Pray for Nesamani

Submission 5,895

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About

Pray for Nesamani is a hashtag inspired by a comedic scene in the 2001 Tamil movie Friends which features a contractor named Nesamani who gets hit in the head with a hammer and falls in a dramatic way.

Origin

In January 2001, the Tamil romantic comedy drama film Friends^[7] was released starring the Indian film actor and comedian Vadivelu playing the contractor, Nesamani (shown below).

On May 27th, 2019, The Pakistani Facebook group Civil Engineering Learners^[1] posted a photo of a hammer and asked the group, “What is the name of the tool in your country?” (shown below). The post gained over 14,000 comments and 3,200 shares in three days. Many recognized the hammer as the tool that knocked out Nesamani and being repeating the phrase "Pray for Nasamani" in the comments.

Spread

On May 29th, the hashtag #pray_for_nesamani reached the number one trending spot on Twitter. Many people familiar with the movie Friends posted memes surrounding the hammer scene as if it was a recent tragedy. @VijayIsMyLife^[2] tweeted screenshots of the film saying, "There were three guys always plotting against Nesamani. First, they carried him on the bed while he's sleeping and beat him. Second, one of them deliberately dropped a hammer on his head. Third, they tied his legs with rope and slid him along the ground. #Pray_for_Neasamani" (shown below, left). The tweet gained over 2,000 likes and 400 retweets in a day. @arun1208kumar^[3] posted a picture of the pope praying with the caption, "#Pray_for_Neasamani #Nesamani the whole world is with you nesamani.. Prayers conducted across the globe for his recovery.." which accumulated over 800 likes and 300 retweets in a day (shown below, right).

In a BBC^[4] article on the subject of #pray_for_nesamani, Sowmya Rajendran, the film and features editor for the south Indian website The News Minute was quoted saying,"Vadivelu is very popular here and Tamil Nadu has a very vibrant meme culture. So his films from the 90s and early 2000s are used a lot in memes – particularly in political commentary" She goes on to say that they contacted Vadivelu for a statement "but he isn't on social media and he said he had no idea what was going on." Twitter user's memes and comments using the hashtag on Twitter continued gained likes and retweets that, like @navmikrishna^[5](shown below, left) and @Syed_Jigathi^[6] (shown below, right) whose tweets gained over 2,000 and 3,800 likes respectively in a day.