Worth A Thousand Tweets

Started earlier this year,Tweetard has over 10,000 likes on Facebook and a substantial number of followers on his blog as well as on Twitter. Among other subjects,politics,social networking,typical Indian habits,popular culture and film-related one liners find repeated reference. Done in his signature minimalist style,the posters are quite entertaining with their intended puns and tongue-in-cheek imagery.

For Pathak too,providing conceptual images,typefaces and simple diagrams for the clever,funny and sarcastic tweets on his timeline has been fun. For example,when Twitter user @spinandswirl tweeted,“Roti,kapda,makaan,internet,” Pathak put the words on the old movie poster of the Amitabh Bachchan and Manoj Kumar-starrer Roti Kapda Makaan,and made the result even more hilarious.

So how does he choose these tweets,since the internet is full of parody accounts,jokes and social commentary? “I usually look at whatever is posted on my timeline I follow a lot of people and a lot of people follow me,so there is really no problem in choosing funny tweets,” he says. He also plays around with brand logos,altering them subtly to match the text and meaning of the tweets. For instance,a tweet by @NumbYaar says,“Maggi is a perfect Indian brand. It says 2 minutes when it means 5-10 minutes.” Pathak put the text inside a red speech bubble on a yellow background with a typeface that matches the popular instant noodles brand.

Has he got into trouble over copyright issues yet? “Not really,” says Pathak. “First of all,I don’t use my project to make money. Secondly,I don’t use it in a slanderous way,” he says. But he sheepishly admits that he hurt the sentiments of a popular author when he made a poster out of a sarcastic tweet by @KajuBadamChor “about the mistakes of his life” on the cover of the book itself.