Pick a situation, and you’ll find several memes — some hilarious and a few educative.
But who makes them? CE speaks to a few meme-makers to find out how they keep it relevant and ridiculous
CHENNAI:What was the one factor that bound demonetisation, American election and Oscars? Memes. Mostly funny and some informative. Anything and everything is converted to memes these days. By definition, memes are images or videos that make fun of any situation and starts trending on the internet. With meme creating apps available on Google Playstore, all one needs is a phone to create them. There are many in Chennai who have taken to making memes regularly. So how do you create a meme? City Express tries to find out...
The meme culture began in the west around 2010 by the popular Facebook page 9gag. “They covered a wide range of topics using expressions of an actor from a film as the base with some quirky and witty message. By 2013-2014, it spread to North India, and it became a hit here only after the craze toned down a bit in the north,” says Gautham Govindaraman, co-founder, Chennai Memes, which began in 2014.
Chennai Memes began as a page purely about the city and provided some entertainment to the followers. “From 2014, our focus began to shift. It was during the Kodaikanal issue that we started making memes that was to spread awareness on a topic. We took up Madras Day and Cooum clean-up and other topics in 2015, which received rave reviews,” he says adding that now they are looking at more social issues and providing information to the public.
Awesome Machi was started by Praveen RCS and his friends in 2015 and for the past one-and-a-half years, they too have grown from providing entertainment to giving out information. “I would call it a blog in a template. It is shared easily and reaches many, not just through Facebook, but also via Twitter and WhatsApp,” says Praveen.
The page has now decided to get their proverbial hands dirty by promoting citizen journalism. They have a set of interns who do Vox Pop on trending issues. “The ideas for our memes are sometimes given by our followers in the comments section. During the Jallikattu protests, people posted many photos and gave us the ground report. We made a meme out of it and posted for creating awareness,” he says. But what about authenticity? “When followers post something, we try to check with other sources or try to contact the person who posted it and get more info from him/her,” he adds.
Most memes have comical situations from a film, suited to dialogues and comments by the creators. “The best thing is that any given situation can be related to a scene from some film. Having Goundamani or Senthil on your template grabs more attention,”he says. And rightly so, we do love our film comedians!
These creators have a team that works 24 hours scanning the news and sharing them on social networking sites. That works as their research too. To up the ante, the recent upgrade is video memes. Rahul Sekar, who works with the Tamil film industry, is one such video meme creator. “I started this about a year ago. I pick up a scene from a film and give my own voice-overs. Through these videos, I believe I am explaining the whole story,” he says. Video memes are used mainly to address topics casually.
If there is one thing that puts off these meme creators, it’s that memes are now being used for political and personal gains. “Unfortunately, through the template memes, many have started trolling the political party they were not in favour of,” adds Rahul.
While most memes are taken with a pinch of salt, many others get criticised too. “We are sharing the public’s opinion through memes and we stick to it. Controversies don’t mar our work. But we analyse before posting it. We don’t want to seem like we are supporting one side and demeaning the other,” says Gautham.
“We get trolled too. But it is only wise to sit back and let people comment. Only when it gets serious, we need to intervene. While we might troll the government in one meme, we also laud something they have done. We need to find the right balance,” opines Praveen.