Mayhem has been unleashed in Twitterland as Elon Musk's grand idea of removing blue ticks and conferring those only to Twitterati willing to pay for the privilege has been rolled out in earnest in India.
Our official account was among the earliest to lose the tick.
Soon, we found out that Virat Kohli, Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar, Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Sachin Tendulkar, Hrithik Roshan and Priyanka Chopra, who are in the top 10 list of most followed accounts in India, had also lost their blues. And no, none of them was making a song and dance about it. Were they lighter beings because of it? We did not ask.
The only two accounts that survived the blue-tick cull belonged to the Prime Minister. Narendramodi and PMOIndia (Ranked one and three with Kohli in the middle) were both royally blue still -- the reason cited being the account belongs to a member of a government or multilateral organisation.
Things were to get a little interesting as we looked further.
The controversial young BJP leader from Karnataka Tejasvi Surya retained his badge of honour for the same reason, as did Shashi Tharoor, another popular tweeter, since both of them are Members of Parliament.
Rahul Gandhi lost his because he has been disqualified from the Lok Sabha. But then there came the controversial omissions.
Many CMs -- Mamata Banerjee, MK Stalin, Pinarayi Vijayan, Naveen Patnaik, Basavaraj S Bommai -- were all removed from the tick club. At least at the time when this was written.
As for party accounts, those of the BJP, Congress and others retained their ticks. The reason given is right below.