Milind Soman recently found himself cancelled on Twitter following the publication of an excerpt from his memoir Made in India. The extrac...
Milind Soman recently found himself cancelled on Twitter following the publication of an excerpt from his memoir Made in India. The extract detailed the 54-year-old fitness icon’s time spent exercising at a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh centre as a youngster, just as several other boys in his Shivaji Park neighbourhood in Mumbai had done at the time.
Critics were outraged that Soman called the RSS a “desi Scouts movement”, and that he was “baffled” by the organisation’s uninhibited reputation for communalism. Someone declared that Soman wasn’t hot anymore.
“It’s very funny to think I am not hot anymore – or did I ever think I was?” Soman told Scroll.in. “Outrage isn’t new to me. There was outrage when I married my wife, who’s 26 years younger. There was outrage in 1995 when I did the Tuff Shoes ad. What happened in this case is one publication released just those two pages, and everyone thought the book is all about that, or worse, I wrote an article to promote the book. It feels like slapstick after a point. People getting angry and rolling over themselves like characters in a Charlie Chaplin movie.”
The RSS anecdotes take up three pages in a book that mostly covers Soman’s time as a national-level swimming champion and...
