Truth is stranger than fiction. Late night, #VHPnames was trending on Twitter.

It turned out that Twitter users had found a new game to play:  creatively imagining the "Hindu" original of a Western name, based on such old gems as:

The hashtag attracted enough attention as to even elicit comment from serious commentators.

The genesis of the fun, however, seems to have been in an article that appears to have been removed and can now only be found in its cached version – though it is also reproduced here in full.


It gets curiouser, however, when you consider that the quote attributed to  "BJP MP Sadhvi Prachi" can only be sourced back to the same page that has since gone missing.

All the other references to the quote seem to rely on this missing page, and the only other link that shows up on a quick Google search for "Vaarahmihir Putr Singh" is a satirical or "humour: breaking news into pieces" column on a related site of the same publication.
If you are from Sangh Parivar - all the better if you are a BJP member - and the media doesn't show your mug on TV because they are busy pushing sound bites from senior leaders, here's a sure-shot method to get bang under the spotlight: Say something outrageous. Say Vladimir Putin is Hindu and his name is Vaarahmihir Putr Singh. Say Arab pagans were Hindus and those destroyed ka'aba idols were actually of Hindu goddesses. Say Paris is Pari Nagar and that's why the French swallow the "s" in Paris. If nothing works, say the word Muslim. That would do.

It does seem to be a fitting commentary on these unreal times, when it is difficult to tell the caricature from the original.

 

What is certain is that PN Oak (of "Vatican is from Vatika" and "Christianity from Krishna-neeti" fame) would  have certainly approved. As would the likes of the Onion and the Fakingnews. Here is a pick of some of the #VHPnames that caught our eye.





 

 

Meanwhile, Shri "Valdimir" Putr Singh has also been immortalised on a reddit thread.

And, if you needed further irony, consider this: the very same "Hindu called Vaarahmihir Putr Singh" had been mistaken for "Jihadi John", just the other day.