A 22-year-old Indian-American student's Bernie Sits puts Senator Sanders anywhere you want on Google Street View. In Bollywood scenes, too. And we're loving it
Bernie Sanders seen in the song Yeh dosti from Sholay (1975)
His Twitter post read, "I made a website where you can put Bernie in places using Google Maps Street View. Enjoy!" The website was easy. Just type in an address, hit enter, and Sanders—sitting on a folding chair, wearing the now iconic mittens and a winter jacket —appears right there. Depending on what image is pulled for that location, you'll see the US senator sitting on a sidewalk, right in the middle of an intersection or on the street. It's the perfect meme generator that has the Internet going crazy.
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'With' Indian president Ram Nath Kovind
We are particularly in love with the Bollywood edit, especially Sanders in the sidecar of a scooter Jai and Veeru are riding on—wait for it—the Bengaluru-Mysuru road. The official account for Kerala Tourism Ministry too joined the meme-fest, placing the American politician against the Munnar Hills, campaigning for God's Own Country.
In God's Own Country
First, friends retweeted, then friends of friends, then a few verified accounts and in no time, this perfectly timed Internet creation snowballed. Around the world, 98,49,938 memes were made using the website. The 22-year-old behind the website is Nick Shawhney. "The website was meant to be a joke between us friends. I made it because I had an hour to kill, and thought it'd be fun. I was able to execute it quickly because it is a simple idea and the tools to put it online were readily available," says Sawhney, whose Indian parents moved to the US when young. The California-born student says he hasn't visited India and his parents are ecstatic about the site's success. Sawhney is a post-graduate student of Computer Science at New York University, studying artificial intelligence and machine learning. He has also written a paper titled, Fair Evasion, on policing in New York City.
Nick Sawhney
When the website, Bernie Sits, was launched last week, the Sanders memes—made using Photoshop—were already doing the rounds. What Sawhney's website (bernie-sits.herokuapp.com) did was add layers of personalisation and absurdity to it. That it was free and easy to use, made it accessible to everyone. The sheer simplicity of it proved that the most impactful ideas don't have to be loud or flashy. While Sawhney may not have heard anything personally from Bernie yet, "the coolest praise I got was a retweet by my favourite YouTuber, Casey Neistat." His semester began this week and he is trying to strike a balance while still enjoying the afterglow of fame that came from an unlikely source. He has had to work to stop the site from crashing after it went the free tier offered by Heroku, the cloud platform used to host the site. The website comes with a price. "Google charges me money to get data from maps. That's the main barrier."
Early into the traffic surge, Sawhney's friend recommended crowdfunding; in no time, more than 7,255 supporters contributed to his Buy Me a Coffee page. The host site Heroku has thrown in some complimentary monitoring services to help keep the site stable. At the time of writing this article, the site had been archived and while Sawhney does intend to keep things going, he is also assuming the interest will start to die down. "I'm excited for whatever comes next," he adds.
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