Cream bun takes a viral trend, thanks to a query on GST

Viral cream bun meme sparks social media outrage over GST anomalies in Coimbatore, involving Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

It’s not odd for food to go viral in social media. It often has, in the past. But this time, as plain buns, plain cream and buns with cream stuffing have become part of meme that are raging on social media, there’s a definite history behind them if you study the hashtags they come with- Coimbatore, Annapoorna, Nirmala Sitharaman, StandwithAnnapoorna and GST.

A consequence of the events of this week when a restauranter - D. Srinivasan of Sree Annapoorna hotel- stood up to ask Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman about the anomalies in GST for food, during an interaction with representatives of the industry, in Coimbatore. A cream bun attracts 18% GST, while the bun and the cream separately attract only 5%, he said, urging the Minister to rationalise it. This was followed by a video of him apologising to Ms. Sitaraman, in the presence of Coimbatore MLA Vanathi Srinivasan, released the next day by the BJP.

“Narendra Modi speaks about one nation one tax on GST. Here is the example of what he speaks”, said one post on X (formerly Twitter) along with images of a bun (GST 5 %), cream (GST 5 %) and cream bun (GST 18 %).

Another post said in Tamil that GST bun was good for the Central government liver.

The hotel, and its regular clientele, shared a marketing video on X on Friday for the cream buns, which was also shared widely on social media platforms.

But that is not all. The meme creators have had a field day as this event sparked outrage on social media. They have been busy covering the different aspects of what happened into memes that are then released online. How to make GST bun, bun butter story, “bun” for Finance Minister are among the several memes on social media with the cream bun as the subject.