What do you meme by it?

What do you meme by it?
MEME IS FOR THE MILLENIALS: Chethan Hiremath’s team is a bunch of 20-25 year-olds, who are increasingly making memes for their clients who want to target the youth across the country

Highlights

  • A section of netizens wants memes to be recognised as a legit art form
  • Random images of thinking dogs, bossy cats, winking students. Are they just a source of entertainment, or do they have a deeper meaning? Hear it from the meme nerds
In April 2018, an article appeared on the BBC’s website that discussed a cartoon that was doing the rounds on the Internet. It in fact asked if that 1919 ‘cartoon’ was possibly the very first meme created. Of course the term ‘meme’ did not come into existence till it was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976-book, The Selfi sh Gene.

Dawkins called memes that were “ideas that spread from brain to brain”.

Cut to the modern fanaticism over memes, fuelled by social media. What is this obsession? Why do people dig up the most unsuspecting photos from the Internet, slap an even more unrelated text onto them, without caring much about the overall composition, and then put them out there? Then there are more time-taking GIF and video memes. For most part, it’s fun, but if you are still stuck at the ‘why’, leave it at that because a lot has happened since you last scrolled away a meme.

For instance, last September, memes went up the scholarly walls of the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. Then European Union proposed a ‘ban on memes’ and got four million letters in protest. And on Friday, Bengaluru saw over 40 people, between the ages of 20-40, gather at a studio to discuss the past, present and the future of memes, for more than three hours. This global phenomenon is driven by a passionate community that creates, consumes and sells memes.

Meme Regime, curated by psychology graduate Anuj Nakade (21) from Pune, brings memers of India closer, and the Friday outing was the third in the series, after Pune and Mumbai.

With exhibits of famous memes, video screenings, and discussions, it was not just a fun event but one that could double up as a class in sociology, reconfirming what a few of them believe: Meme-making is a serious pre-occupation and not joblessness.


You should look at a meme and be able to say ‘Oh! So I am not the only who thinks like this. It’s like someone is reading your mind

Nahim Abdulla


Mind over matter

Take the case of Shreyasi Bose (28). The game narrative designer runs a page called Clinically Depressive Memes, a forum to post mental health memes and refer support, which has over 20,000 followers. She started out by making a suicide meme in 2017 – she enjoys making puns on life, and ‘s**tposting’. She says, “I have bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. These are incurable, so I am looking for ways to cope. Therapists ask me to put down my thoughts, which is what I do with memes. When people like and share my memes, it shows solidarity.”

Bose has observed that the largest consumers of memes on Reddit are people suffering from some kind of mental illnesses, and audience member Rashi Vidyasagar agrees. She says, “Just the ability to laugh at yourself and your illness takes the edge off. But I don’t find all memes funny – a lot of them are sexist or make fun of others. But I am okay to look at a meme and make fun of myself.” Graphic designer Kanika Kaul is in the same boat. “My meme-watching journey started on Tumblr in 2007, and I am still at it. Currently, I am addicted to the Yeet memes.” What is its past tense – yote or yeeted? The Internet is divided, help if you can.

Trend watch

Brand consultant Anugraha Kumar Sharma is developing a course for social media influencers, a part of which will focus on memes. “To capture a thought in a single image with a few words is the greatest marketing hack of our times. I want to teach youngsters to make creative memes that look no less than an ad,” says Sharma. “I have been making anti-political and anti-religious and progressive memes for a while. My latest meme that went viral (12,000 likes and shares) was for a group that is asking people to stop making babies. I took a picture of a skeleton and wrote ‘Nature imposes trauma (on women). Religion justifies it. Patriarchy glorifies it. Society celebrates it’.”


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Memes can launch careers, 29-year-old Nahim Abdulla knows that well. Between 2008-2014, he was creating memes anonymously and solely for fun, till Buzzfeed India gave him the job of professional a meme maker in Mumbai. Now, he’s back in Bengaluru and is making memes for a media studio, plus freelancing for a magazine for the Indian diaspora, and is in talks with a few news websites too. He is known for memes on the Indian daily life and culture. “You should look at a meme and be able to say ‘Oh! So I am not the only who thinks like this. It should be as if somebody is reading your mind,” Abdulla says.

Chethan Hiremath burst into the digital marketing scene by making Bengaluru City Police look cool with the Game of Thrones memes that he created along with Dheeraj Gowda. “I knew if we could change the game of the Police online and get them the attention of youngsters, I could possibly sell any brand. And so in nine weeks, I got them three-lakh followers on Twitter. That was in 2017. I have moved on. I started my agency and now I have 25-28 clients across sports, F&B, gyms, corporates.” It was his team who “found” the ball that Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) player AB de Villiers smashed out of the Chinnaswamy Stadium into Cubbon Park, a meme that broke the Internet at the time. “It’s the news and trends that make a meme lit. They must be topical or throwbacks. Most people I know get their news via memes. Actor Rami Malek fell off the stage during the Oscars, I got that from memes,” shares the 29-year-old.

Memes have become news channels too. Nayan Temkar, who runs the Troll Haida page with 2.8lakh followers, claims, “We broke the news that Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma went to watch a movie at a mall in the city. I have now made contacts with Bollywood PRs.” Pavan JD, a digital marketing professional who runs Namma Karnataka Meme with nine-lakh followers, adds, “During IPL, for instance, we do 20-25 memes a day as opposed 10-15 on normal days.” Breaking news or not, being clued in is critical. “On weekends, party memes do well. Sunday to Monday, we do office-related memes. And the rest of the week is about daily news, college memes and inside jokes,” says 23-year-old Temkar. ‘Did you know?’ facts are also the current toast in Bengaluru.


Scenes from the Friday gathering of Meme Regime

Scenes from the Friday gathering of Meme Regime



These regional ‘hobby pages’ have also started making money, because producers now want ‘meme teasers’ for their films. They get `15,000-`20,000 per film. Now, these meme makers have become “mini celebrities” too.

Young club

Memes are the language of the millennial. Hiremath says, “It’s mostly the youth brands that go for meme marketing, because they know youngsters thrive on memes, which is all about savagery.” Sociologist Aditi Surie, 30, who’s set the discover tab on her Instagram to memes, agrees, “Some time back, my friends and I would only talk in memes. We’d prod each other follow meme pages. And instead of sharing long-form articles, we’d share social memes. The good thing is memes let you talk about things you would otherwise not, such as ghosting.”

Is meme art?

While meme consumers are happy as long as they are being fed – thinking dogs, grumpy cats, winking girls, Elon Musk, ‘sanskaars’, Meenaboys (“It’s unique to India”), meme addicts want more. They would like to see memes go up in art galleries, next to paintings. Can that ever happen? “Definitely,” says Sonakshi Lele, who is doing research on whether the definition of arts and aesthetics can be expanded to include memes. She makes the case, “Because, memes are so democratic and mutable. They are by the people, of the people, for the people. That’s one thing. The other thing is that the notion of art is always changing. In 1920s, Dadaism had turned a toilet installation into an art piece. Much like the paintings serve as anthropological archives, 50 years from now, memes will reflect the thought-processes of this era.” Similarly, Paulanthony George likens memes to post-modern folklore which “cut through high and low culture.” The post-grad from IIT-Bombay is now doing a PhD in Bengaluru on memes, exploring the intersection of how memes are made and people who make them.


No matter how crude or cringe these images and videos are, they are sparking thoughts, laughs and conversations and are uniting a section of youngsters around the world, even if it looks divided between dog and cat camps, Yeet and Yote gangs, and Rajinikanth or Ekta Kapoor followers, or most recently, torn in the PewDiePie versus T-series versus nationalism debate. “If something goes viral, it means there is some truth to it; it is connecting people. So meme is a serious art. And that’s why I want memes to become a part of art history and not just digital history,” signs off Nakade.
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