THE FIRST TIME that Sattvik Mishra, Sriparna Tikekar and Rishi Pratim Mukherjee discussed “listicles,” they were getting drunk in Mukherjee’s small apartment in Delhi’s Mayur Vihar area. At the turn of the last decade, the US-based website Buzzfeed had popularised the term for articles in the form of multimedia lists that could be effortlessly read and shared online. The company, which targeted what it called the “Bored at Work” audience, had been valued at $1.7 billion, and now wanted to expand into several other countries, including India.
At some point during the drunk evening, Mishra, Tikekar and Mukherjee began discussing how hard it could be to write a listicle. The banter culminated in them creating a blog and writing a listicle for it. The headline read: “These pictures from a Hindu lesbian wedding would make you go all aww.”
The next morning, they woke up to find that the post had over half a million views and that many of their other friends had shared it. Thrilled, they decided to create and post more articles on the blog. For the next three months, by day they worked in their offices, and by night they wrote listicles for “ScoopWhoop,” the name they had chosen for their blog.
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Arnav Das Sharma is an independent writer based in Delhi. He is currently a doctoral fellow in the department of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics. His debut novel, Darklands, will be published by Penguin Random House during the fall of 2017.
