The abominable snowman was discovered by Twitter when an Indian Army handle with 5.9 million followers posted images of footprints in the snow near the Makalu base camp.After a long and distinguished career spanning the gamut of the human imagination, from mythology to comic books, the Yeti has now reached social media. The abominable snowman was discovered by Twitter when an Indian Army handle with 5.9 million followers posted images of footprints in the snow near the Makalu base camp. They are 32 inches long, look exactly like Yeti footprints in Tintin in Tibet, and have fuelled a sharing frenzy, but the army is being mercilessly ridiculed. The army, which must not be criticised in the interest of national security. Mumkin hai.
Granted, there are puzzling inconsistencies with the popular image of the Yeti, a shaggy bipedal creature. For example, the prints seen all appear to have been made by one foot, suggesting that hopping is the Yeti’s native form of locomotion. Social media is having a ball with that, but classical sources support the army. In Indika, the oldest known Greek work on India from the 5th century BC, the physician Ctesias wrote of a race of South Asian monopods who hopped, and also slept with their solitary foot held aloft, shading them from the sun.
Hopping Yetis are par for the course in Indian social media, a highly imaginative space. In recent days, it has featured Madonna singing the Hanuman Chalisa. A random guy has taken a video of buildings in Turin and passed them off as Rahul Gandhi’s property, put out on rent. One of the buildings is the royal palace, incidentally. Twitter features such incredible discoveries every day, and one would have expected the occasional Yeti to go unnoticed. As it has gone, visually unnoticed, in its furtive existence since its footprints were first discovered in 1899 by Lt Col Laurence Waddell, archaeologist, Assyriologist, chemist, archaeologist, explorer, problematic historian and the Indiana Jones of his times.
