How an Indian teen and his disabled father became victims of vicious memes
If you are a fan of memes, and are fairly active on social media, chances are you have come across a series of Instagram screenshots featuring Sanjay, a teenager and Durgesh, an elderly man, in the last couple of days. Without the absurd and dark captions — which turned their pictures into a popular meme — their photos don’t mean much.
My favourite Instagram account pic.twitter.com/r1bFklRmDx
— Yugi'hoe (@Tazznemo) October 26, 2017
A short sad story pic.twitter.com/IvcoZjLq6k
— prateek (@pbthegrea) October 26, 2017
F*CKING durgesh has done it again pic.twitter.com/qogsTu8oN0
— Wolf - FUT Trader (@WolfOfFUTStreet) October 28, 2017
Someone – perhaps we shall never find out who, thanks to anonymity on the internet – created a kind of story with these Instagram screenshots. It was the tale of a teenager who would keep on falling for the catfishing (where one pretends to be someone else on social media particularly to pursue deceptive online romances) accounts run by the same person. This teenager, at some point, got tired and tried to fight this catfish, but ultimately retreated with a black eye!
An absurd story, but somehow it managed to strike a chord and resulted in meme after meme – the usual.
The problem with a meme like this, which uses the photos of ordinary people, and not a celebrity, a sportsperson, a politician or a fictional character, is that the person being meme’d is likely to chance upon these images. This is where this absurd meme took a dark turn.
On October 28, Sudhanshu Pandey, a student from Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh posted the other side of this story on his Facebook account. He claims he is the brother of Durgesh, a 16-year-old student from Varanasi, who became "Sanjay" in the memes, and the elderly man who catfishes him — "Durgesh" in the memes — is his 51-year-old father Sanjay, supposedly a government official who has undergone two brain surgeries. Sudhanshu says that the elderly man is physically disabled.
Speaking to Storypick, Sudhanshu said, “He [Durgesh] is not into memes. His friends told me that he is not one to have enemies. The whole family is shocked as to why someone would do such a thing to Durgesh. But it’s heart-breaking to see my brother like this. I was the first one to inform him about all this. And the first thing which I heard from him was, ‘Maine kisi ka kya bigada he, mere saath aisa kyu ho raha he? (What have I ever done to anyone, why is this happening to me?)’”
The problem
Of the hundreds of thousands of regularly evolving and forever changing memes, there are some telltale problematic consistencies. Some memes are funny only because of how orientalism plays out: for instance, they are gross exaggerations and distortions of how the West sees Indians. In these memes, Indians are always sexually deprived and depraved, and, of course, they struggle with English.
The subreddit called “Indian People Facebook” is a manifestation of these two ideas. Most of the photos you find on it are either badly phtoshopped images of Indian teens with generic “deep” one-liners written in nauseatingly colourful WordArt or screenshots of conversations, most likely what you would find in the “Others” folder of your Facebook messenger.
Can Indian men be creepy? Yes. Can Indians have badly photoshopped photos with tacky captions? Yes. Is that what every Indian is? No.
In the age of the internet, Indians are no longer snake-charmers, elephant-riders and black-magic-savvy. This new age orientalism has turned all Indians into creeps with a bad command over the English language – which is ironic, given how another raging racial stereotype (with some truth) for Indians is how they are all call-centre employees trying to sell Americans AT&T plans.
The problem of perception, sadly, is not limited to the West. The privileged Indian too laughs at this orientalist humour. It may be urban elitism, class privilege or just plain ignorance, but thousands of Indians have been happily complicit in the spread of memes like “bobs and vegana” and the racially offensive meme born in 4chan called “Pajeet/poo in the loo/designated shitting streets”.
For Durgesh and his father Sanjay, this bad meme may just be a bad episode that will be over in a few weeks at most – memes do have a short lifespan. But for all of us, it should be a reminder of the toxic culture of humour that is a result of both class and racial privilege.
Is this really the best we can do?