“Prof HC Verma. He gets 1 crore as royalty/year for his book ‘Concepts of Physics’ and he gives it to PM’s Relief Fund and to charity. He pays fees of poor students with the salary he got as a senior professor at IIT Kanpur. And he still rides his Bajaj Priya. #RealHeroes”.
This tweet by a handle called Real Heroes (@IndianRealHeroes) has been shared close to 4000 times. Professor Verma is a familiar name and it was not surprising that the tweet struck a chord with social media users.
The viral news took Professor Verma by surprise and he took to Facebook to categorically deny the claim made in the tweet about him earning and donating Rs 1 crore. He also denied ever owning a scooter of the colour shown in the picture.
Despite the professor’s clarification, the Twitter handle has neither deleted the tweet nor issued any explanation for the patently false tweet. Many Twitter users have shared his denial in response to the Real Heroes’ tweet but to no avail. “I am just one of you, a common man and a physics learner”, clarified Verma. The Twitter handle, however, is undeterred and seems determined to use the professor’s name to get maximum mileage out of its fake post.
The Real Heroes Twitter handle claims that its “aim is to make known the great deeds of those people who are ignored or talked of in passing by the mainstream media”. It also invites stories from its followers. Unfortunately, it did no fact check before posting the story about professor Verma.
Social media users must be careful before they believe everything they come across on various platforms.
(This piece was originally published on Alt News, and has been republished here with permission.)
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