SRK Effect
On Sunday night, after early dinner, i was telling Palla about my journalism days. Some of the interesting exploits, which involved chasing popular personalities on phone and foot, and we ended up talking about Shah Rukh Khan. I told her about my visit to his home and the subsequent interview. Although she’s not a diehard fan, she seemed to be in awe of my episode with King Khan himself. So, she suggested i write a blog post on what i just told her instead of letting the story go. A bit hesitant at first, i got down to typing past 10. I usually write in the morning so the timing was odd. Regardless, i was done by 11.15 and after minor edits, i made the post live at 11.25. I was thinking of sharing it on Twitter the following morning but then, i shared it at 11.36. I usually log off between 10 and 10.30. Assuming that hardly anybody would notice it, let alone read, i went to sleep.
On Monday morning, i woke up to find that the tweet has literally worked through the night, with upwards of hundred in RTs and Favorites. My tweets, thanks to their random nature, seldom gain traction. Moreover, the blog post itself had impressions north of 500. Which might be a small number if you compare it to the number of mammals on this planet with access to Internet. But to my humble track record, that seemed HUGE. And as the day passed by, the blog post seemed to outrun the tweet. It ended up becoming my most viewed, read, commented and recommended blog post of all time. And i’ve been blogging for close to a decade now!
This peculiar progress was simply incredible and to be frank, it was obvious that people were reading it not because i wrote something epic but because i wrote about a superstar everybody admires. No wonder even Tuesday continued to show surge in the resulting stats.
Turns out that wasn’t enough because SRK went ahead and decided to retweet my blog post on Tuesday night.
Boom.
I woke up with a neck sprain on Wednesday morning only to find my notifications flooding on Hootsuite (I haven’t checked my notifications on Twitter since 2012) and then there were messages on WhatsApp from friends who couldn’t believe what happened. As if i did. It was overwhelming and the pain in my neck didn’t help my case. The brighter side: the blog post kept marching on, and still continues to, like Lance Armstrong on steroids.
When i moved to Medium from Blogger last month, i cracked a silly joke predicting i’d be earning loads of followers here and eventually multi-million dollar book deals. As far as i can, both of these events aren’t happening anytime soon. If ever, that is. However, i wasn’t expecting someone as accomplished as Shah Rukh Khan to take notice of my writing either. His RT basically validated my piece beyond expectations. So i guess, it’s alright if that joke remains a joke.
Lastly, my 4 essential learnings from this once-in-a-blue-moon saga has been: a) continue to write honestly; b) share stuff people might connect with; c) it’s OK to revisit journalistic interactions; d) people are scared of philosophy and poetry in general; e) improve math asap.
