Team AIB apologises to Christian community

MUMBAI: All India Bakchod (AIB), the popular comedy club that is at the centre of a raging storm over an allegedly offensive stand-up comedy act, has offered an unconditional apology to the Mumbai Archdiocese and the Christian community for their controversial programme.
In a Facebook posting on Monday, the show’s organisers said that they could have ended up hurting the feelings of a community though that was not their main intent. "We, Tanmay Bhat, Gursimran Khamba, Ashish Shakya, Rohan Joshi at AIB hereby offer an unconditional apology to the entire Christian community for any offence that may have been caused to its members as a result of the AIB Knockout. While performing our acts, no matter the subject, we never intend to hurt anyone, though we, as an unfortunate consequence of the nature of our profession, sometimes do. We are sorry," the group said.

But the apology, instead of settling the issue, has only added fuel to the fire with many aggrieved supporters of the comedy group taking to social media to vent their anger at the climb down.

"Knowing the state of breaking law to create outrage, profiting from it, and ENDORSING them with public apology after apology. AIB FAIL," tweeted Vidyut Kale, blogger and a frequenter commentator on the micro blogging site Twitter.

"There’s a thing called spine. If u go out there wanting to push the envelope, u gotta have the nerve to stick with it," wrote Rupa Subramanya, columnist with the centre right magazine Swarjya and co-author of Indianomix.

However, there were also those who stood by the group. Author Sonia Falerio threw her support behind the group as she wrote, "Isn’t "pathetic." The people who pushed them into a corner & made them feel like they had no option but to apologise are."

"Let’s cut #All India Bakchod some slack. A victim can’t be called a coward," wrote Milind Deora on Twitter. AIB Knockout, the provocative show, took place on December 20 featuring Bollywood actors Ranvir Singh, Arjun Kapoor and Karan Johar. The controversy started when the ‘roast’ video uploaded by AIB went viral with over 9 million views on YouTube. Following threats by some political parties, AIB decided to pull down their video on February 4.

The group met with the Bp. Agnelo Gracias, Auxiliary Bishop of Mumbai on Monday. On its Facebook page, they put up pictures of the AIB members with their ‘unconditional apology’ note. "Bp. Agnelo Gracias, on behalf of the Archdiocese of Bombay, accepted the unconditional apology and in the spirit of understanding and reconciliation stated that the Archdiocese accepts the AIB apology and considers this matter closed," it said.

"With the Knockout, in our own juvenile, idiotic way, we wanted to push the envelope of comedy in this country. But then the envelope pushed back. Things got to a point where people who have supported us, people who work hard to make what we do come to life, were put in a position where things could get deeply unpleasant for them. And that’s a problem. We can live with abuse, hate, anger, fury, rage, ignorance, bigotry and perhaps even bullying. But we don’t want anybody to get hurt because of us." AIB had said last week when they pulled their video down.