The term meme was coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In this book Dawkins defined a meme as: “A noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission… Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain.”

As he further wrote: “If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.”

In the nearly 50 years since Dawkins defined the term, it has undergone some change in what it means, especially when it comes to memes shared over the social media, everything from Twitter and Facebook to WhatsApp and Instagram.

In a February 2022 piece, The New York Times defines a meme by quoting a popular meme creator, Saint Hoax, “as a piece of media that is repurposed to deliver a cultural, social or political expression, mainly through humour”. In that sense, it’s something visual and humorous which can be shared over social media and captures the prevailing zeitgeist (The defining spirit or mood at a given point of time among a certain set of people.)

The prevailing zeitgeist amongst the well-to-do Indians is that they are paying too much tax (both income tax and other taxes). And they think the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman is responsible for it. And to share their frustration they have been making and sharing funny memes holding her ‘solely’ responsible for this situation. In fact, the stock-market investor Vijay Kedia even made a spoof song on this issue.

This raises several interesting points.

First, the fact that the so-called taxpayers look at the finance minister as the villain of the piece, seems to hold true for people across the political spectrum, even those who vehemently support the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. These people are popularly referred to as bhakts.

Second, the inability or the reluctance of these bhakts and others to