Tirupati: With online protesters demanding protection for Bonigi Anandaiah, a self-proclaimed Ayurvedic practitioner from Nellore’s Krishnapatnam village – who claimed to have prepared a cure for Covid-19, memers are fuelling his ever-increasing popularity among the netizens through their well-made memes, putting images and videos from Telugu movies to evoke laughter, on the social media.
For the past few years, Telugu memers, who try to keep their followers engaged by posting content about politics, movies and trending topics in an organised manner, have been dominating the social media space, particularly Facebook and Instagram. There are hundreds of meme pages, whose primary agenda is to entertain followers.
When authorities ordered for a comprehensive study on the scientific authenticity of Anandaiah’s concoction by the ICMR and Ayush department and temporarily halted the distribution of the herbal medicine, memers got active and began poking fun at China and other corporate hospitals.
Among the top trending memes, an account on Instagram - ‘unprofessional_gang2’, which have over 66.5K followers, posted an image from Godzilla vs Kong movie, tagging the Godzilla as remdesivir and King Kong as Covaxin/Covishield. On the bottom of the image, actor-MLA Balakrishna, who was tagged as Krishnapatnam medicine, is seen chasing Godzilla and Kong with a wooden-stick.
Another account – ‘oops_memes’, which has over 8K followers, posted a meme – poking fun at private hospitals.
With an image from a Telugu movie, a reporter tagged as a private hospital is seen asking a person (tagged as people) ‘Covaxin or Covishield’, for which an answer was posted below as ‘Krishnapatnam Ayurvedic Medicine’.
Surprisingly, a page from a book - claimed to be 159 years old, in which the herbs currently used by Anandaiah and their details were mentioned, is also widely circulating on social media.
