Mannequin challenge: Freeze this!

The game ‘statue’ we played as kids has taken a new form, as the #mannequinchallenge and the Internet is going gaga over it. In this challenge, people freeze mid-motion and get into mannequin-like poses, while someone films it to make a short one minute or less video.

International celebs likes Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Britney Spears, James Corden, Paul McCartney and Cristiano Ronaldo have come up with their own versions of this challenge.

At his sold-out show in Los Angeles, DJ Marshmello had 6,000 people in the crowd stand still for a minute and he did this for three nights in a row, making it the biggest mannequin challenge so far.

Back home, our Bollywood stars too have taken up the challenge in good spirit. On Children’s Day, actor Varun Dhawan took up the challenge with a group of kids.

Jacqueline Fernandez did it with her crew members, and John Abraham and Sonakshi Sinha took up the challenge as a part of their film Force 2’s promotion.
“I came across Sonakshi and John’s challenge, and found it interesting. I then took it up with my friends,” says city-based theatre actor, Jay Jha, who did his own version at a friend’s party.

“Taking photographs at the party is monotonous, so we took up the challenge instead and created a fun video,” adds Jay.

A group of friends working with Uber in the city did the #mannequinchallenge as a part of their team building exercise at work: “I heard about the challenge from a friend and thought it was a great way to lift the team’s spirit at work. Everyone had a blast,” says Prasanth.

The #mannequinchallenge has caught and bowled our Indian commentators too. Kapil Dev, Sanjay Manjrekar and Ravi Shastri, along with Ian Botham, did the challenge in the midst of an India vs England match at Rajkot. Time to say ‘Statue’ again!