#grandpakrish

“Tell me Karthi, why should I continue being a burden to you all? What is the point of surviving like an invalid?” asked my grandpa, the bitterness and frustration evident in his voice. I struggled to think of a convincing reply, but could find neither a logical nor an emotional riposte. I just ended up muttering “Nothing like that, thatha. You’re the head of this house,” in an unconvincing tone. It was over two years since my grandma had passed away, after a marriage that lasted more than 65 years. And even though he liked to think otherwise, she had been the rock on which he built his life. For a man who had started working from the age of seventeen as a labor officer in a government-controlled enterprise, retirement had been particularly difficult. He spoke to very few people, and I happened to be one of the few with whom he opened up. His relationship with his sons and daughters was, to put it mildly, strained. I could only watch helplessly as he fought with any of his children who wanted to spend some time with him, as if on a personal mission to build a wall around himself that no one could breach.

When not bickering with his family, he tried occupying himself with a geriatric’s last refuge: politics. He had a love-hate relationship with the media, and even though he spent much of his waking hours watching news channels, he was caustic in his comments on their sensationalism as well as the national political scene. His dry wit always managed to make me smile, and I often wondered what might have been had he became a writer instead of pursuing the “safe government job” when he was young.

Many a times, I visited news websites and posted comments in his name. His satire was always well-received by other viewers, and this made me wonder if I could show him a more engaging way to spend his time. One day, I walked up to him and said “Thatha, I am going to open a twitter account for you”. I was met with a quizzical look. He had never sat before a computer in his life, and didn’t seem intent to start now. But I had other plans. I asked my cousin to get an iPad from the US, and opened an account for him in the name of @grandpakrish. Next, I got over his objections (You can’t teach an old dog new tricks) to make him understand the way twitter works.

I felt that after a long time, I could actually connect to him in a way I had forgotten in my adulthood. Like a little child watching a magician at work for the first time, he was wonderstruck at the simplicity and ingenuity of the technology that enabled millions of people to collaborate and share opinions seamlessly. I was amazed at how quickly he was able to grasp what I was telling him, and soon, he was asking me questions related to the technology platforms that I needed to search on the net to find answers to.

Finally, he started tweeting. Like a typical Tambrahm (Tamil Brahmin), his first tweet was a Tamil verse which translated to “Every word that I write is at God’s behest”. He kept tweeting about the political scams that occurred daily, and was gathering followers on Twitter slowly as more and more people started enjoying his invective yet polished language. The inflection point came during the 2G scam. His witty word-plays with politicians’ names and his new found love for using trending topics to help him reach a wider audience combined to increase his followers exponentially. For more than ten thousand followers, his quips were nuggets of gold which ran around the internet through “retweets”.  His daily routine changed drastically. He didn’t have time to even talk to anyone in his family, let alone bicker. Instead, he spent almost his entire waking hours on twitter, reading, replying and re-tweeting. In fact, his popularity reached such a height that we even had marketers contacting our home to have him endorse his products on Twitter.