Column | Armed with memes

The Ugly American has long been a prototype — loud, boorish and insensitive to the culture of others. Now, Madhu Raju has become the epitome of the ‘Ugly Indian Abroad’ on the Internet.

Raju, an Indian-origin engineer in the U.S., went viral much to his own detriment when he made a dance reel with a woman at the World War II Memorial in Washington DC. The Internet slammed him for disrespecting the ambience of a war memorial, that too at a time when the U.S. is at war in Iran. Latest reports suggest Raju might be deported if he is found to have been making money from his dance studio in Dallas alongside his IT job, something not allowed on his H1-B visa.

At a time when the U.S. has been cracking down on immigrants, this seems like an act of provocation, both foolish and foolhardy, to disrespect the sanctity of a war memorial in one’s host country. But others dug out videos of Americans doing similar things and asked whether the backlash on Raju wasn’t just racist. For example, two American brothers were arrested in Thailand in 2017 for deciding to take a butt selfie at the Wat Arun temple in Bangkok. In 2015, two American women were deported for taking nude photographs inside the Angkor Wat complex in Cambodia. At least Raju and his companion kept their clothes on.

Raju, who deleted his social media profiles, has not explained why he chose the War Memorial for his Reels but it’s hard to believe he could have been unaware of the significance of his locale. What’s actually more significant is he wasn’t just dancing. He was apparently doing something called the ‘Don’t Rush’ dance challenge on TikTok.

Living in a video game

The story isn’t really about the Ugly Indian Abroad. It’s about the desperation to go viral on social media. The War Memorial becomes just a backdrop, nothing more. In fact, the more unlikely the backdrop, greater the chances of the video standing out from the pack and thus going viral. It’s social media’s version of shock and awe.

Recently, I went to Kolkata’s Alipore Museum, which used to be a jail. It features cells that housed freedom fighters like Subhas Chandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru and Bidhan Roy. It still has the gallows where the likes of Kanailal Dutta were hanged for killing an approver of the British. But the gallows had to be placed out of bounds from visitors because too many were sticking their heads in the noose and making funny videos.

We clearly live in a world where everything has become fodder for clickbait. As the Iran war erupted recently, I noticed a slew of memes poking fun at the happenings in West Asia, including the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. At first, I was rather impressed at the alacrity with which people came up with those memes. There have been Lego recreations of Khamenei’s compound being destroyed and Khamenei as an action figure. The White House itself posted videos using jokes from Top Gun and Dragon Ball Z with the caption ‘Wake up, Daddy’s home’ as if what is happening in Iran is a video game rather than a war.

But as they keep coming, it makes me wonder about the meme-ification of news.

Laughing at ourselves

One does not have to be a fan of the Ayatollah, but is the assassination of a top religious leader really the subject of memes? In a short attention span world, we do not have the time to read a real analysis of the implications of the attack on Iran, the tangled history of the U.S. meddling in Iranian affairs that led to the Ayatollahs coming to power in the first place, and the irony of the son of the late Shah of Iran being heralded as some kind harbinger of democracy when his father’s secret police was notorious for its brutal crushing of dissidents. But such analysis consumes time. A meme is timepass.

At one time, we complained that people did not want to read in-depth stories. News had to be compressed into a paragraph. Maybe, just into a headline. But now, news must be turned into a meme.

Perhaps, that is the point. In a world that seems to be spinning out of control, the meme might be our coping strategy. We are not really laughing at what’s happening, but at our own helplessness.

As one popular meme shows — we are being encouraged to sip our soda with a paper straw to save the planet while global leaders seem to not care about kicking off World War III.

The writer is author of Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal.