What do Twinkle Khanna, Bobby Deol, Alok Nath have in common?

Do you remember Bobby Deol?

Er, okay, question reframed. Do you need to remember Bobby Deol? Sorry, what? Why?

Question, re-reframed. Have you been gobbling up whatever @bobbydeol_ has been tweeting since February 9 this year and ROFL’ing in the middle of a boring office meeting or when the boyfriend was going yap yap yawn yawn about the SUV he’s eyeing next?

Gotcha!

You don’t “follow” @bobbydeol_ but you secretly visit this fake account page and slide down the inclined plane of his emoji tribute to Bobby the star (son of Dharam the Paaji and brother to Sunny the dhai-kilo-haat Deol) who supernova’ed at the turn of the century. Or you chuckle in the quiet refuge of your cluttered desk in the middle of a noisy, boisterous workplace when you read “The ‘Gupt’ in Gupt movie was my acting”, or “I still receive death threats for doing Bicchoo” or see a Kent RO water purifier pasted in place of Hema Malini’s, aka, Bobby di Mummy twice removed, already plastered face.

Thank Twitter for the brainwave. Or the epileptic attack of a memory reload, whatever suits you. The truth is the micro-blogging site, and other hummer trucks of social media, are letting you have rides of your life through ringed, mazy, catacomb-like superhighways of the virtual world.

Not just by rehabilitating Bolly-trash (or the happy has-beens of our enormous film industry, Bobby included), Twitter, Buzzfeed and others can trump Indian Idol or Nach Baliye when it comes to showcasing talent. Or in this case, twinkling it just enough to outshine the brightest of stars, for a while.

When Mrs Khanna Kumar debuted as @Mrsfunnybones, declaring that she’s a “bona fide member of an ambiguous tribe of the new age Indian woman; heavily armed with the weapons of my choice: Google and lame jokes”, the virtual world experienced a quake measuring high on the cyber Richter scale. That a trophy wife of a big shit action hero, who had long quit the glitz and blitz that tail the life of a cineaste and was content making a splash in her jewelry and interior design business prettifying mansions and penthouses of Bollywood biggies, could “write” and write freaking well, was something no one had quite dreamed of in their wildest imagination.

An almost literary star wife who didn’t go to film or fancy creative writing school? Behold the superstar-daughter, superstar-wife and now Twitter superstar in her own right: Twinkle Khanna. As @Mrsfunnybones, she famously took on Chetan Bhagat, saying she too plays judge distinguishing between dog puke and dog poop, when the latter was gloating about his many talents on and off the page and the stage.

She also sparkles in her column in a leading English-language national daily, that has been celebrated as a refreshingly original take on Indian problems and issues. Be it Karvachauth, Yoga or sexism in everyday life, @Mrsfunnybones tickles yours, and you have to admit her PJs are Macintosh to your Windows. Just smoother, and hardly lame.

From funny to “sanskari” and it’s such a long journey! Alok Nathji, who “goes to bachelor parties at Vaishnodevi”, was practically resurrected on Twitter, like the Christ himself. The Second Coming of this house of Sooraj Barjatiya staple, at whose “darshan” even the dogs start barking “Bowji, bowji”, happened about a year back when he found himself trending on the top spot on Twitter. #AlokNathSanskari, #Babuji, #HumAapkeHainBabuji, and a host of other hashtagged wonders started doing the rounds for no rhyme or reason.

And in no time, Alok Nath memes and gifs were breaking the internet, before Kim Kardashiyan’s prehensile posterior (often mistaken for a pitcher plant or a Venus fly trap).

Sample these:

Hilarity and hurt sentiments aside, in the unpredictable world of Twitter-led social media, where “going viral” is the healthiest of options, the hunt for newness offers up the quirkiest of remixes. Bollywood, that gigantic reservoir of memory, is trawled to dig up forgotten lines, faces and people, who are given a fresh lease of life as a peculiarly public gesture of remembering. It’s a blind man’s roulette, and although they say the nodes and internodes of Twitter’s enormous electronic gut are tightly controlled, whose sphincters are turned off and on at certain wills and whims, instincts and creativity fall through the stools of surveillance and produce mass quirks.

Twitter is a garrulous gangrene in the brain of a gobsmacked god. But it midwives rebirths, short-lived though they are at times.