Time magazine yesterday brought out an interactive map, using data they got from Google, on the most-searched person by country in each country, and globally. The most-Googled person on the planet, as anyone who remembers how and why the Internet broke one fine day would expect, is Kim Kardashian. The result for India, though, is a tad surprising: the most-searched person is apparently Salman Khan, who has never taken off as many clothes as Kim K. How Mr Khan has left Sunny Leone (who did take off as many clothes as Kim K, and more often) behind is a mystery. Perhaps we should demand a CBI investigation. If my name was Kejriwal, I’d be calling a press conference right now to press this demand.
The curiosity about Mr Khan in India is matched by the curiosity about one of his former lady loves in the rest of the sub-continent. Katrina Kaif is the most-searched-for person in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. Basically, if the two of them were to become “good friends” again, form a band, and tour South Asia singing “Selfie le le re” and “Afghan jalebi”, we might soon see a tearful Hafiz Saeed warmly embracing an equally tearful Yogi Adityanath. They’d be weeping because their followers would be doing the bhangra together.
Apart from film stars and reality stars, the only other people who seem to matter to pretty much the whole world are football stars and singers with what the Income Tax people call “disproportionate assets”. Time has colour-coded the world map into countries where the most-searched people were Kim Kardashian, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Nicki Minaj, and Rihanna. After that, everyone else is in the category called “Other”. This is very apt. It helps us to see that the world according to Time magazine can be divided into three groups. The first lot are the countries that want to know, more than anything else, about women in USA who have or might balance champagne glasses on their behinds, which are as spacious as the boot of an Ambassador car. This lot is followed by countries that really want to know about these two chaps, Messi and Ronaldo, who can sometimes kick a ball into a net when there are a few people trying to stop them.
And finally, we have the “Others”, which includes only a few insignificant countries such as India, China, Russia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Indonesia, Japan, and some other countries that together account for more than half the world’s population. They are in the “Other” category because they happen to have other icons than the West.
I’ve already mentioned that the Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Nepalis are apparently most interested in Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif. The Syrians, when they are not getting killed or running for their lives, are looking for — you guessed right — a woman with big tits who sings. Her name is Haifa Wehbe. Please try to finish reading the column before you Google her.
Russians, true to their dark, Slavic types, want to know about Lyudmila Putina, their boss-man Vladimir Putin’s ex-wife. The Chinese, true to their dark, Sinic, filtered-Internet type, want to know about Jiang Zemin, the 89-year-old former chief of the Chinese Communist Party. Those guys need to lighten up, for which I would recommend watching some Salman and Kat videos, followed by some Kim Kardashian photos. If that still doesn’t do it, they should get a dose of translations of the best of next US president Donald Trump’s tweets.
It is abundantly clear that Kenya is the only country on the planet that cares, of its own accord, about politicians with less than one foot in the grave. The most-searched person there is Barack Obama. The Saudis are apparently searching for King Abdullah, who has both his feet in his grave and must right now be enjoying his 72 dates and walnuts, and the Zimbabweans are searching for Robert Mugabe, who at 91 is still president of that country though he probably can’t tell his dates from his walnuts or any other kind of nuts any more.
Actually, nor can I. The whole world is starting to look rather nutty to me.
Disclaimer: This column is meant to be satirical. Yes, it needed to be said, because as Justice Katju had said, the country is full of idiots. Ditto rest of world.
