Rahul Ravindran has announced that he is stepping away from X (formerly Twitter) for good after being subjected to a wave of abusive messages, including threats directed at his children, following a controversy linked to the death of Ketan Agarwal in Pune. The filmmaker said that seeing hate-filled comments left him enraged and even led him to briefly think of doing “unspeakable” things to an X user. Ravindran added that he is “too fiercely self-respecting to let something have power over him”.
‘Deleting This App From My Phone’
Announcing his exit from the platform, Ravindran said he was “done” with X, though he had previously continued using it as a primary source for sports updates, especially for Indian sports outside cricket.
“I was sitting and watching the Brazil vs Japan game. I wanted to check a football-related Twitter account, so I opened the app. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of checking my notifications too, and I came across this tweet. I wish I hadn’t,” he wrote.
He added that the message triggered an intense emotional reaction. “I kept staring at it for a long time. I was filled with rage. I wanted to track this guy down and do unspeakable things to him. The urge was very real. I was involuntarily imagining scenarios in my head. My usual response to anger is to tell myself to calm down, but I didn’t want to this time. My head was very hot. I just sat there staring at the game on TV without watching it. Slowly, my heart rate returned to some semblance of normalcy.”
“Maybe I am overreacting. Maybe it’s somehow my fault. Maybe my kids and I deserve this hate. But I am done with this app. I’ve been wanting out for a while. The only reason I couldn’t leave was because it’s the best source of sports news, especially Indian sports outside cricket. But I am done. I didn’t like the person I became for that half hour after reading that tweet. I didn’t like my thoughts. And I am too fiercely self-respecting to let something have power over me. I’m deleting this app from my phone right away,” he added.
How The Controversy Began
The controversy began after an X user shared a poster of Ravindran’s upcoming film The Girlfriend, starring Rashmika Mandanna, alongside an AI-generated image depicting Siya Goyal pushing her fiancé Ketan Agarwal from a fort in Pune while her boyfriend Chetan Choudhary watches from hiding. The post was captioned, “They show this to hide this.”
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Another user tagged the filmmaker and wrote, “Bro, please do one movie on the atrocities of women on men.”
Responding to the post, Ravindran wrote, “I don’t claim to know everything, bro, so educate me if I am wrong. But I don’t see atrocities of women on men at all. I see some horrible incidents of sociopathic human beings who happen to be women committing horrible crimes. On the other hand, I see a self-sustaining system that has lasted centuries, that suffocates women, that through invisible everyday microaggressions forces them to shrink their identities and does not offer them an equal world. This is my perspective.”
He added, “I’ve seen so many women around me suffer silently because of it, and I chose to convey that through this story. I felt responsible for it as a man because I benefit from the power equation.”