On Thursday, the usually impeccable Shashi Tharoor made an egregious error on Twitter. To wish his followers Mahavir Jayanti, the Congress MP unknowingly posted a photograph of the Buddha. Mahavir Jayanti, a major Jain festival, marks the birth of Mahavir, the last Tirthankar or spiritual guide of Jainism.

Twitter users were quick to spot the error and jumped on the chance to correct the man who usually sends people scrambling for dictionaries with his dense tweets.

Several others saw the humorous side of things and what ensued was a long thread of tweets accompanied by mismatched photos, with often hilarious results.

Tharoor was not the only one, Samajwadi Party’s Dimple Yadav also made the mistake. Twitter users also pointed to a poster in Karnataka, ostensibly put up by the state government, that confused Buddha for Mahavir.

Tharoor also pointed to others who had made the mistake, including Zee News. The leader later said that the news channel had deleted their post.

The Thiruvananthapuram MP has had a rough 24 hours on Twitter, as he indicated in a post. On Wednesday, he had made two typos in his tweets – minor mistakes by all accounts, but ones that he felt compelled to correct.

The recent errors notwithstanding, Tharoor’s Twitter account frequently doubles up as a crash-course in English vocabulary. In recent months, he has expanded social media users’ dictionaries with words such as farrago and rodomontade. As this made him the stuff of jokes and memes, Tharoor joined in the fun by intermittently sharing a word of the day with his followers.