Never underestimate the power of yellow or blue

As soon as the juicy yellow nimbu became a bit expensive, thieves turned greedy to have a few lemons in their kitty. Two police reports confirmed the theft of 100 kg lemons from rural markets in Shahjahanpur and Bareilly districts of Uttar Pradesh. On the other hand, Elon Musk, the world's richest businessman, is eyeing the blue Twitter bird to bring under his umbrella. Musk, the owner of the magical Tesla car company, first bought a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter, and now he is showing his keenness to buy the entire microblogging company. Musk has bid $43 billion to buy Twitter. He feels that Twitter has a lot of potential and the current management is not able to harness the full capabilities of this blue bird. Musk says that he has an idea as to how to harness the power of Twitter. While lemons are rich in vitamin C and taste sour, just as Twitter is a powerful microblogging tool which often creates an uproar.

Who understands the power of Twitter better than Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who hasn’t addressed a single press conference in his two terms. After all, he owns one of the most powerful Twitter accounts in the world to convey his wishes and messages. He is the first leader in the country to make it mandatory for all his ministers, MPs, government officials and departments to use Twitter actively. Due to this change, all the states also started using Twitter and made it mandatory for everyone in office. Now newspapers and TV news channels also get breaking news from Twitter only. As soon as a prominent personality comes into limelight, journalists start checking his or her Twitter handle. When former US President Donald Trump tried to create unrest in his own country after losing power, the Twitter management banned Trump's account permanently. Poor Trump is now very upset and keeps threatening to launch his own social media platform, which is not that easy.

Last year, under the guise of agricultural laws, some elements created a ruckus in and around the Capital city of Delhi and their notorious well wishers sitting in Canada managed to flash a few anti-India tweets by paying millions of rupees to some famous foreign personalities. Obviously this mischief made the Indian government angry. The government even threatened to boycott Twitter at large scale and turned to the yellow birdie of a desi microblogging platform named Koo. It is another matter that the yellow bird has not yet learned to fly properly till date. Taking down a well established social media platform is not a joke. After all, millions of important people in the world are on Twitter. Most of the Twitter users are educated, rich and influential in every sphere. On the other hand, the Koo is having common people on its list, most of whom are supporters of a certain ideology or a political party. You get a little buzz only when you write Har-Har Mahadev or Jai Shri Ram on Koo, otherwise nobody cares what you are saying. Koo has no global connect, which shows that Koo will take many years to even make a mark as a social media tool.

(Writer is a senior journalist & columnist)