Twinkle Khanna Lays Emphasis on The Art of Communication after Zomato’s Pure Veg Controversy

Food delivery company Zomato’s recent announcement of launching a ‘pure veg’ fleet with delivery personnel wearing green uniforms instead of red has sparked a new row.

The ‘pure veg’ fleet allows customers to choose from a curated list of restaurants that serve only vegetarian food and not from those restaurants that serve non vegetarian food.

Many defined the act as promoting casteism.

Twinkle Khanna has also chimed into the conversation and shared her interesting perspective on the issue.

She wrote in The Times of India, “The folks at Zomato, they did what successful entrepreneurs are meant to do — see an unfulfilled need, service it and make a profit. It’s another matter that segregating food into pure and impure, and having a fleet of delivery persons that they proposed to dress in green made a large section of Indians see red.”

She further elaborated, “On the surface, it seemed like a solution crafted for people with specific dietary requirements, but underneath that layer, they forgot that ‘pure veg’, unlike vegetarian or vegan, has connotations of caste, hierarchy, and untouchability. Communication is a serrated tool; it can be a healing scalpel or a dagger depending on how you use it, and that still doesn’t take into account how good your aim is.”

Mrs Funnybones lays emphasis on the effective art of communication. The art of communication is like building a rope bridge. It usually begins with one person throwing a line that reaches the recipient on the other side. This goes back and forth eventually building an aerial passage. Sometimes, however, when you tie a rock to aim accurately, it may fall into a ravine that separates the two people or hits them on the head and eventually four rocks are thrown back.

Twinkle explains that words have the power to affect us unexpectedly which Zomato now realises by their usage of the word ‘Pure Veg’ that is capable of stirring deep emotions in our complex society.

Twinkle Khanna admits that she struggled with communication when she was younger. She even turned to books for help like Dale Carnegie’s ‘‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ although it didn’t help her much. She’s still not an expert in making small talk to this day although she takes cues from Pulitzer-winning Charles Duhigg who wrote a book called ‘Supercommunicators.’

Coming back to Zomato, it has decided to make amends after the social media outrage. The company has decided to rename the services as ‘veg only’ and not ‘pure veg’ after analysing the deep consequences the new launch could have. Delivery personnel will stick to the regular red uniforms and not green.

As Mrs Funnybones aptly puts it, “Communication, whether by accident or design, can embed enduring links” and Zomato appears to have followed suit.