Our memes are like this only

There’s only one photo that Obnoxious Townie Lemur puts up on Facebook — he has one paw up, and a look full of disdain that’s reserved for any one living in the suburbs of Mumbai. Only the message changes each time. “Dude I don’t know what the hell Khar, Parle, Malad is — just say is it close to Bandra/Andheri?” or “I have been to Chembur — only on my way to Pune.”

The lemur, which has Mumbaikars in splits, is not alone. Typical Indian Father, Corrupt Indian Politician and Confused Engineer are some of the memes — a quintessentially American form of internet humour — with a distinct Indian flavour that are gaining in popularity in the online world.
“First of all, it’s pronounced meem, like gene,” explains Supriya, 17, and the mastermind behind innovative takes on Indian life in meme form that include Confused Engineer, IB Student and Roadside Dude. “My mom keeps telling people I make ‘may-mays’ online, and I’ve stopped even trying to correct her.” Supriya has a strict schedule for posting them. “Lunchtime, late evening and late night is when people share and ‘Like’ posts the most. So I put up stuff in those time shifts,” says Supriya, whose Facebook group ‘Meme Madness’ has 2,302 subscribers and 1,500 Likes.

So what is a meme exactly? If you’ve shared or ‘Liked’, or laughed at a funny photo shared on Facebook, you’re already a fan. Internet memes come in different forms, all of them wildly popular. A meme can be an image, hyperlink, video or hashtag overlaid with humourous, and occasionally ungrammatical text. Memes can be considered a means of impersonal communication now, with people slinging references to popular memes into daily conversation and posting them meaningfully on friends’ Walls on Facebook.

“Repeated use of the same image, like the contemptuous Townie Lemur, gives memes a built-in context,” says Deepak Kochhar, a sociologist based in Bangalore, “The reader processes this on an almost sub-conscious level, and half the joke is already told. Since the text is merely an addition, perhaps even decorative, memes can transcend language barriers.”

Maybe this is why they have been so easily adapted to Indian contexts. Typical Indian Father, for instance, is an adaptation of another meme, Strict Asian Father. The meme is occasionally humorous (“Why did the chicken cross the road? To go to medical school”), but more importantly, it is easy to identify with. “Indians tend to hesitate when it comes to laughing at themselves, but hopefully that will change with internet humour making inroads amongst the youth,” says Kochhar.
Annie Ravi, 17, is the administrator of Indian Student Memes, and she feels that Indians are “a whole different species of humanity”, and memes such as Typical Indian Father have been able to illustrate just that. “I have friends who want to become engineers without knowing the first thing about it. Parents think that whatever we didn’t get, our children should, and so they push them blindly towards engineering and medicine,” she says. “I initially got interested in memes through the IB Students Memes Facebook page. Mugging up is such an Indian thing, that a friend and I initially started making memes around that topic.” Ravi points out that irony is key to a meme’s success. “A meme is successful because it’s where humour meets social interaction, and what could be more basically human than that?”

Abhishek Samant, 30, works with a pharma company, and in his spare time comes up with memes themed around ‘Corrupt Indian Politician’. One of his captions, written over an image of a politician counting cash, says: “Before election: bail gaadi. After election: Audi”. “The most viral memes I have had were about Mumbai local trains, and another about Indian gamers,” says Samant. Parichay Mehta, owner of the ROFLIndia website and Facebook page, though is emphatic about what he thinks is popular — “Relationships! People love relationship memes. And ones that comment on what’s happening in the news.”

But some view memes as another symptom of our attention-deficit age — has a paragraph-long joke too become a strenuous endeavour? “Of course, they are a symptom of a desire for instant gratification,” concedes Moulik Chatterjee, 27, a frequent sharer of memes and an occasional contributor to meme-curating website, 9gag.com. “But that goes for everything we do today, and we can’t make a value judgement on that basis. But the real downside is what memes mean for humour. Memes are distilled portions of society telling the same joke over and over again, with a slightly different punchline every time. That doesn’t sound like a good direction for our understanding of humour to go in.” But will Chatterjee still make, read and share memes? “Of course I will. Memes might be the junk food of humour, but they’re still deliciously funny,” he says.