Nobody changes their mind because they had a Bad Week Online

What the ₹370 biryani controversy reveals about social approval, belief systems, and why public consequences don't automatically create personal change.

The Part That Keeps Getting Missed

In the last few days thousands of people reacted to the ₹370 biryani statement, but the most interesting thing about the controversy isn’t the backlash.

The backlash obviously makes sense.

Himanshu Jangra got a mic at a Pranit More show and described trying to kiss a woman and pull her shirt up because he wanted to recover the ₹370 he had spent on biryani. Instead of the room becoming uncomfortable, the story was met with laughter. Pranit More called it peak Gurgaon content and offered the man ₹5,000.

Women reacted strongly and many men did too.

None of that is surprising.

What has been sitting in the back of my mind is something else.

A lot of people seem to be acting as though public backlash automatically creates personal growth. As though enough criticism, enough embarrassment, enough consequences, and a person will naturally come out the other side with a completely different worldview.

That assumption feels far more interesting than the controversy itself.

Beliefs don’t appear overnight

The audience member didn’t wake up one morning and suddenly develop those attitudes.

Pranit More didn’t accidentally reward that story and the audience didn’t accidentally laugh.

Whether people like it or not, those reactions came from somewhere.

The story felt normal enough to tell and the room felt safe enough to tell it in.

The reward felt appropriate enough to offer.

That matters because those few minutes reveal something much bigger than one person’s behaviour. They show what a group of people considered acceptable before there was any fear of consequences.

A lot of attention has gone toward what happened afterwards. An Instagram story that disappeared after 24 hours doesn’t tell us very much. Most public figures know how to respond when public anger reaches a certain level.

The original reaction is far more revealing.

Nobody knew there would be consequences when the clip was recorded or that it would spread so widely and there would be public outrage of this magnitude.

The laughter happened anyway.

Why Pranit More’s role matters.

Most conversations have focused on the audience member because he was the one telling the story.

But there is a reason so many people keep returning to Pranit More’s role in this.

The audience member brought the story into the room.

Pranit decided what happened to it after that.

A comedian on stage isn’t just another person in the crowd. People take cues from the person holding the microphone. The mood of the room often follows their reaction.

Had the story been challenged or treated as uncomfortable, the audience would have reacted differently.

Instead, it was treated as entertainment.

Calling it peak Gurgaon content wasn’t neutral.

Offering ₹5,000 wasn’t neutral.

Those reactions didn’t create the attitude being expressed, but they validated it.

That’s why so many people found the later attempts at damage control unconvincing. The issue was never just the story. The issue was how enthusiastically it was received.

Why the backlash doesn’t guarantee change

This is where the psychology becomes more interesting than the controversy itself.

People don’t simply experience consequences.

They interpret them.

A person can lose opportunities and conclude they were wrong.

A person can lose opportunities and conclude that everyone else is wrong.

Both outcomes are possible.

The internet tends to assume that consequences naturally lead to reflection. Real life is not that simple.

A deeply held belief doesn’t simply disappear because strangers on social media criticized it.

A worldview doesn’t collapse because someone disabled their Instagram account for a while.

Most people don’t abandon beliefs when those beliefs become inconvenient. They usually abandon them when those beliefs stop making sense to them.

And that is a much slower process.

Which is why the small group of people trying to minimise the incident matter more than they appear to.

Not because they represent the majority because clearly they don’t.

The backlash became far too large for that to be true.

They matter because they offer an alternative explanation.

If someone wants to avoid asking difficult questions about themselves, those explanations are very comforting.

The problem wasn’t the behaviour, it was women overreacting.

The problem wasn’t the attitude, it was public outrage.

Once a person adopts that version of events, there is very little reason to really examine anything further.

Why the Sejal Pawar comparison feels so strange

One of the oddest developments has been watching people bring up Sejal Pawar as though it somehow settles the discussion.

What she said about a cadaver was awful.

That isn’t difficult to acknowledge.

The problem is that it doesn’t answer the question being asked here.

The conversation around the biryani clip was never about whether women can behave badly.

Of course they can.

Nobody serious is arguing otherwise.

Yet the moment misogyny enters the conversation, the discussion suddenly becomes about proving that women are capable of terrible behaviour too.

It feels like the conversation quietly changes tracks.

The original discussion was about why a story involving entitlement towards a woman’s body was treated as funny and relatable.

Then suddenly everyone is debating something else entirely.

The question remains exactly where it started.

Why did this seem normal enough to laugh at?

Nothing about the Sejal Pawar incident answers that.

Why so many Women recognised it immediately

The reaction from women wasn’t interesting because it was loud.

It was interesting because it was immediate.

Thousands of women seemed to understand the problem almost instantly.

That doesn’t happen when something feels unfamiliar. It happens when something is overtly familiar.

The details of the story may have been specific to that clip, but the underlying attitude wasn’t.

Many women have experienced situations where money was treated as creating entitlement, boundaries being negotiated instead of respected.

Many women have experienced the feeling of being told that something wasn’t a big deal when it clearly felt like one.

That familiarity is part of why the backlash became so large.

Women weren’t reacting to one man.

They were reacting to a pattern they already recognised.

So what actually changes things?

This is probably the question worth asking.

If backlash isn’t enough, then what is?

The answer is less dramatic than people would like.

Real change usually happens when social approval disappears.

Not for a few days or while a controversy is trending.

Consistently.

Beliefs survive because they are reinforced.

They survive because people laugh and nod along.

They survive because somebody with influence rewards them.

The same process works in reverse.

Attitudes start weakening when they stop receiving social validation.

When peers stop treating them as normal and influential people stop amplifying them.

Enough people refuse to participate in the reinforcement.

That is why the audience reaction matters.

And why Pranit More’s reaction matters.

The story wasn’t just being tolerated.

It was being rewarded.

And if reward helped create the problem, the absence of reward is probably part of the solution.

What happens after the internet moves on

The internet will eventually find something else to talk about.

It always does.

The outrage will fade and the attention will move elsewhere.

Pranit More will probably return.

Himanshu Jangra will continue with his life.

The real question is what remains once all of that disappears.

Because beliefs don’t vanish when somebody has a bad week online or because public opinion turned against them.

They don’t vanish because an account was deactivated.

The most disturbing part of this story isn’t that a man said those things but that he expected approval and got it.

The audience laughed.

Pranit More rewarded it.

The clip was uploaded as entertainment.

That happened before anyone knew there would be consequences.

And if the underlying belief remains untouched, then all that really changes is the strategy.

Not the worldview.

What social change actually looks like

Real social change is not when people get better at hiding what they think but when certain attitudes stop receiving approval.

A man should not be able to describe violating a woman’s boundaries and expect laughter and a comedian should not hear that story and think it deserves a reward.

An audience should not hear that story and recognize themselves in it.

That is the standard.

Not because people need to be perfect, but because some things should produce discomfort instead of validation.

For a very long time, many women have carried the burden of adapting to these attitudes. Avoiding certain situations. Laughing things off. Staying polite. Explaining why something felt wrong. Defending reactions that should never have required a defence in the first place.

The burden should not be on women to become more understanding of behaviour that already receives too much understanding.

The burden should be on society to stop treating that behaviour as normal.

People often talk about social change as though it happens through grand speeches, policies, or viral moments.

Most of the time it happens much more quietly.

It happens when a person tells a story expecting applause and is met with silence.

And when somebody says something demeaning and the room no longer finds it relatable.

It happens when behaviour that once earned status starts earning embarrassment instead.

Because shame has a purpose in every society. Not the kind that attacks people for existing, but the kind that signals that certain actions fall outside what a community is willing to endorse.

The reason this controversy mattered was never because one man told a disturbing story.

It mattered because too many people initially treated that story as entertainment.

The backlash was not the problem.

The applause was.

And any meaningful social change begins when the applause stops.

Why I’m even writing about this

The internet is full of things that are offensive, stupid, cruel, or simply exhausting. Most of them get a reaction and disappear. This one stayed with me and not because it was the worst thing I’ve ever seen or that it was shocking. Honestly, I think the reason it stayed with me is the exact opposite.

It wasn’t shocking enough.

Even now, there are people who seem more disturbed by the backlash than by what was being described. Some brought up another totally unrelated incident as if that would justify this one.

Behavioral psychology has always fascinated me because people tend to imagine that beliefs change in dramatic moments. Someone gets called out, faces consequences, apologizes, and learns a lesson. Real life is never that that simple. Most of the attitudes people hold were built over years through reinforcement, social approval, repeated exposure, and a sense that the people around them see the world the same way they do. That’s why moments like these catch attention. Not because they show something new, but because they reveal something that was already there.