₹370 Biryani and a Million Boys Who Don't Know What Enthusiastic Consent Sounds Like

Should Himanshu have been fired? Should Pranit More issue a sincere enough apology? We are busy debating over this yet in the middle of all the outrage, nobody is asking that How did an entire room applaud?

Many Indian boys receive extensive moral instruction about protecting family honour, about ghar ki izzat, about what it means to be a good son, a good student, a good professional. And remarkably little instruction about navigating rejection from a woman they desire. We teach daughters how to stay safe. We spend far less time teaching sons how to hear no. We think consent is about sex, when it´s about rejection. And we never give our sons the skill-set to deal with rejection.

That absence is what this story is actually about.

Here is what happened. Himanshu shared a story at a stand-up show hosted by comic Pranit More, who rewards the best personal story from the audience. Himanshu described taking a woman on a date, spending ₹370 on biryani, and then, when she wanted to go home, deciding he hadn't yet extracted sufficient "value" from the evening. He described overriding her discomfort entirely. The comic cheered, the crowd applauded, the clip went viral and Himanshu was fired.

After the firing, he apologized and deactivated his accounts. Was it genuine remorse or damage control? We don't know. What we do know is that neither viral outrage nor silent deletion produces any learning. One bad actor leaves. The room that applauded him stays exactly as it was.

We are busy debating what to do with Himanshu but we are not questioning the conditions that produced a room full of people who laughed and clapped? Himanshu is just one man but that audience is a cross-section of us.

The Skills That Were Missing
The internet's fury tells us about the collective moral recognition that consent is non-negotiable. Anger, when channeled purposefully, can protect people. But rage without restoration is only performance. It does not prevent this from happening again.

We are so focussed on branding Pranit More as a bad person? We fail to question his craft. And this shift is very important because it opens different conversation.

Pranit More is not just a person at a comedy show. He is a creative amplifier. He is a professional whose job is to read an audience, manage energy, decide what to amplify and what to redirect. That is a craft with learnable components. When we ask "what went wrong with his craft?" instead of "was he a bad person?", we move from moral judgment (which produces defensiveness- “lapse in judgement”) to skills analysis, which produces training.

When we locate the problem inside a moment of individual´s moral failure. It can be very easily defended as "I had a lapse in judgment," implying that they normally have good judgment, this was an exception, and therefore the person is fundamentally fine. It also, conveniently, closes the conversation, because once you've acknowledged a lapse, what more is there to do?

But when you question a comedian´s craft you open the closet where the skeletons are hiding. Pranit is a "Creative amplifier", he is a professional whose role involves selecting which stories get told louder. He makes amplification decisions constantly. Now is he making those decisions consciously or on autopilot?

From what we can see in the video, anticipatory empathy is the specific skill he was missing. Most empathy is reactive, we feel bad after we see someone hurt. Anticipatory empathy is the habit of running a quick mental simulation before acting: if I amplify this story, who experiences what? It is called anticipatory because it happens in advance, not in response. Pranit More, in his professional capacity, needed it and apparently had never been taught it.

"Whose dignity is being traded for my laugh?" is the specific question that anticipatory empathy would have surfaced. Comedy often works by releasing social tension, which includes tension around sex, power, and embarrassment. That release can be generous or it can be extractive. The line between a joke that punctures pretension and a joke that dehumanizes someone is not always obvious at the moment, which is exactly why the habit of asking the question matters. You build the reflex before the crowd is cheering and the energy is high and your judgment is flooded.

It belongs in every improv and crowd-work training curriculum, and it's not there, yet. And that should concern policy makers.

Improv training teaches listening, yes-and, building on others. Crowd-work training teaches how to read an audience and work with whatever a stranger offers. Neither, currently, tends to include explicit training on when not to yes-and, on what kinds of stories should be redirected rather than rewarded. That is the gap that the policy needs to address.

The point is, Pranit More did not fail morally in an exceptional moment. He operated without a professional skill his industry does not yet require him to have. And, that is a solvable problem in a way that personal moral failure is not. Because unlike problems of souls, problems of skills can be fixed.

Just as Pranit is flattened into a villain in the story the woman is flattened into a prop. In all that is said and written from Himanshu to people calling it out we don't get to see the woman's perspective. We know only what Himanshu's retelling implies, that she was uncomfortable, that she wanted to leave, that she stayed, kissed and complied. Nobody talks about her fear, appeasement, or freeze responses that may have been present. What is clear is that she appears to have lacked the freedom to refuse without fearing consequences in that setting, with that person, in that dynamic.

Dating education, where it exists at all, spends almost no time on this. We teach "no means no." We do not teach men to read discomfort before it reaches "no." We do not teach women that they do not owe anyone anything for biryani. We do not teach either that enthusiastic, uncoerced, and reversible consent is the standard, not the floor.

Despite this, India has no national relationship education curriculum. No mandatory consent training in colleges. No public health campaign on sexual boundaries. What young Indians have instead is Bollywood, which has spent decades coding stalking as romance and persistence as proof of love and WhatsApp forwards with transactional "tips," and peer groups where Himanshu's script is not an aberration but a shared inheritance.

"₹370 for biryani = entitlement to sex" is not an individual pathology. It is a cost-benefit framework so deeply embedded that many men using it cannot even see it as a framework. Extrinsic values of money, performance, exchange, have been allowed to override intrinsic ones like mutual care, autonomy, and shared pleasure. When that happens, dehumanization follows. But the framework can be replaced. The skills can be taught.

And the most important skill to learn is how to handle rejection.

At its core, consent education is not really about sex. It is about rejection. It is about learning that another person's autonomy is more important than our disappointment. As a society we teach algebra but not graceful rejection and then we are surprised when entitlement masquerades as romance.

Himanshu's story, stripped of its graphic detail, is the story of a man who could not tolerate hearing no. That is the deeper wound, not ignorance of the rules, but an incapacity, never trained and never rehearsed, to sit with the discomfort of being unwanted and respond with dignity rather than pressure.

Hearing "no" activates more than disappointment. It can trigger humiliation, shame, wounded pride, social comparison. The ability to regulate those emotions rather than discharge them through pressure, manipulation, or entitlement is a learned skill. Yet we rarely teach it explicitly. We expect young adults to navigate rejection gracefully without ever showing them how.

Education alone cannot eliminate coercive behaviour. Some individuals understand consent perfectly well and choose to ignore it. But when millions of young people receive no training in emotional regulation, perspective-taking, boundary-setting, or respectful rejection, we should not be surprised when coercive scripts fill the vacuum.

In Himanshu's case, the audience clapped. More rewarded him. This is social proof normalizing coercion in real time. No one said "that doesn't sound right." The moral courage to interrupt only appeared after the clip went viral, when the social cost of silence had already shifted dramatically.

Bystander intervention, too, is a trainable skill. It is not a personality trait some people have and others lack. It is a muscle that atrophies without practice and strengthens with rehearsal. Teaching young people how to interrupt a coercive narrative without escalating a confrontation would have more lasting impact than any number of viral cancellations and yet we are simply not doing it.

Beyond Cancellation
Firing Himanshu sent a signal and signals matter. Some behaviours must result in consequences, including termination where trust has been irreparably damaged. But firing alone stops harm for one employer while producing no learning in the person, no reparation to those affected, and no change in the culture that shaped him. It also, predictably, allowed him and those inclined to sympathize with him to shift into a victim frame, moving the conversation further still from the actual issue.

The accountability was warranted but accountability alone is sufficient. A more structurally useful response might have looked like this: suspension pending investigation, followed by mandatory consent and empathy education, followed by a public-facing accountability project, like a content created by Himanshu himself that demonstrates genuine understanding of the harm. None of this precludes termination. It asks only that whatever consequences follow, they produce learning rather than just signals.

Comedy venues can adopt explicit policies that crowd-work cannot reward stories involving boundary violations, and train hosts to redirect without killing the room. Schools can introduce empathy and perspective-taking workshops at the primary level, where the habits are still forming. High schools and colleges can run consent education that goes beyond "no means no"  to actively training what psychologists call mentalizing: What might she be feeling right now? This is learnable through 10 minutes of guided role-play. We are simply not doing it.

Workplaces can develop restorative protocols, not as a replacement for consequences, but as a structure that makes consequences generative rather than merely punitive. Men's peer groups in colleges and workplaces can create the kind of accountability that shifts default behaviour rather than simply driving it underground.

And then there is culture. We cannot keep celebrating Raj harassing Simran on a train as a template for great love while being surprised that young men learn persistence as the primary romantic strategy. Content creators can make viral what is currently invisible: men who heard "no" and responded with warmth and dignity. The story of "I asked, she said no, we ate the biryani and parted warmly" needs to exist in public culture. Right now it almost doesn't.

What we are currently running on is social environments that insufficiently reward empathy and perspective-taking; bystander passivity that only breaks after viral backlash; shame-based accountability that produces withdrawal rather than repair; persistence scripts so normalized that the men using them cannot see them as coercive; and a near-total absence of felt freedom for women to state limits early and without cost.

None of this changes through outrage alone. Outrage signals what a society values. But a signal without investment in skills, structures, and narratives is just noise that fades before the next clip goes viral.

How do we raise people who can hear "no" without feeling humiliated, enraged, or entitled to a different answer? That is the question hidden inside every viral cancellation. That is what every parent, teacher, employer, and young adult already recognises, even if they have never had the language for it.

That is what we need to build a skills curriculum. Curriculum is more constructive than cancellation.