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Viral video of Malaysian man dressing model in Saree falsely shared with communal angle.
The man seen in the video is Joseph Rakesh, popularly known as 'Malaysian Sari Man' and the video is from an old fashion show held in Malaysia.
A video of a man draping a saree on a woman goes viral across social media. The video went viral with the claim that the video shows a Muslim named Rafiq, who is draping a saree to a Hindu woman for her wedding.
The video shows a woman waiting as a person draping her saree. The man wearing spectacles helps out the woman speedily drape a saree. The video is shared with the claim, “Till now, Muslims used to call turban tyers in marriages, but now a Muslim boy named Rafiq has started the business of making Hindu women wear sarees in their marriages. If so, why blame others?”
Fact Crescendo found the claims made along with the viral video to be False and shared with a communal angle.
The same video was widely shared on Facebook as well.
Fact Check-
We started our investigation by running a reverse image search with the keyframes of the video, the results led us to a video with similar visuals published by a YouTube channel named ViVi Tv in July 2019, with the title, “How to Wear a Saree Simple Steps”. The description of the videos stated it is the visuals of Malaysian Saree Draper Joseph Jerry draping a saree effortlessly in 3 minutes.
In further search we discovered one more video of the same person draping a saree to another woman wearing the same dress. The description of the video states, “How I watched Joseph Jerry, the Malaysian Saree man, drape the saree effortlessly within 3 minutes for one of the models during Zobha’s fashion show.”
After a keyword search, we came across the Facebook profile of ‘Joseph Jerry’. There, we discovered many pictures of him dressing up women in sarees.
There he shared the images of models whom he draped sarees for the Zobha fashion show in 2019 and stated-“Specially draped by me 19 top models.thanks to zobha kanjivaram for appointing my services.its really not easy maan u need a lot of energy to make u look slim.”
He says that he has draped the sarees of "19 models" in an image posted on his Facebook page on 5 May, 2019. He also thanks ‘zobha kanjivaram’ for appointing him to drape sarees. On observing the image carefully, we found that the woman seen in the viral video can be seen in these pictures.
On searching for further sources, we found the same woman, whom Joseph Jerry draped saree in the video, walking in a fashion show conducted by the Zobha, a Malaysian-based textile manufacturing company, in 2019.
We also came across another post on Instagram page, ‘starmylife’, captioned, “We have Rakesh Joseph, a master at tying sarees in the studio today.”
An article published by ‘The Star’ news website on Rakesh Joseph can be seen here. Taking all these evidences, we can clearly understand that the man draping the saree to a model in the video is Rakesh Joseph, not Rafiq and there is no communal angle to relate with the video.
Conclusion-
Fact Crescendo found the claim made along with the viral video to be False. The video does not show a man named Rafiq from the Muslim community draping sarees. The man seen in the video is Joseph Rakesh, popularly known as 'Malaysian Sari Man' and the video is from an old fashion show held in Malaysia.
Title:Viral video of Malaysian man dressing model in Saree falsely shared with communal angle
Fact Check By: Usha ManojResult: False
