A few years ago, a video had gone viral of an Indian man thrashing a youngster and taunting him: “May may banayega tu (Will you make memes)?”. The answer to that existential question is Yes, because everyone is making memes now, from the White House, which has been serenading us with super-edits set to the Mortal Kombat leitmotif and cuts of popular Hollywood films, to the Iranians, who have somehow upped their meme game so much so that a lot of the world is cheering on the meme game from various Iranian social media handles, showing that the Americans are wont to lose at their own game. The meme was a concept first introduced by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976), to describe a unit of cultural transmissions analogous to genes, and has since become the internet’s lingua franca.
