The Indian-origin astrophysicist, along with his friends, was barred enterance from a garba venue in Atlanta on Friday after the organisers and coordinators said that their surnames did not “appear to be Hindu”.
Karan Jani, a 29-year-old from Vadodra, narrated on Facebook and Twitter how he and his friends were “thrown out” of the venue by the organisers at Sri Shakti Mandir.
Jani said that despite talking to the organisers in Gujarati, he was asked to leave. Jani had made it to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) team in US in 2016. He said that he never faced any such trouble over the years.
“Year 2018 & Shakti Mandir in Atlanta, USA, denied me and my friends entry from playing garba because: ‘You don’t look Hindu and last name in your IDs don’t sound Hindu’,” Jani wrote on social media and posted a video narrating the incident.
Year 2018 & Shakti Mandir in Atlanta, USA denied me and my friends entry from playing garba because:
“You don’t look Hindu and last name in your IDs don’t sound Hindu”
-THREAD- pic.twitter.com/lLVq4KhJtw
— Dr. Karan Jani (@AstroKPJ) October 13, 2018
When one of his friends gave the volunteers ID proofs, they said that they would not be allowed as his surname ended with ‘wala’ and it didn’t seem to be a Hindu surname, Jani claimed.
One of the volunteers told his friend, “We don’t come to your events, you are not allowed to ours,” Jani alleged.
The friend, Jani said, was a Konkani and had come to the garba event for the first time. When she said that she was a Kannada, the volunteer refused to accept it and said that she was an “Ismaili”.
