‘Maa, she’s twenty-one! She’s not getting married right now. Also, zero points for unlearning the patriarchy.’

  ‘Don’t start with me,’ Maa says. ‘You can’t fight with your mother-in-law and you’re showing all your bravado in front of me.’

  ‘Maa?’

  ‘Was her chai still tasteless?’ She doesn’t wait for me to finish and says, ‘She always does this to us.’

  Anusha Sardana

  Welcome to my notes, Gautam.

  I should thank you, to start off. Maybe these people at WeDonate are geniuses. When I say people, I mean Sarita Sharan, and to an extent, Rachita. Because after all, I found you, Gautam. Life’s come a full circle, hasn’t it? I had told Karunesh I couldn’t start writing because I hadn’t found an interesting character to write about. He found me employable but not in the entertainment vertical. Had he not put me in medical, how would I have found you?

  You’re interesting, aren’t you?

  You did make it to the 100 most hated people on Twitter in a survey by India Today last year. You were at ninety-three but still in top 100.

  I remembered why I had blocked you. You were furiously tweeting Game of Thrones spoilers and I have no patience for that. Anyway, I unblocked you and there was your timeline—93,500 tweets. You kept yourself quite busy, didn’t you?

  Everyone was right—you were hated quite universally.

  I was scrolling through August 2017 when 26 August caught my attention. There were sixty-eight tweets in a single day. I read them all.

  The Supreme Court called for a ban on Triple Talaq and you saw it as an opportunity to gather some hate.

  @gautam_gabbar: Why should Muslims have all the fun? BIG WIN FOR WOMEN? Nahh. Big win for Hindu men who had been suffering alone. At least ab bhai-bhai.

  Retweets: 2501 Likes: 1543

  Hindu men flooded your mentions. Most of them were laughing, others were still lying that they were happy for Muslim women. They were fooling no one.

  A little later, you tweeted.

  @gautam_gabbar: If we can’t get rid of our wives easily, you can’t too. Fair game. #saatjanamkarishta

  Retweets: 2501 Likes: 1543

  The same Hindu men now shat all over your mentions calling you Paki, porki, pseudosecular, libtard, the works. They collectively lost their shit.

  You turned your attention in the afternoon to Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh—a self-styled, gaudy godman who had directed, produced, acted, sung in a movie on himself, castrated his male followers, slept with their wives. The conviction in rape case led to violence by Dera Sacha Sauda’s followers in Punjab, Haryana. Thirty-eight died, 300 were injured. You were less than sympathetic to the

  entire thing.

  @gautam_gabbar: If you’re following a Godman, you deserve to die. It’s evolution, weeding out of the stupid. #DeshMeinChutiyoKiKamiNahi #lovecharger

  Retweets: 2532 Likes: 3433

  The self-righteous people of Twitter united and bemoaned your heartlessness. They wondered how you could be so cruel.

  @gautam_gabbar: What do you expect if you’re walking to a Godman’s room when he himself calls it a gufa?

  #commonsense

  Retweets: 3501 Likes: 2343

  Well, that was in bad taste. Quite understandably, the feminists of the world united and did what’s needed the most—take down a troll. While I support that, what was hilarious was all the male feminists—a mythical being to be honest—were there ridiculing you. All actors, charlatans who use feminism as a paddle board in the dating game. If one is being plain ignorant that’s pardonable, but these men were only projecting intelligence, performing for an audience and that was rotten.

  People who were using your tweets as diving boards into the filth of their own minds found companionship in your thoughts. It was fun to see people finding your tweets resonating with their own thoughts and going, yes, I think so too.

  You, meanwhile, honourably picked no camps. You tweeted about everyone—liberals, conservatives, men, women, Hindus, Muslims.

  Interestingly, some people—mostly the male feminists—who had pilloried you for one tweet, appreciated your other tweets and even liked them. Say what you will about male feminists, they do have a sense of humour. Maybe that’s why feminism is a joke to them.

  There was a lot of noise to boycott you since you were a troll. But you weren’t the usual troll—bad syntax and grammar, unyielding and unhandsome. You never issued rape threats or were violent. You came across as literate, a bit too much at times. You knew pop culture, enjoyed Beyoncé and Nehru and Ambedkar, wrote with a flair in both English and Hindi. Some of your ardent ‘followers’ deemed your more dangerous because of that.

  Late afternoon, you wanted to tweet a bit more and so you did.

  @gautam_gabbar: Why do you think Hindu men are so insecure about Muslim men marrying their women? Is it a size thing? #sizematters

  Retweets: 501 Likes: 343

  You got hammered from both sides for this tweet before the two sides started having a go at each other.

  I imagined you sitting in a tall tower, looking down, watching two factions first abusing you, and then when they didn’t find you responding, fighting against each other.

  I scrolled to other days. You were just relentless.

  @gautam_gabbar: There’s one job more stupid than a female social media influencer cum blogger. A male social media influencer cum blogger. #higuys

  @gautam_gabbar: Vegetarians who aren’t vegetarians by choice should shut up. You didn’t make an ethical choice, you did what your mumma-papa taught you. Shove your moral lecture up your behind.

  +

  @gautam_gabbar: To know the state of the country, watch these fools taking to the roads after India wins the WORLD cup in a sport 12 countries play.

  @gautam_gabbar: GENUINE QUESTION. Can you convert to Islam, get married thrice to Muslim women, then convert again and get to keep the women? #askingforafriend

  @gautam_gabbar: When you say Virat Kohli is the best batsman in the world you mean he’s the best out of upper-order 60 batsmen who play international cricket. Right, right, got it.

  @gautam_gabbar: How weak does one have to be to start being obsessed with English Premier League just to make a few friends?

  @gautam_gabbar: People from small towns who shift to big towns and can’t stop talking about their small town please go back and live a life of penury. #gareebgoback

  @gautam_gabbar: Why do all Greater Kailash aunties have the same hard face? Like they haven’t been fucked in a while? #botoxnahincelibacy

  @gautam_gabbar: People who talk about feminism, please stop saying what everyone has already said, thank you, you’re boring. #unoriginal

  @gautam_gabbar: Indian teachers aren’t underpaid. They are overpaid. #thosewhocantteach

  @gautam_gabbar: Obese people who put hashtags and say I love my body are lying. Even people with abs don’t love their bodies. #bodynuetrality

  @gautam_gabbar: Want someone to tell me what’s the talent of a fashion influencer. Kim at least made a sex tape. #makeasextape

  @gautam_gabbar: Men who talk about feminism, please stop, you’re fooling no one. Please go back to searching ‘rough, forced sex’ on pornhub.

  @gautam_gabbar: Homophobia exists because every heterosexual couple knows that two boys and two girls have much more fun together.

  @gautam_gabbar: People who bitch about the professionalism of Ola drivers are the same who take hour-long cigarette breaks.

  @gautam_gabbar: Every time a house help is given a different glass to drink water from, she should spit in the food. It should be a law.

  @gautam_gabbar: Feminism is dead if we turn to social media influencers for it.

  @gautam_gabbar: All babies aren’t cute and parents need to realize that. Love can’t be ‘that’ blind.

  @gautam_gabbar: Everyone worshipping Priyanka Chopra called her a slut, and thought she was embarrassing when her music video with Pit Bull came out. Most became fans after the whites accepted her. Please lick the soles of white people.

  @gautam_gabbar: How can you tell someone is a Brahmin? They will tell you. They will tell you right after they tell you that caste doesn’t matter.

  @gautam_gabbar: How big of a loser do you have to be for your role model to be a full-time Instagrammer?

  @gautam_gabbar: It’s okay to be homophobic. Girls fear men’s orientation all the time. It’s fine if men fear other men’s orientation.

  @gautam_gabbar: If I lived in the 16th century—an average lifespan of 25 years—and my wife wouldn’t keep hungry for a day for my longevity, I would have mixed feelings about sharing my pyre with her. #karwachauth

  @gautam_gabbar: If you’re depressed, lonely and friendless, and no one checks on you, you probably deserve it.

  @gautam_gabbar: Every girl who learned make-up early to hook a suitable catch before 23 is now a social media influencer.

  @gautam_gabbar: I am yet to find a social media influencer who wasn’t fat and lost a lot of weight and now posts regularly about body positivity.

  @gautam_gabbar: Indian parents care about who their children are having sex with because their own sex lives dry up sooner than you think.

  @gautam_gabbar: Male influencers. No one wants to know your beard routine. People have real jobs.

  @gautam_gabbar: Even the most woke of you will only call a white person a firangi. Everyone else is either Chinese or kaalu or ye to indian hi lagta hai.

  @gautam_gabbar: Female influencers. No one loves you.

  Then I scrolled to the last tweet from your account.

  @gautam_gabbar: Madarchodo, and Baapchodo (not to be sexist or anything), I will see you on the other side. You have 3500 crores for a statue, you can’t spare 20 lacs for a human life. Nice work bhosdiwalo.

  Retweets: 7000 Likes: 13443

  It was your most retweeted tweet.

  You never woke up after that.

  Amit Modi

  Amit Modi woke up to three missed calls on his phone from the creative director of the production house. There were fifteen messages as well hounding him for revisions of the skit he had written. It would be his seventh revision.

  ‘This is not funny. You used to be funny. What happened?’ his creative director—the haramzaada was a twenty-one-year old boy, five years younger than Amit Modi—had said in the last meeting.

  Others in the room had chimed in. They were fucking eighteen-year-olds—fucking interns—who had not written a single funny thing in their entire lives and now were telling him off in creative meetings. This production house was built by sharing memes on Instagram and then they moved on to making small videos.

  Bhenchod, mujhe sikhaenge (they will teach me)?

  Amit didn’t allow himself to get lost in nostalgia, of the times his comedy shows sold out in little Gurgaon clubs, or how the YouTube sketches he helped write raked in millions of views, how he was on the list of most promising comedians or how his Twitter following had ballooned to 250,000 followers.

  Amit Modi opened his laptop. Without even thinking, his fingers typed the website of WeDonate and then Gautam’s name in the search bar. He looked at the amount collected. 1.5 lakh/35 lakh. ‘Marega chutiya (you will die, fucker),’ he whispered to himself with a sense of relief. It was the only time of the day Amit Modi could manage to smile. Gautam was going to die sooner or later. He closed the tab. He knew he would open it a few more times during the course of the day. He opened Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages of WeDonate. He checked if they had shared Gautam’s campaign there. Nope.

  They wouldn’t dare.

  When the Gautam campaign had first gone live, he had lost his mind. How could someone want to save him? He had made multiple accounts and dropped scores of abusive comments forcing WeDonate to take down the posts. They would still post about him every now and then and he would repeat the same.

  Everyone talked about how public memory was short. That people on the Internet moved on. As someone who built his career on the Internet—by first being funny on Twitter—Amit Modi thought that too.

  It had been two years since Gautam had destroyed Amit Modi’s life and no one had forgotten yet. Everywhere he went and introduced himself, people referred to Gautam’s tweets. The little of the life he had left after Gautam’s tweet devastated his entire being, was still getting choked out of him.

  Amit Modi was only one of the people Gautam tweeted nastily about. He had driven scores of people off Twitter. Amit knew of him before Gautam turned his attention to Amit one morning for a few hours. He thought of Gautam as one of those attention-seeking insects on Twitter.

  Gautam’s tweets were directed towards many people like him and yet it seemed that they managed to stall only his life. On some weekends, he would comb through the tweets and stalk the others whom he had driven off Twitter. They all seemed to have moved on with their lives. People like Arvind Mohan, whom Amit Modi ascertained to be Gautam’s best friend, was now working at an MNC, unmindful of what happened.

  Amit opened the document of the skit again and leaned back into his chair. He stared at it for a long time. He lit another cigarette and stared at the empty bottle of Old Monk. He shouldn’t drink, he reminded himself. Who knows when the hipsters—he was one of them—decided that the outrage against him was too boring to follow up on?

  He should have quit working with this production house long ago but he needed the money. The little savings he had had dried up and this project was two months’ rent.

  Though he hated the bastards who employed him, he was thankful they employed him. Even though he saw the pity clearly in their eyes, they hadn’t mentioned the tweets from the handle @gautam_gabbar even once. But they had told him explicitly to not mention that he was working with them.

  Amit Modi remembered the day his life imploded down to its last minute; he would still get nightmares of the day.

  That day he had first woken up at 7 a.m.; he had talked to his girlfriend of three years till 3 in the morning. He had checked his phone; it was choc-a-bloc with texts, and WhatsApp notifications and mails. He had gone back to sleep because everything could wait. How was he supposed to be productive without sleeping well? He had a busy day of writing jokes and scripts in front of him.

  Those days Amit Modi used to forget to fill up invoices and losing out money. He didn’t mind it. He was just happy doing what he was always meant to do. Writing funny sketches, doing open mics and the occasional corporate show. He woke up at 10 a.m. again and by that time the tweet from @gautam_gabbar had been retweeted 3000 times. His phone kept hanging from all the notifications; it didn’t stop ringing for an hour. All notifications in his Inbox were in caps. Every time he tapped on a notification, his phone hung.

  He knew something was wrong; his heart pounded, his fingers trembled. It had happened to him before. He had woken one morning and found himself called an anti-national bhadwa because of the cow joke he had cracked. Woke twitter—citing freedom of speech—had defended him at the time but he knew they weren’t to be trusted. The liberal, secular, progressive Twitter were one of the most traitorous, opportunistic people he knew.

  He logged onto Twitter from his laptop. A stream of invectives and abuses welcomed him. The mentions in his feed all said the same thing.

  He was cancelled.

  He was named the reason why the youth is the way it is, he was the reason holding back India, he was the scourge, he had to be weeded out. All his employers, his friends in comedy, the venues he performed at, were tagged and people called for a complete boycott.

  His heart beat out of his chest; his face twitched. It was another panic attack.

  He clicked to the tweets that started it all.

  @gautam_gabbar: Just saw the new Amit Modi video about feminism and love and intersectionality and other big words.

 

  @gautam_gabbar: Quite boring.

 

  @gautam_gabbar: His stand-up set from two years ago was much better. It talked about the simplicity of the lives of Indian women—baby making and sex providing factories. Here’s a small clip.

  Video.mp4

 

  @gautam_gabbar: He also talked about how sending dick pictures to women actually benefits women. It’s true feminism. You send nudes, we send dick pics. No double standards. Here’s a small clip I recorded at the time.

  Video.mp4

  Amit Modi clicked on the video. It was at least four years old. Maybe more. He said those things. He was young and he thought them to be funny. People laughed at them too. He knew now that it wasn’t funny but he was young . . . he was starting out, he hadn’t educated himself, he didn’t know better.

  By the time it was 12 p.m. there were page-long articles on Scroll.in, Wire.in, Opindia.in painting him as all what’s wrong about the Indian comedy scene and Amit had been fired from all his writing projects, all his stand-up slots were cancelled. There were other comics who were called out of their sexist comedy routines but there was no visual proof. Amit Modi would be the sacrificial lamb. He felt the axe on the back of his neck, slowly pressing down.

  People whom he hung out with wrote threads on his problematic behaviour, about his misconduct, his casual sexism. Some girls he had dated recounted how he was always a bit iffy. They recalled him being aggressive in bed, crossing some boundaries, abusing his power as a successful comedian. Successful? Power? When did he ever have that? He was soon called a rapist, a molester, someone who should be behind bars. There were tweets in which his parents were named and asked why they didn’t use a condom or get an abortion. His sister was tagged, his sister’s employers were tagged and she was called a rapist’s sister who must have known about his predatory ways. For those few hours, Twitter forgot about dying children, crumbling infrastructure, and concentrated all their collective energies on destroying Amit Modi.