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ShareIyer logged into his Tweeter account and found there were 15 other people following him. He was baffled. After all, he was no leader; just a cashier in a nationalised bank with a bunch of rich friends, who not only coaxed him into blowing up a month's salary on buying an expensive mobile phone but also introduced him to the world of Twitter, where he would slowly feel a sense of importance unlike before.
Over the next few days, Mr Iyer would tweet about everything from the brand of his toothpaste to the number of idlis eaten at breakfast. And his followers would respond with their comments ('Try Dabur danthmanjan') and words of appreciation ('Wow! That's a lot of idlis').
As he got more addicted to Twitter, Mr Iyer not only had followers, but he also started following -- Bill Clinton, Megan Fox and Rakhi Sawant, among others. It soon dawned upon him that the late Raj Kapoor was a genius who'd foreseen this phenomenon through a song in Mera Naam Joker that went something like this: twitter ke do aage twitter, twitter ke do peechhe twitter, aage twitter, peechhe twitter, bolo kitne twitter?
Soon, Mr Iyer discovered that Twitter was a useful tool to improve his general knowledge, since his followers would eagerly answer any question posed by him.
So when he casually asked who discovered sugar, he was in for a pleasant surprise. "Indians discovered how to crystallise sugar," tweeted someone and then added, "until then people added sweetness to their morning tea by taking a sip and then biting into sugarcane."
More enlightenment followed from other tweeters: "Buddhist monks took sugar to China which immediately pulled out all its children from schools and put them in sugarcane plantations -- so that it can flood the Indian market with cheap sugar."
And the British were consuming so much sugar in the 18th century that one day the Queen went shopping and there was no sugar available in shops, prompting her to invade India
But Mr Iyer was so busy with Twitter that he never realised his wife had left him -- until she appeared on his list of followers and tweeted him a divorce notice.
