Two complaints, including one to the governor, have been lodged in Karnataka against multilingual actor Prakash Raj over his Chandrayaan-3 tweet that many failed to understand was an old joke and not an insult.

While S.B. Gayakwad, said to be a Sangh parivar sympathiser, lodged a police complaint in Banahatti in Bagalkot district, Pramod N from Shimoga sent an email complaint to the governor seeking action against the actor.

Prakash had late on Sunday shared an image of a tea-seller with a caption “Breaking News: The image just received from Chandraan.”

The post on his X handle was based on a decades-old joke that when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon he was greeted by a Malayali tea seller who offered him a cup of his brew. The joke was, in fact, to credit the ubiquitous nature of Malayalis who are found everywhere in the world.

But Prakash was brutally trolled and called a “traitor” as many failed to grasp the content of his post and accused him of berating ISRO and its scientists. Some took it as an affront to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his self-proclaimed image of a chaiwala, while others saw it as poking fun at K. Sivan, the former chairman who helmed the space agency when Chandrayaan-2 failed.

But Prakash had later clarified it was indeed based on the Armstrong joke built around the omnipresence of Malayalis.