Actress Shilpa Shetty Kundra is known for giving Bollywood hits such as Dhadkan, Life in a... Metro and Baazigar, to name a few. On Monday, the Celebrity Big Brother 5 winner landed herself in a soup for recommending George Orwell’s Animal Farm, published in 1945, to children.
In an article in The Times of India, she was quoted to say: “Books like Lord of the Rings (LOTR) and Harry Potter as part of the syllabus is a great move because it cultivates imagination and creativity at a young age. They should include books like Little Women, as it encourages respect towards women at a young age. Even a book like Animal Farm can teach the little ones to love and care for animals.”
Shetty’s unintended hilarious comment was part of an article on what Bollywood celebrity parents thought about modern classics such as Harry Potter, Tintin and Amar Chitra Katha being included as part of the English syllabus for Indian Certificate of Secondary Education students.
Animal Farm, of course, is an allegorical and dystopian novella. In the book, which is a devastating critique of communism, dozens of animals get their throats ripped out by trained dogs. The socio-political book has allusions to revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, economist Karl Marx, theorist Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. According to Orwell, the book is a reflection on the events that led up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union.
Social media users decided that this was a good opportunity to indulge in some faux lit crit.
But some Twitter users took a more sympathetic view of the gaffe.