It is not easy to avoid someone is an enclosed space thousands of feet above the ground, and a recent conversation of sorts between Kunal Kamra and Arnab Goswami underscores this point.
On Tuesday, the stand-up comedian took to Twitter to reveal that he had met the journalist on a flight.
"Met Arnab Goswami on a flight & gave him a monologue about his ‘journalism’ All he did was call me mentally unstable & after sometime I had no choice but to return to my seat," he wrote on Twitter.
He also posted a video of himself confronting the Republic Editor aboard the plane.
In the video Goswami can be seen with earphones plugged in, presumably watching something, as a voice in the background (Kamra) addresses him. Throughout the video, he does not react, or even look towards the camera.
"Here I'm asking coward Arnab Goswami a question about his journalism and he's doing exactly what I expected him to do," heard saying at the beginning of the video.
Echoing his earlier tweet Kamra says, "He's being a coward. First he called me mentally unstable, and now he's saying 'I'm watching something'. He's not ready to answer my questions, viewers."
Kamra goes on to say that the viewers want to know whether Goswami is "a coward or a nationalist".
"I'm part of the tukde tuklde narrative, you should deflate me...you should take enemies of the state down. You should make sure that the country is in the safe hands of Narendra Modi, and you should fight against dynasts like Rahul Gandhi who I support..." he goes on to say.
"Arnab, are you a coward or are you a journalist...or a nationalist? Who are you Arnab?" he asks the unresponsive Goswami.
"You will have no answers. As I expected. Your cowardice has gotten the better of you," he says amid continued silence.
"I wanted to have a conversation with you politely. But you do not deserve my politeness. And this is not for you. This is for Rohith Vemula's mother whose caste you were discussing on your f****** show," he says.
"Go find time to read that 10 page suicide letter that Rohith wrote. So that you have some emotion or some heart ...or you just become human. Do that. Do that in your free time," he adds.
Rohith Vemula, a Dalit scholar had committed suicide on the campus of the University of Hyderabad earlier on January 17, 2016, following alleged caste bias.
Soon after the incident, Goswami, then a part of Times Now, had invited BJP spokesperson Nalin Kohli, NCP leader Rahul Narvekar, RSS' Rakesh Sinha, Shehla Rashid and Smita Gupta amongst others for a debate on the topic.
In a 2017 Republic news video, Goswami had debated if the Dalit card was used to "politicise the young student's death".
The PdD candidate had been suspended alongside a few others following a complaint by ABVP. His Rs. 25,000 scholarship was also suspended for raising "issues under the banner of the Ambedkar Students Association".
According to an article by the Wire, Vemula's suicide note had touched upon how he felt that his birth was his "fatal accident".
The publication also republished his suicide note.
To quote:
"May be I was wrong, all the while, in understanding world. In understanding love, pain, life, death. There was no urgency. But I always was rushing. Desperate to start a life. All the while, some people, for them, life itself is curse. My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness. The unappreciated child from my past.
I am not hurt at this moment. I am not sad. I am just empty. Unconcerned about myself. That’s pathetic. And that’s why I am doing this."
