Chennai floods, Cyclone Vardah, and demonetisation. In the last few years, the city has bravely overcome a series of crises, and one of the platforms that has helped people get back on their feet is a Facebook page called ‘Chennaites’. It was started by Lokesh Jey in 2012, and nowboasts over eight lakh followers. He describes the page as an exclusive platform ‘to share wonders and blunders you come across in your life in Chennai.’
City as focus
The Facebook community has been instrumental in launching several programmes and campaigns when the city faced the worst of natural calamities, by gathering volunteers from different parts of the city to join hands and help each other. Besides that, the page also has posts addressing concerns ranging from helping stray animals or the need for blood donors. This year, they celebrated five years of humanitarian effort by and for the people of Chennai.
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When Jey founded the page, he never dreamt it would grow to what it is now. “My page has received bids worth lakhs of rupees to gain ownership and access to the database,” Jey explains. Well-known Facebook pages including Sarcastic Indian, Meme Engineer and Logical Thamizhan are also part of the community. The recent celebration commemorating the page’s success had celebrities such as music director Nivas K Prasanna, stand-up comedian Praveen Kumar and the RJ Balaji making their presence. The highlight of the event was the launch of the ‘Meme Marathon,’ an upcoming challenge to create a Guinness World record for most memes created in a certain amount of time at a given place. The challenge will be open to the public and aims to garner 30,000 memes in under three hours.
“The topic for the memes would be on social awareness such as water wastage prevention and tree plantation,” says Jey. He adds that the aim of the event is to make more people use the digital medium in a constructive manner, in a way that it makes a difference to society. “If the Internet is used in the right away, it can definitely touch a lot of lives,” adds Balaji.“To do a good thing for a day or week is easy, but to continue doing it year after year is difficult. We want to do that.”