“There was absolutely no malice intended. It was said out of panic.”
Shobhaa De’s tweet on how Indian athletes go to the Olympics only to take selfies and return empty-handed created quite the stir on social media.
De has been trying to take her words back ever since Sakshi Malik and PV Sindhu won their medals.
But that hasn’t really stopped the backlash it seems, because the author/columnist has now gone on and given an interview to NDTV, in which she says:
“I am a sentimental person, when I tweet, I don’t calculate. It’s said straight from the heart. Sometimes I get it right, sometimes I don’t. This time, obviously it backfired. I am being punished for it, shamed for it, trolled for it. What more is required, some sort of public penance?” she asked.
De also said that she tweeted out of panic that India would return empty handed: “There was absolute no malice intended. It was said out of a sense of panic, at that point it did look like we were going to come back khali haanth(empty-handed). It’s only in the last two to three days that things have turned around. Having been an athlete myself, it was said out of a sense of deep frustration.”
