The background music changes to a soft fiddle, the colour of the video dims. Gayathri, her smile unwavering, says she is about to demonstrate what is best for a girl to do on YouTube: cooking.
Known for her ‘roasting’ videos on YouTube, Gayathri is giving her ‘reply’ to a popular Malayalam actor who asked her to ‘stop criticism and start cooking’.
“This is not my idea. I won't have the knowledge or intelligence for that. I am a woman right?” she asks, her smile never leaving her, as she slyly mocks patriarchy.
The idea was given by a comic actor who has celebrity status, Gayathri says, without naming the person. "If you are a girl and have a family, you must do cooking. What a fresh idea right? Just like his comedy,” she continues on a sarcastic note.
At the end of the video, a tweaked audio clip of the said actor is played, so that his privacy is protected. The voice can be heard saying, “I have done BA and LLB and it is because of my passion for mimicry I came into it. You should read a lot. Have you watched English comedy? In Comedy Central they have good sex jokes. Not like you who are a frog in the well. Don’t you have a family? So many people do cookery shows…”
Though Gayathri did not take names, the buzz is that the actor is also a mimicry artist and was upset at her video in which she called out racism in mimicry.
Roasting him in style, she gives a recipe for a ‘digestive juice’, she says that’s what the actor needs since he could not digest women making social criticism or expressing their opinion.
Among the ingredients she lists are dry ginger powder which should be taken from ‘old ginger but not as old as the actor’s outlook’. Next she mentions mint leaves which he’d know because he has repeatedly specified his qualifications. “You kept saying you have completed BA and LLB but why didn’t you say you failed LLB? Did you forget? The mint leaves are good for memory,” Gayathri says. And lemons, she says, will give him the strength to take a litle criticism.
She suggests adding sugar (to remove the sourness he seems to have), water (‘I have a lot of this since according to him I am a frog in the well’) and an international ingredient like apple cider. She helpfully tells him not to confuse it with apple juice since he seems confused between rape jokes and sex jokes.
Gayathri does not stop there, suggesting that you can use a mixer that needn’t be all that powerful ‘because it has no inferiority complex and it won’t keep shouting about its power’. Finally she asks the viewers to pour the juice into a glass which is sizeable but hollow inside like ‘you know who’.
“The juice will work for everyone who thinks about females as ‘she is just a woman’. It will refresh their mindset,” she says.
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