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regular-article-logo Wednesday, 08 January 2025

Missed out on Diljit Dosanjh concert or a date? Don't fret, just flex

For a paltry fee, you can now get live videos from concerts where you are not present and share them on social media as part of been-there-done-that bragging rights

Debabratee Dhar Published 06.01.25, 06:50 AM
The Get Your Flex Instagram page invites customers to buy live videos of Diljit Dosanjh’s Ludhiana concert last week 

The Get Your Flex Instagram page invites customers to buy live videos of Diljit Dosanjh’s Ludhiana concert last week  Sourced by the Telegraph.

To be or not to be is no longer the question

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

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The slings and arrows of outrageous FOMO,

Or to take arms against a sea of missed concerts and snubbed date proposals

And by getting live videos and social media tags end them.

Sorry Will, but Hamlet’s daddy problems are too passé in 2025. Not being at a Diljit Dosanjh concert and OMG, having to face the world after that, is the real facepalm moment.

But worry not, social media, where lives are lived, made and undone, has the perfect bailout package for every chimera. For a paltry fee, you can now get live videos from concerts where you are not present and share them on social media as part of been-there-done-that bragging rights.

The Gen Z phenomenon is called “fake flexing”, which the mental health magazine Psychologs describes as “the presentation of one’s lifestyle that does not correlate to actual monetary worth”.

“For those who do not have the means to afford such expensive flexing, unusual means and solutions have come up. If you do not have the money, you can simply buy videos and stories of the places you dream about and upload them in your story or you could simply pay to get tagged in such stories,” Psychologs says, giving an example of a vast range of services that are available to a generation that craves for validation.

Get Your Flex, an Instagram business account, is one such service available on social media that is run by two siblings who are chartered accounting students. This article is masking their names on their request as anonymity is crucial to the business and identifying them instead as Vijay, 18, and Vithika, 23.

It all started with a Diljit Dosanjh concert. About a month ago, Vijay attended the concert in Pune and posted some videos of the Punjabi pop singer on social media. Vithika said: “One of his friends could not get tickets for it. So he asked my brother to send his videos and he posted them as his own.”

The idea was to fool his social media followers into believing that he too had attended the concert. “Then a few more people did the same. And we thought, why not monetise it?” Vithika said.

The siblings then started the “Get Your Flex” business account on social media to sell concert videos and photographs that people can post as their own to portray a social life that is trendy. A bunch of four or five videos from a concert comes for 249. For customers seeking to give the impression that they had been to an event or place with friends, Get Your Flex gets them tagged to videos and photographs uploaded from fake accounts.

Be it Dua Lipa or Bryan Adams, Coldplay or Ed Sheeran, Vijay and Vithika are alert to events happening across India’s metros. Before a concert, clients can place orders and they will get you HD videos and photos of the performance, taken from the Fan Pit area or the area closest to the stage in an auditorium.

How do they do it? “It’s all about contacts,” Vithika said. “We have a network of people attending these events. They sell their photos and videos to us.” Poor-quality videos simply won’t do. And no, these are not photos and videos gypped off Pinterest or Istock.

“It has been less than a month since we started this account and we have earned about 75,000 already,” Vithika told The Telegraph over a phone call. Vijay could not join the call as he was in coaching class.

Juggling with academic pressure, the siblings can barely keep up with customers’ demands. Vithika said: “We recently put up a hiring post calling for interns, and more than 400 applications poured in.”

While the biggest demand is for concert visuals, there are other services as well. If you want to pretend you are out on a date at a five-star restaurant in Delhi while sitting in Calcutta, Get Your Flex has got you covered. A fake account — complete with pictures from the place where you want to take your date, along with photos of your “companion” taken carefully so as not to reveal his or her identity but meant only to tease viewers into a world of make-believe — will tag you in posts from the “outing”. The siblings manage six to seven fake male and female social media accounts.

Aarav, who is from Ahmedabad, placed an order three weeks ago. “I wanted my friends to think I was on a trip to Manali. I wanted some premium-looking cafe shots, scenic views of Manali and maybe snowfall,” he said.

And how was their service? “Once I made the payment, they gave me the photos and the videos within five minutes. I was very pleased.”

As businesses go, if a customer is pleased with the service, they would recommend it to their friends. But not in this case. Aarav said: “I would not even utter a word about this to my friends. It is all about flexing.”

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