Pappu and Feku are yesterday's news. There's a new leader online, a true grassroots figure who doesn't depend on the paid cronies of either of the big political parties just to trend. He's called 'fakeriwal.'
INNLIVE published a fun and satire story in these columns captioned 'A Kiddy Affair Of Rahul Gandhi's 'Yuva Josh' Campaign: Funny Spoof Video Of 'Pocket Size' 'Har Hath Lolipop'!' and got a fantastic response. The political circles appreciated the content and in social media it makes a huge hit. "10k followers in 49 days," his Twitter account, with the handle '@fakeriwal' posted on Saturday. "I'm telling you... 49 is the magic number! Time for @fakeriwal to resign?"
Twitter isn't the only avatar of this enigmatic figure; he turns up in Facebook forwards and viral videos, WhatsApp jokes and SMS puns. And, true to his 'aam aadmi' status, there is no one person behind all the fakeriwals on all the different social networks-he truly is the parody everyman.
Until around five months ago, much of the political discourse on the internet took place in the form of rancorous debates driven by members of the two big political parties.
There was plenty of humour too, but it was either blatantly partisan-Pappu jokes and Feku retorts-or got drowned out in the sea of vitriol being peddled by the digital teams on both sides.
Over the last few months, however, the tenor of internet humour has seen a drastic change. The dramatic victory of the Aam Aadmi Party brought along with it a surge of user-generated parodies, appropriately put together by ordinary people not receiving paychecks from the Congress or BJP warrooms. As a result, no one is spared.
"Apne mansik santhulan ko ghisi piti debate se bachaiye. Apne nazdeeki NaMo ya Gandhi bhakt ko chaanta lagaiye. (Protect your sanity from these useless debates. Slap the nearest NaMo or Gandhi devotee)," spells out a YouTube warning that mimics the cigarette-smoking disclaimers viewers are forced to sit through in cinema halls across the country.
That video, entitled Congress vs BJP was put together by All India Bakchod (AIB), a four-man comedy troupe that has been mining political storylines for humour. Although the Congress-BJP video did well-with around 9,00,000 views over the last eight months-it was with a video focussing on former Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal that AIB went officially viral.
Nayak 2: The Common Man Rises, a parody movie trailer ended up getting forwarded around faster than 'sickular' insults, notching up more than 2.5 million hits in under a month. It was aided by a hefty budget-`1 lakh for a day's worth of shooting-and also by cashing in on the sudden Twitter popularity of Alok Nath, who sportingly decided to embrace his digital 'sanskari' caricature by appearing in the parody trailer.
Another video, produced by The Viral Fever, perfectly matched up political characters with Bollywood storylines-Rahul Gandhi as Uday (Chopra) Baba, Arvind Kejriwal as the guy complaining about plagiarism in Indian cinema-on its way to earning more than 2.5 million hits.
Meanwhile, from Twitter accounts to Facebook walls as well as on dedicated parody websites like The UnReal Times and Faking News (which was bought by Network 18 last year to cash in on the trend), Indian political humour is alive and well.
Once dominated by political cartoonists, local mimicry artistes or the class clown, spoofs and parodies have become the main channel for humour, spurred on by the huge number of Indians making their way to social networks. And, even if this means it is still only being seen by a minuscule percentage of Indians because of the medium, its impact might still be far-reaching.
The 2008 and 2012 elections in the US saw a similar explosion of user-generated videos and internet memes that parodied the principal players in American politics, as well as some amount of scholarship on how those affected the ordinary voter.
"These memes and videos do not necessarily make an explicit political argument, nor do they necessarily provide political information in the traditional sense," wrote Dannagal G. Young, a 'quantitative social scientist' at the University of Delaware who is studying the trend.
"They provide a state of play where the audience can engage with public officials, political issues or events and not feel judge or inadequate in their ability to understand what's going on," Young wrote in Columbia Journalism Review.
In other words, the humour is opening up the democratic process to those who might not otherwise engage in it-a sign of health for India's democracy. "This playful space isn't a realm that exists separate from politics," Young wrote. "For most people, this is politics."
No comments:
Post a Comment