CHENNAI: Endless rolls of firecrackers, sweets and a lot of dancing was the order of the day for AIADMK cadre on Thursday after the party won 134 seats in the Assembly elections. Meanwhile, netizens trained their guns on opposition parties, which, except the DMK, all went home empty-handed. Memes on DMDK chief Vijayakant, who was already a target on social media, were never in short supply. While some known Facebook pages did put up their water-marked jokes, playing on scenes from Tamil movies, new pages like ‘TN 2016 election memes’ lifted lyrics and movie dialogues from recent and old movies. FB-ians heavily trolled ‘Captain’, with memes asking, “Enakku memes potingale, vote potingala?” (You put so many memes for me, but did you put a vote for me?). Another showed him asking, “Who is that counting only the AIADMK and DMK votes? When will they count our party’s votes?”
Even the DMK, though it won 89 seats, was not spared. A meme featuring Goundamani and taking a dig at expectations over the exit polls (which had mostly predicted a DMK lead) did the rounds on WhatsApp and Facebook. Some Jayalalithaa fans even catapulted their heroine to superstardom, comparing her to superstar Rajini in Kabali.
RJ Balaji, a popular wise-cracker on social media, brought out the essence of TN’s people in a single post. Translated, his comment read, “The election which we need to follow with ‘full emotion’, we follow in a jolly way like a match. And a match which we are supposed to enjoy in a jolly way, we watch with full emotion. #IndianDa”.
On Friday afternoon, however, it looked like ‘Captain’ may have the last laugh — he turned to meme-making himself! Putting up a picture of him pumping his fist from his official Twitter account, the caption read — “Victory has been delayed... Don’t lose heart, We will form a government. Fate will be rewritten soon.”
Targets Aplenty for Netizens
Another victim of social media was former union minister Dayanidhi Maran after his gaffe statement on the exit poll that people of Tamil Nadu had sold their “conscience to the devil”.
“Dayanidhi Maran is that guy who never accepts that he got out while playing gully cricket,” tweeted a social media user