Every second day, my Instagram DMs will have someone from TikTok asking me, in what can be described as the whiny tone of a narcissistic toddler, “I have 10,000 followers, you have 1,500 so why do you have blue theek and I don’t?”. In reply, I almost want to scream, “Because making random reels is not the same as being on TV, writing columns and having an MBA”. Mercifully, Instagram is now offering the verification tick for Rs 699 per month, though I think that may be a little beyond their personal GDP.
You all may be aware of the launch of Meta-verified (different from Bae-ta verified, so you know you’re not friendzoned by Bae anymore). Some of the benefits being touted are a verified badge that authenticates accounts with government ID, proactive account protection, and access to account support. Given the recent news of a data leak from the Cowin database, what can possibly go wrong with sharing my Insta details with the government? Perhaps someone will steal my blue tick and put it on their vaccination status right on the top of our PM’s photo. As for access to account support, many have died on the hill awaiting a response about why their account was banned as offensive for using the term ‘rizz’ in context of their college professor. (For the uninitiated, rizz is an Internet slang to mean someone you’d like to charm or flirt with.) And if I wanted proactive account protection, I would have proactively asked my friend to club me on the head before my drunken posts after my break-up.
Mercifully, they are retaining verified badges for those who already had it before the programme so I don’t get mistaken for the people who buy corporate awards and then share the ceremony photos on Linkedin with superlatives like “Proud to receive this”, “Acknowledgement is a wonderful thing” or “I’ll put this right next to my fake Hermes bag”.
According to the social network, with Meta Verified in India, you will get a verified badge, confirming you’re the real you, which sounds rather dystopian. I’m reminded of the episode from Small Wonder where the father Ted Lawson had to visit a government department to convince them he was alive while they insisted he was dead on paper. He finally had to fake his own funeral and scare literally the living daylights out of them by rising from the coffin, before the government finally gave him the blue tick of being alive.
Meta was clear that the blue tick is only to verify identity and not an indication that you are special. This led to immediate cancellation of all blue tick applications from Delhi.
On a lighter note, I received my blue tick on Twitter last year, a few months before the paid programme launched, only to have it hacked immediately by clowns who also got into my Insta and Gmail accounts. About two hours into the hack, a hacker friend of mine and I managed to recover all the passwords and I even managed to get a screenshot of the Turkish hacker’s email ID and phone number. I hope some day to call him, and like Liam Neeson in Wanted say “I have a very special set of skills…”
Circling back to the point, perhaps verification is also a curse. Seems a lot like trying to get attested copies of my marksheet from the college clerk who acts like he has the blue tick of everyone’s career with him.
All I can say is, if I need a random algorithm to verify that I’m real, then I might as well replace my DP with a captcha and my Insta photos with random photos of fire hydrants, bicycles, motorcycles, highways, and traffic signals. Because I can only say from personal experience that life will never give you a blue tick simply because you paid for it. It has to be earned. By hitting like, share, subscribe on this article.
The author, Vikram Poddar, is a Marwari investment banker turned corporate comedian. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the website.
