In the post-truth era, April Fool’s Day becomes trickier than usual to navigate. Now used to separating fact from fiction and propaganda nearly every day, people both online and offline viewed every unusual announcement and news report on Sunday with suspicion. Still, celebrities, media organisations and brands did their best to pull a fast one on their followers – with varying degrees of success.
Writer Chetan Bhagat kicked the day off with a tweet announcing his decision to join the Congress. The author offered a link where people could find more details on his surprise announcement – which turned out to be a Wikipedia page on April Fool’s Day. Bhagat’s tweet received more than 1,000 responses and not everyone got the joke. A fair amount of Congress-bashing and trolling ensued.
ANI editor Smita Prakash decided to break the fake news of businessman and Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra making his political plunge. This was presumably funny because murmurs of Vadra mulling a political plunge appear routinely in the news cycle.
The Congress, meanwhile, turned April Fool’s Day into an opportunity to score political points. The party launched a sustained attack on the Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on social media, tweeting with #HappyJumlaDay. They also released a spoof video mocking the party for failing to fulfill several campaign promises and over the performance of several highly publicised government schemes.
The official party handle also posted a message claiming that Rs 15 lakh had been deposited into all bank accounts – raking up the far-fetched promise made by the prime minister in 2014 that his government’s crack down on black money would bring windfall gains to Indian citizens.
Politics dominated April Fool’s Day in Punjab too, where the Shiromani Akali Dal reportedly distributed dummy smartphones and fake currency to remind people of Congress and Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh’s campaign promises. Singh had promised to give smartphones to the state’s youth and increase employment levels.
Media organisations joined in the fun by publishing spoof articles.
The National Herald tried to scare India’s non-vegetarians with further clampdowns on their food habits after the ban on sale of cattle for slaughter last year. “Union cabinet approves ban on chicken,” declared an article in the publication by columnist Mohan Guruswamy. “The notification also declared the Red Jungle fowl (gallus gallus) as the mother of all fowls and has decreed it the same status as the Indian cow (Bos taurus).”
Conde Nast Traveller, meanwhile, made light of wanderlust with its prank piece declaring that the US would roll out visa on arrival for Indian citizens. The announcement was made none other than a Nehru-invoking Donald Trump. “F.R.I.E.N.D.S: I have finally found a way to make America great again,” the US president said. “At the stroke of midnight hour, when the world sleeps, Indians will queue up at their airports to board a flight to the US.”
Trump also provided fodder for humour to The Independent, which claimed that US President and avid tweeter had decided to deactivate his Twitter account. It beefed up its report with a quote from an unnamed White House source, who said, “It’s well known that the president has micro-fingers.”
Brands, as always, had the most fun on April Fool’s Day, with a series of bogus announcements about products that either seemed too good, or too horrendous to be true. Since many of these companies have not clarified whether these are pranks, we could, in the weeks to come, be treated to a wide array of bizarre offerings, including chocolate burgers, anti-ageing ice creams and self-charging SIM cards.
Cab aggregator Ola decided to give competition to media organisations by introducing “instant hyperlocal news”, to give you your morning update on the status of vegetables in your local market, among other things.
Restaurant chain Social chose to have a few laughs at the expense of its patrons’ Aadhaar linking woes. If having to connect the biometric identity number with phone connections, bank accounts, permanent account number and the like wasn’t enough, Social added another requirement to the list.
Comic Con India left cinephiles torn between dismay and delight with news that actor Ranveer Singh had been roped in for a three-movie contract to play Shaktimaan in a big screen adaptation of India’s original superhero.
Snapchat proved to be the most innovative prankster of the lot. The multimedia messaging app took on rival Facebook and reports of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections, for which it is said to have relied most on the social networking site. Snapchat introduced a filter that combines Facebook’s interface with the Russian-style Cyrillic script to strike two birds with one stone.
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