“Eating carpet is strictly prohibited”: Signboard at airport lounge goes viral, Aviation Min reacts

Team Udayavani, Jun 10, 2021, 1:11 PM IST

An image of a signboard, placed at the waiting lounge of the airport, that reads “Eating carpet is strictly prohibited” has been going viral on the internet.

While the signboard in Hindi reads, “Farsh Par Khaana Sakht Mana Hai” the translated version in the shared image reads “Eating carpet is strictly prohibited.” As you can guess, the word “on” is missing in the translation.

Earlier this week a Twitter user who shared the image suggested that the AAI needed Congress leader Shashi Tharoor’s help to correct the language on the sign.

Reacting to the same, Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri on Wednesday clarified that the image is a morphed one and has been doing the rounds since 2015.

“Listen people. This is a morphed image doing the rounds since 2015,” Puri tweeted, sharing photos of the sign in question.

Listen people.
This is a morphed image doing the rounds since 2015.
It resurfaced in 2019. AAI had pointed this out even then.

Let us all do a bit of due diligence before putting such things out.
Fake images & morphed pictures don’t do any good to people who are posting them. pic.twitter.com/JLKkyT5Fcm

— Hardeep Singh Puri (@HardeepSPuri) June 9, 2021

Responding to the now-deleted tweet, Tharoor had said, “They are incorrigible” – as a screenshot shared by the aviation minister shows.

Notably, the mistranslated signboard went viral in 2019 too when actress Shabana Azmi had shared a photo of the airport sign on Instagram.

Further Puri said that the Airports Authority of India (AAI) had issued a clarification on the morphed sign in 2019 as well.

“Let us all do a bit of due diligence before putting such things out,” the aviation minister urged in his tweet. “Fake images and morphed pictures don’t do any good to people who are posting them.”