date and buying her a plate of chicken biryani worth about Rs 370 (£2.89), before she asked him to drop her back home.
When describing what happened afterwards, Jangra said in Hindi: "I said I’ve spent Rs 370, so I’ll get my money’s worth.”
In a longer version of the interaction that later circulated online, Jangra went on to describe taking the woman to a park after the meal. According to his account, she initially refused a kiss but the encounter eventually became physical.
The clip caused a storm online, with social media users arguing that Jangra’s comments and the audience’s response showed “how rape culture sounds when it is made comfortable”.
Every time I speak about my experiences with men or why I’m cautious around them, there’s always someone ready to tell me, “Not all men.”
— Chature bhole (@arpita_pradhan_) June 10, 2026
Fair enough.
But the ₹370 biryani controversy perfectly demonstrates why women remain cautious anyway.
Because the problem has never been…
“Misogyny runs so deep that Apoorva got FIR for standing up for herself while this 370 biryani guy and that cheap comedian are still getting sympathies, despite admitting to assaulting on the show,” said one person on X.
They were referring to content creator Apoorva Mukhija, who faced multiple police complaints and online abuse following her appearance on the comedy show India's Got Latent. In an April stand-up special, comedian Samay Raina said Mukhija had faced three FIRs and rape threats after responding to a contestant's derogatory remarks on the programme, describing it as “the price of women standing up for themselves”.
“This is standard locker room talk. Men casually dismantling women into body parts, trading stories like trophies,” wrote another. “Yes, much of it is performative, but when rapey talk is perceived as cool, it’s not harmless banter.”
The backlash extended to More, who posted the clip himself and could be seen laughing along to Jangra’s story. As criticism mounted, he apologised in a statement posted on his Instagram, writing that the comments “do not reflect my views”.
“Looking back, I should have challenged the remark instead of laughing and moving on. That was a lapse in judgement on my part,” he said.
“Live crowdwork often involves reacting in real time, but that’s not an excuse. I take the feedback seriously and will be more thoughtful in how I handle similar situations going forward.”
More said he had removed the video from his platforms because he did not want to “amplify or normalise those views”.
The comedian later deactivated his Instagram account.
That 370 rs biryani guy rightfully lost his job but what consequences Pranit More got for hosting him, encouraging his vile joke & even participating in it while making it look like whatever he said, he was right?
— Rajiv (@Rajiv1841) June 10, 2026
Pranit More is a bigger culprit but his comedy shows will run…
In the immediate aftermath, Jangra’s employers released a statement via Instagram confirming they had terminated his services after receiving “hundreds of messages, emails, and calls”.
Starvik Design founder Vivek Vishwakarma said in a video that Jangra’s statements were “offensive” and “not something our company stands for and they certainly should not be influencing young minds”.
Vishwakarma said the company had conducted an internal review and spoken to employees, including women, after the clip went viral.
“We reviewed his conduct inside the workplace and we asked difficult questions,” he said. “But interestingly, we could not find a single complaint against him from our team. The team described him as professional, respectful, hardworking, and well-behaved at work.”
He added that the controversy had affected the business and he had a “responsibility towards the company, our team, our clients, and the environment we create here”, which prompted him to let go.
“A person can make a terrible mistake. A person should face consequences. But I hope we never become a society that believes people cannot learn, reflect, apologise, or change,” he added.
Saying you will take a girl on a date, spend 370 rupees on biryani and then expect sexual favors in return is not freedom of speech. It is a threat. Said into a microphone. In front of an audience that laughed.
— Why U (@vayunandini) June 9, 2026
This is how rape culture sounds when it is made comfortable. When it… https://t.co/Qj6UuTVvOd
The 370 biryani guy is the average petty dude.
— Chinmayi Sripaada (@Chinmayi) June 6, 2026
He thinks you owe him sex / physical intimacy because he bought you food.
The best thing - don't let men pay for anything. Many have a very weird way of calculating even a bar of chocolate they may have bought for your birthday.…
Some social media users, however, argued that Jangra losing his job, on top of the social media pile-on, was disproportionate punishment for a casual remark made at a comedy show.
Others rejected the argument, saying it wasn’t an off-colour joke but an overall attitude that directly contributed to rape culture.
“He was announcing his worldview and testing how many people would cosign it. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. It definitely does not mean the freedom to threaten women’s dignity and bodily autonomy for a few laughs. Those are not rights,” said one person.
Content creator and actor Kusha Kapila urged women to continue speaking out against what she described as “disgusting comedy”.
“Uploading a clip like that is a choice. Choosing to crack ‘certain’ jokes on women and hosting that on your channel is a choice,” she wrote on Instagram.
Fellow creator Dolly Singh also criticised More, accusing him of allowing “extremely sexist and creepy behaviour” to be celebrated on stage.
He “also laughed, clapped, laughed so hard he got up from his seat, requested a recreation of the incident, asked for details, got concerned over a religious mention but not for a woman, calculated the price of a kiss with said woman at 12 rupees, called that man the funniest in the room”, she wrote.
Comedian Rohan Joshi said the audience member’s willingness to publicly boast about feeling entitled to a woman because he had paid for a meal reflected “our own entitlement and lack of empathy and inability to process women as whole people who don’t owe us s***.
Fellow comedian Aditi Mittal said she was unsurprised by the clip, arguing that similar conversations occurred routinely both on and off stage. “The humiliation of a woman, the shared humiliation of a woman, is a very common male bonding ritual,” she said in a video on Instagram.
