When I was Mr. Universe.... and Tweeted off my feet!

Joe A Scaria

In the good old days of what now appears stone-age communication, there were radio, television and the ubiquitous print media. I myself lived and worked through the heady days of newspapers when just every now and then people saw your byline and told you about it.

Now there are tweets – whose brevity means they occupy such minuscule digital space and yet reach tens of millions, unlike newspapers that went door to door at dawn. Obviously, the Twitterati with tens of millions of followers have enormous influence over local, national and international audiences. So what happens when a leading Twitterati tweets about you? I had that experience last week when one of India’s leading Twitterati, Anand Mahindra, tweeted about one of my Joe-metric View videos on Kottayam, Kerala being India’s only hunger-free district. Kottayam scored a perfect zero – the best possible score – on the index of multidimensional poverty.

It’s good to know the world’s leading Twitterati before knowing the power of their tweets. Barack Obama leads the world with a whopping 130 million followers, followed by Canadian musician Justin Bieber with 114m. For perspective, the world’s largest-circulated newspaper, Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun has a morning circulation of 7.7m and the Times of India goes to some 4m-plus subscribers.

The next eight in the top ten Twitterati are, musician Katy Perry (109m), musician-entrepreneur from Barbados, Rihanna (104m), Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo (96m), musician Taylor Swift (90m), musician-actress Ariana Grande (85m), musician-actress Lady Gaga (84m), comedian and TV hostess Ellen DeGeneres (78m), and YouTube – yes, the online video platform – with 74m followers.

Take a closer look and you see unmistakable US domination – except for Canadian Bieber, Barbadian Rihanna and Portuguese Ronaldo, seven of the top ten are American. More proof of America’s soft power, if any were required. What is for certain is that their words pack dynamite. Remember earlier this year Rihanna sent millions of Indians into a frenzy when she tweeted about the farmers’ agitation? She put the farmers protest hashtag and required only six words to have virtually all of India take a stance for the farmers or for the federal government. She only needed to say six words – “Why aren’t we talking about this?”

In a counter that failed, India came out with hashtags like ‘IndiaTogether’ and ‘IndiaAgainstPropaganda’ and none less than external affairs minister S. Jaishankar tweeted, “Motivated campaigns targeting India. Will never succeed. We have the self-confidence today to hold our own. This India will push back.” But eight months later, it was the farmers who pushed the government back. Jaishankar was joined in a chorus of tweets by Bollywood and cricket personalities from Lata Mangeshkar and Sachin Tendulkar to Ajay Devgn and Virat Kohli. But they all seemed deficient to blunt Rihanna’s tweet. That’s the power leading Twitterati pack in their punch lines. Therefore I should have known what it means when someone like Anand Mahindra tweets about my video. It was a friend from Hyderabad who alerted me first, saying “Hey, are you aware, Anand Mahindra has just tweeted about your video on Kottayam?”

To be sure, Mahindra is not quite in the same class as Rihanna in terms of global influence, but he has 8.5m followers, enough to startle and excite someone like me who has a mere 8,000 subscribers on YouTube.

His Tweet had a tectonically uplifting impact on Kottayam’s new-found status as a hunger-free district, and kept the district and I in the limelight for at least the next 72 hours. Within hours of Mahindra’s tweet, a team from the Mathrubhumi television channel was at home to interview me, and the next morning Kerala’s leading newspaper, Malayala Manorama carried a prominent news story on Mahindra’s tweet, with a sub-headline saying it was prompted by my video. Later in the day, another team from Mathrubhumi television came over home, complete with an outdoor broadcasting van, for a live discussion.

That wasn’t all. The Kottayam Press Club invited me to engage a session for its fresh batch of journalism students, and the Anand Bazar Patrika carried the news of Mahindra’s tweet and my role in it. Whew, that was nearly 72 hours of breathless action. After tweeting about me, Mahindra has moved on, his latest tweet being about the new Miss Universe, Harnaaz Sandhu. Makes me feel like I was Mr Universe last week!

(Joe Scaria is a blogger, columnist and regularly podcasts a Joe-metric View)