Congress leader Shashi Tharoor ritualistically smashed a coconut on Onam and triggered a meme flood. The Thiruvananthapuram lawmaker, who is known to be  a sport when it comes to social media, joined in the fun and picked his favourite memes.

The Congress leader shared a few photos on Twitter of his Onam celebrations on Saturday. One of the pictures, where he is seen sporting a yellow kurta and off-white mundu, caught the fancy of Twitter users. Then there was no stopping them. From ‘Fast and Furious’ to WWE, cricket and chaiwallah — people photoshopped the picture into a series of funny situations.  

In one such image, Tharoor is seen smashing the coconut on a wrestler. In another he is seen matching steps with classical dancers. He is serving tea in one and appealing in a cricket match in another. One user also played on Tharoor’s fetish for complicated, long English words. “Shashi Tharoor catapulting gargantuan and unprecedented word in an unornamented English sentence:” he wrote.

Another user retweeted the coconut-smashing photo with the caption, “shashi Tharoor throwing a big, unnecessary, difficult-to-pronounce and never-heard-before word in a simple english sentence.”

Not the one to miss out on all the fun, Tharoor wrote in response to the memes, “There are many of these memes going around using the pic of me ritually smashing a coconut … don’t know who dreams them up but they are often very funny. This one is one of my favourites.” And his favourite was the one in which the parliamentarian’s photo had been superimposed onto a cricket pitch. 

Tharoor, who has 8.1 million followers on Twitter, is very active on the social media platform. One of the  early users of the platform, Tharoor has had to delete his tweets a few times. One incident being his tweet of former Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan. In April, he condoled the death of Mahajan but was soon trolled by many BJP leaders who pointed out that she was healthy.

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Tharoor later said he was relieved that Mahajan was doing fine and said he banked on “a reliable source” for putting out his tweet.

“I am relieved if that is so. I received this from what I thought was a reliable source…. Happy to retract and appalled that anyone would make up such news,” he said in a tweet.