Epicretold, Kerala-born journalist Chindu Sreedharan’s audacious attempt to fit the mother of all epics, the Mahabharata, into the microblogging site Twitter, has crossed 100 tweets in just about a month. To tell the complete story, hundreds of tweets more are required.
In these many tweets, Bhima, from whose point of view the epic is retold, has moved with his mother and brothers from the forest to Hastinapur. He is gradually becoming aware of his strengths and has already shown Duryodhana what he is capable of. Epicretold at 100 has not even reached a quarter of its journey. Even then, by now, Epicretold has emerged as the most popular ‘twiction’, as attempts of similar kind are informally referred to.
James McCormick, who had begun to tweet a full-fledged novel, ‘Talking Cat’, written by his late wife Alice as early as May, 2008, has 103 followers. Roger Morris, who is posting his novel ‘A Gentle Axe’ in tweet form has 1,152 followers. Matt Stewart’s rendering of ‘The French Revolution’ in tweets has 962 followers. Author Phillippa Gregory who tweeted a limited version of her novel, ‘The White Queen’, has 778. Chindu’s ‘Epicretold’ has 1,405 followers.
‘’In Twetterian terms the 1,400-odd tally Epicretold has is yawnable. The twitterati, particularly celebrities, have tens of thousands of followers,’’ Chindu said in an e-mail chat from the UK, where he works as a professor of journalism in Bournemouth University. But adds: ‘’But for this particular genre, the number is impressive.’’
There is one more thing that sets apart Chindu’s work from other ‘twiction’ writers. ‘’The first is that while McCormick, Morris and Stewart are posting from what is already written, Epicretold is being written as I post. It is written for Twitter, on a day-to-day basis, the information architectured with this specific platform in mind; not merely the transmission of a completed work meant for the conventional media in the unconventional media. So this, I suspect, is more of twiction,’’ Chindu said. After ‘Express’ broke the Epicretold story on July 31, it was lapped up by leading newspapers across the country.
Now, Chindu and his twiction has been featured on the latest issue of the venerable Time Magazine.