Seemingly out of nowhere, a Twitter movement to save a person named Nesamani began growing in momentum. At one point, began trending across the country, with thousands of people sharing pained messages about his fate and praying for justice. The hashtags #prayfornesamani and pray_for_neasamani were all the rage. The trend prompted many unsuspecting north Indians to worry about the health of a famous Tamil ‘celebrity.’
While some north Indians mistook Neasamani for a real celebrity in distress, Tamilians could not hold their amusement on the microblogging site. This led to a flood-gate of thousands of memes.
As the popularity of the hashtag on Neasamani gained momentum, many non-Tamilians were seen asking ‘who’s Neasamani?’ They suspected Neasamani to be a top Tamil celebrity, who had fallen ill.
How did it all start?
#Pray_for_Neasamani trended after a Pakistan-based meme page Civil Engineering Learners posed a question, “What is the name of the tool in your country?” by posting a photo of a hammer.
An overenthusiastic Vadivelu fan was quick to connect the hammer with a scene from Friends, in which Contractor Neasamani ends up with an injury because one of his inept assistants (Ramesh Kanna) drops a hammer on his head after failing to follow the simplest of instructions. The humour in the scene is accentuated by the poker-faced expressions of Vijay and Suriya, who play second fiddle to Vadivelu.
After the user connected the hammer to Neasamani, another Tamil Facebook user, mockingly wrote, “Is he ok?” Now these two decided to rib the entire Facebook culture of praying for someone with #Pray_for_Neasamani which later snowballed into a major Twitter trend with memes and funny responses.
Undoubtedly, Vadivelu is one of the most iconic Tamil comedians. Though he hasn’t been active in films of late, his old films have made such a deep impression in the minds of the Tamil audience that most of his dialogues have turned into memes. As someone on the internet said, “Vadivelu is deeply interwoven into Tamil culture and our everyday lives.”
Watch the iconic scene here:
There has never been a better time to live in. Let’s all join in and pray for Nesamani.
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