When two students of Miami Ad School came up with a Slap Aamir website, everybody thought this was the whole debate of intolerance being taken to a new extreme. The anti-Aamir brigade happily took to visiting slapaamir.com to deliver a virtual slap to him. On the face of it, this seems like a really appalling idea that made some of us sigh and think ‘what has this world come to’. What most people didn’t realise/know was that the site was really a slap in the face for the intolerants.
The website allowed you to ‘slap’ Khan virtually, i.e if you moved the cursor on to the picture of the actor’s face on the page, a hand appeared to whack the actor, accompanied with a loud slapping sound. And his face changes with every slap.
On November 28, Buzzfeed quoted the creators of the site – Himanish Ashar and Dhvani Shah, saying, “Whether he deserves it or not is debatable, but we thought of the best possible way of trolling this incident.”
Encouraging people to virtually slap a person is quite a disturbing manifestation of what we call ‘trolling’. But many Indians took to it like fish to water.
The creators of the website told HuffPost India in a mail, “The plan was to see if people actually slap him and to our surprise he got over 8 million slaps on the website in over 15 hours. Many found it hilarious and understood the sarcasm in it, but most were slapping him in anger…”
But there was more to the site than just slapping Aamir.
The website also urged users to claim a reward by sharing the link. The makers claim that the moment someone shared the link of the website via their registered Facebook or Twitter accounts, the page re-directed them to a ‘cheque’. And therein lay the catch.
The cheque looked a bit like this:
Ashar and Shah claim that the website was actually set up to show people the mirror and point out how intolerant they are that they would take to virtally slapping a person. Clever!
After a section of India ‘proved (their) point that people can be intolerant’, Ashar and Shah moved on to what they call the phase II of their plan.
“In the name of supporting Aamir and every Indian citizen’s freedom of speech, we turned SlapAamir.com into KissAamir.com. KissAamir, similar to SlapAamir, but with an all new meaning and identity. Only now, we ask people to spread love, not intolerance. This is probably the truest test of what the nation feels about Aamir Khan right now. Whether it feels like slapping or kissing him. Aamir Khan was slapped 8 million times, and the idea was to see if he could get over 8.1 million kisses,” the makers said.
According to them, they have launched the second version of the site, Aamir Khan has been kissed 3 million times in just 8 hours.
When you share the new website through the Facebook and Twitter buttons on the page, you are greeted with the following message: “Dear tolerant citizen of India, thank you for kissing Aamir Khan. We will make sure that your love reaches him.”
Sounds like a swell way to deal with intolerance, don’t you think?
