Beef goes ‘beep’ after food fascism surfaces in Kolkata

KOLKATA: Organisers of the threatened beef festival in Kolkata have renamed it “Beep Festival”, the change in nomenclature sending out a strong — and intelligent — signal to food fascists while being an admission that discretion may be the better part of valour in the current scenario.

“For very obvious reasons we had no choice but to change the name. We do not make food political.The objective of the event is to provide a day full of some amazing food and let everyone have a good time. We are happy to see the support we got.... We would like to point out that the focus is on a wide arrangement of beef dishes but we shall also have some amazing pork dishes. The menu remains the same,” read a Facebook post put up on Wednesday by the event organisers.
You’ll get the same dishes as planned before, just that you’ll have to ask for ‘Beep tenderloin’ and ‘Roasted Chilli Beep’, and similarly replace the B-word in any other dish you want to try.
TOI on Wednesday morning reported how event management firm owner Arjun Kar’s plans to host one-day food festivals, featuring beef, pork and fish, had run into trouble after threats specifically against the beef festival. The original venue was changed — more because of the huge initial response to the idea but also because the venue owners were wary of trouble — and Kar had told TOI on Tuesday that he planned to change the name to a more innocuous-sounding “meat festival”.
The new name, “Beep Festival”, was suggested by a college student online and lapped up immediately by the organisers. “We thought it was a good way to seize the mood of the whole thing and it was funny as well,” organiser Kar said on Wednesday. The TOI report on the threats led to hundreds of others calling in and messaging their support for the event.
Kar had got numerous threat calls and social media posts, demanding that the event — scheduled for June 23 — be cancelled. Most calls were anonymous and ended abruptly but Kar suspects a saffron connection. One of them even urged fellow “Gau Rakshaks” to raid the venue on the day of the event.
“Multiple names were suggested when we put up the issue on social media. We considered a more generic ‘Kolkata Meat Festival’ for a while but I was personally uneasy about having to replace the word ‘beef’ when the very essence of the festival was all about beef dishes. So a college student suggested we replace ‘beef’ with ‘beep’, as this amounts to censorship. The idea resonated with all of us and we have changed the name of the event to Kolkata Beep Festival,” Kar said.
The organisers had gone to great lengths to evade trouble. They first postponed the festival till after the polls to escape the political heat. They also consciously decided to keep some pork items, too, at the beef festival (just like some beef dishes at the pork festival proposed in July) to attract guests across the spectrum.
“Considering all the tension that has been built around unnecessarily, we think the new name — Kolkata Beep Festival — will cool things down a bit. It plays on the word ‘beef’ and is also symbolic of the taboo associated with it. But, given how serious some of the threats have been, we realise the name change alone may not be enough. So, we are hiring security guards and also getting in touch with police for any help on the day of the event,” Kar said.