It's a meme world!

With subtle humour, sarcasm and puns backing the vital content, memes are a combination of pictures and texts that reach out to the masses. Internet memes are one of the most quickly-shared means of information communication on social media platforms. The Chennai memes scene has been growing rapidly in the last few years. With increasing competition, Facebook meme pages in Chennai are coming up with newer initiatives everyday to communicate information.

‘Chennaites’, a meme platform, which recently held a launch for a world record attempt, came up with a new concept — Meme Marathon. Lokesh Jey, the CEO of InSight Media, the parental company of Chennaites elaborates more on the marathon — “We are attempting a Guinness Record for the most number of memes produced within a given time period (mostly within 4-6 hours) and printing out a huge collage of all the thousands of memes produced.”

It all started when the Chennaites page, needed more meme creators to be part of the team. When they posted that they had openings for meme engineers, people from all over Tamil Nadu and abroad sent in their resumes! The team at InSight media was astonished at the response and confused because they only had two openings.

“That’s when the idea for the marathon struck. It will be an online platform where creative people with knowledge of local and world affairs can participate. We have chosen topics like politics, environment, friendship, love, philosophy and more. We are taking social and genral topics that’ll interest the audience. The meme makers need to make the maximum number of memes within a given time frame. The best maker with the most number of memes will win a sum of '1 lakh and free airplane tickets from Air Asia,” adds Lokesh.

Stating that there are moderators to make sure that targeted or vulgar memes don’t come out, Lokesh assures that the memes will be subtle, yet
informative for all age groups.

While the hype for memes is so high, one wonders if it is a financially-viable career option. When asked about it, Gautam Govindaraman from Chennai Memes (another Facebook page) responds, “Indeed it is! We have five full time meme makers at our office. We make memes for clients who pay us. A meme maker can earn between Rs 15,000 to '20, 000 in the beginning of his/her career depending on the creativity, spontaneity, humour sense and knowledge of not only local, but also global affairs.”

On an active political day or a victorious win for India in some sport or an entertainment programme like Bigg Boss, the memes are more in number and also create a lot of controversies. “Our page was taken down by Facebook thrice during the time of elections. We also make sure that our team makes a detailed study and check the facts before creating a meme. We have a sense of responsibility about the content we deliver and we fought for our right to express,” shares Gautam.

Jaytesh Calpakkam from another social media group ‘Paracetamol Paniyaram’ speaks in favour of meme-makers, “While it may seem like an unstable profession, it is the trend among youngsters now. Many people are leaving their well paying corporate jobs to come make memes, because it gives them a sense of satisfaction to inform and create. It is our freedom of speech and no one can take it away from us. Although we faced a lot of troubles, we keep posting and sharing our content through available platforms to reach out to people.”

Stating that meme creation is also a serious profession, Lokesh concludes, “We want people to view it as a serious profession now. It is also a form of media which involves a lot of mind work! Our sponsors are taking the marathon to a whole new level. It is not just a trolling platform but an infotainment industry on its own.”

The team at Chennaites is currently on the lookout for a location and the record creation will be announced soon.