Voices Devdutt Pattanaik Sathya Saran Ravi Shankar Dr Alka Pande Gaurav Yadav Mata Amritanandamayi THE new sunday express MAGAZINE may 10 2026 SUNDAY PAGES 12 All the World’s a Meme Meme culture has evolved from disposable internet humour into a sharp, crowd-sourced language that shapes commentary, identity, and even public discourse in real time I By Mohd Shehwaaz Khan t begins, as it almost inevitably does now, with memes. Recently as West , Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Kerala headed into heated , political seasons, another parallel campaign surged to life online. Within minutes of a speech, a slogan, or a slip-up, the meme machine kicked in, flattening complexity into something instantly consumable, endlessly shareable, and often far more memorable than the original moment. For instance, Mamata Banerjee’s loss in the recent West Bengal Assembly elections has sparked a massive meme fest, with scenes from films and shows like Dhurandhar, Panchayat, and even Mahabharata reworked into meme templates. Her viral “hamba hamba ramba ramba” remark from a 2021 Murshidabad rally resurfaced, slipping from political rhetoric into meme folklore. Raghav Chadha’s exit from AAP and switch to the BJP didn’t escape the treatment either. He was promptly cast as the lead in “Hum 7 Saath Hain,” a tongue-in-cheek jab at his political reshuffle with six more MPs. Elsewhere, the internet found its own shorthand for diplomacy The much-photographed . camaraderie between Narendra Modi and Giorgia Meloni was swiftly rebranded as “Melody”—a portmanteau that turned statecraft into fandom. And then there are the slips that refuse to stay slips. When Delhi chief minister Rekha Gupta mistakenly referred to Subhas Chandra Bose as “Netaji Subhas Palace,” the internet exaggerated and remixed. Even gestures aren’t spared. When Rahul Gandhi hugged Narendra Modi in Parliament, it was quickly reframed online as awkward intimacy, fodder for endless captioning and GIF loops. In the south, figures like Pinarayi Vijayan and MK Stalin are similarly caught in this cycle—every expression, pause, or phrase feeding into a constantly evolving meme archive that reshapes how they are seen and remembered. And then, just as this hyperlocal meme churn reaches saturation, the frame widens. A child’s plastic steering wheel—bright, toy-like, utterly unserious—is clipped onto a real car dashboard. The caption reads: “The Strait of Hormuz will be controlled by me and the Ayatollah.” No official statement, no diplomatic rebuttal—just a perfectly timed visual punchline posted by Iran’s Embassy in South Africa, echoing US President Donald Trump’s claim with disarming absurdity At a . time when doomscrolling is as much a lifestyle as it is a symptom of screen addiction, memes have become a tool for narrative-building, marketing strategy, coping mechanism, and of course, political propaganda. We don’t just experience events anymore; we template them. The power of memes lies in their supposed unseriousness. What looks like humour often carries durable political meaning. Rahul Gandhi’s “Pappu” image, for instance, was an accumulation of memes that solidified into perception. “Memes are propaganda’s ideal delivery system for the social media age,” says Anunaya Rajhans, Visiting Faculty at Nayanta University and a doctoral candidate studying memes and their political implications at the University of Amsterdam. “They are compact carriers of political messaging that exploit both platform architecture and cognitive vulnerabilities.” Their strength lies in what he calls “context collapse,” where disparate references, emotions, and ideas converge into a single, viral frame. The meme-verse never really stops. Even as the Indian government asks platforms such as Facebook, X, and Instagram to take down content critical of the government, something else always comes up. Recent reports indicate that takedown orders have targeted posts featuring criticism and satire of the Prime Minister as well as memes, with action reportedly taken under Section 69A of the IT Act. When a parody reel of Narendra Modi hugging world leaders went viral, Facebook took it down. Modi baiter Dhruv Rathee, who had downloaded and reposted it, asked his followers on YourTube to repost it again. In spite of the take down, memes continue to make people laugh and politicians mad. “Posting political content is always a risk, but I also see it as a reward in terms of engagement,” says the admin of MemeMandir, a page with 935K followers on Instagram and 74K on X. “I see memes as democratised newspaper comics—a way to create awareness, critique policies and ideologies, and make sense of what’s happening,” the admin says. MemeMandir began as a political gesture. Its Ayodhya-based admin, who requested anonymity , conceived the name as a pun on the Ram Mandir, which dominated headlines at the time. “It was around 2018, and Ram Mandir was everywhere in the news, so I started MemeMandir to critique the political developments,” he says. In that sense, memes do what editorial cartoons once did, but at a speed and scale traditional media cannot match. Walk the Talk Sankalp Samant, co-founder of Idiotic Media, a firm that handles multiple meme pages, calls memes a language of the internet, layered with culture. “If something has not turned into a meme, it simply doesn’t exist in popular imagination,” he says. “Be it war, an LPG gas crisis, a scandal, a controversy or a personal experience—everything , is meme-worthy for this generation, because it takes away the complexity of the situation and In India, there is a meme for almost every situation, in every format. It is at once organic and organised. Images, videos, GIFs, AI-generated edits—humour is the common thread presents it in digestible, humorous scenarios.” Samant’s meme page, Log Kya Kahenge, with over 2.5 million followers on Instagram, posts as many as five memes every day often blending them with , news, professional life, sports, and politics. “In one week, we get 100-plus million views and 4.5 million engagements. That’s the scale of just one page. We have many other pages focusing on Bollywood, topical content, politics, and the news cycle.” India’s meme economy while still loosely defined, , was already estimated at around `3,000 crore by 2025, according to equity firm Equentis. Smaller meme pages charge a few thousand rupees per post, while larger accounts with over a million followers can earn lakhs a month. “ page with one million A followers can earn up to `10 lakh per month,” Sankalp says. Its real scale lies less in formal valuation and more in reach. It is an economy built not just on money but on attention—fast, reactive, , and endlessly reproducible. Long before memes came to define how we communicate online, the word itself was coined in a very different context: evolutionary biology . Darwinist author Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, deriving it from the Greek word mimesis, meaning imitation. He described it as a “unit of culture,” much like the gene is a unit of evolutionary life. Says Rajhans. “Historically culture has been produced top-down. , But with internet access becoming widespread, cultural production became more democratised, and the idea of memes came back in. Common people may not write novels or make films, but they make memes, which is also a form of expression. They are now equally producers of culture.” In India, there is a meme for almost every situation, in every format. It is at once organic and organised. Images, videos, GIFs, AI-generated edits—humour is the common thread. This circulation is sustained by meme template websites and tools—platforms like Imgflip, Indian Meme Templates, and Kapwing make formats easily reusable, while apps like Canva and CapCut enable quick adaptation. The latest in the trend are AI-generated slops—a term used for digital content of low quality—of vegetables, fruits, and food items portrayed as characters of short, wacky stories. The script is always unbelievably ridiculous. A cauliflower’s marriage is fixed with a pea, but she is in love with a potato. A strawberry cheats on an orange with a banana. The brainrot is endless and addictive. “I can’t just stop watching these videos. They are the best content for doomscrolling after a busy day at work,” says Suhail Noshai, an engineer from Uttar Pradesh. Then there are evergreen templates. A line from the show Panchayat—“1-1 cup chai aur bola jaye?”—becomes shorthand for everyday indulgence. An Arab man exclaiming “Technologia” finds new life in Indian timelines, repurposed to comment on everything from gadgets to jugaad. A sixth-grader’s bewildered “Aayein” travels across platforms, used for confusion, disbelief, even the horror of reading a family WhatsApp forward. The contexts differ, but the instinct is the same: to translate experience into something instantly recognisable. “The moment I wake up, I go to every social media platform—YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit—and look at what’s trending, and then I try to create my own content out of it. I am always looking for humour in every situation,” says Bengaluru-based Sudarsan Das (Sid), admin of the famous meme page, Indian Memes, which has over 407K followers on Instagram. Das runs five such Turn to page 2 Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment