Since then, the sentence has trended like a monster. Everyone is on the bandwagon, from A-list Bollywood actresses like Deepika Padukone to the ministry of railways, which used the phrase to describe Vande Bharat Express trains. ABCD Dance Factory’s music video based on it collected millions of views. It’s like the lyrics in the Soul Asylum song ‘Black Gold’: ‘See the crowd gather ’round/ Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.’
Kaur, who reminds me a little of Sima Aunty from Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking, is using her instant fame to endorse a well-known brand of instant noodles: ‘Just tasting like a wow!’ It’s a versatile phrase, as malleable and mouldable as putty.
A doctor doing his rounds asks her patient, ‘So, how are you feeling this morning?’ The patient replies, ‘Just like a wow, doc!’ A chef comes to a restaurant table, ‘How is the food, sir.’ ‘Well, thank you, it’s just like a wow!’ A neighbour asks a neighbour how her vacation went, ‘It went just like a wow!’ A father meets his son outside the exam hall, ‘Beta, how did the paper go?’ The son responds, ‘Just like a wow, Dad!’ A stargazer might say, looking up at the twinkling stars, ‘Tonight, the night sky is looking just like a wow!’
Catchphrases have a life of their own. No one quite knows why one takes off, and another doesn’t. After SRK’s Chak De India came out, ‘Chak De’ became the nation’s slogan. Just about everything was prefixed with a ‘Chak de’. But the phrase has been around in Punjabi forever. The ragamuffin artist, Apache Indian, had a single by the same name. But the phrase never reached a pan-Indian tipping point – until SRK’s film came along.
Zoya Akhtar’s rap saga, Gully Boy, spawned ‘Apna time ayega’. I remember in Class 6, some kid started saying ‘billiant’ instead of ‘brilliant’. That became our catchphrase for the term. A couple of years ago, there was a trend of pronouncing ‘okay’ as ‘okk-kay’, with a break in the middle. My grandmother would pick up phrases from her kitty party or satsang groups: ‘No sweat’, ‘How are we?’ and, when she was in her 80s, ‘I don’t care’. She would use them for a season, then move on to the next one. Since virality is monetised by social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, staged videos are more common than spontaneous ones. Virality is not just bubblegum, even though the bubble often bursts. It can be a matter of life and death. The quest for a viral video can end in tragedy.
What makes Kaur’s video different is its sheer unintentionality. This was not a video that was setting out to be viral. It’s not preconceived. There was no plan for it. Unlike Urfi Javed, she didn’t have a marketing team or a manager plotting virality. Kaur was not an influencer. She became one unwittingly. There’s a rare purity to this, which everyone has loved. It’s the sort of thing that confounds MBAs who think they’ve got it all figured out.
There’s irony at play here. As the world, propelled by social media, gets more and more artificial, social media provides a corrective by bringing back and making big the natural as opposed to the artificial, the authentic as opposed to the inauthentic, the unfiltered as opposed to the filtered, the unscripted as opposed to the scripted, and the un-choreographed as opposed to the choreographed.
Well done, Jasmeen. You are a genius. So effortless, so genuine, just like a wow!
The writer is author of The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into the Passions and Follies of India’s Technicolor Youth
