The new paradigms of image building

I recently watched an episode of Koffee with Karan where Karan Johar was talking to Orry, a new-age influencer who has risen to dizzying heights in the last few months. For the first time I saw even a sassy and fairly eloquent Karan Johar also visibly gasp and look quite stunned several times during this interview.

Orhan Awatramani or Orry as he is popularly known has been doing the rounds the last few months. What started off as an inconsequential man taking photos with B-town celebs has now turned into this media frenzy and someone who is seen everywhere, spoken about across circles and also endorser of products. He was also recently awarded The Breakthrough Influencer of the Year Award by a magazine. Yes, he's a "liver" and as he says " I do my best"- all that is great for memes and Instagram posts, but if you really look at it there is nothing this man is built on except a solid PR and a blind following of people who are just mesmerised by his "image". Calling his team "minions" and talking about doppelg?ngers and building Relevance Rooms and planning his own demise is all good for spoof material that someone would want to build. But to build an entire personality on a foundation of needing constant self validation for his coolness and image is a bit absurd. Not so much for him but for all those people who follow him and apparently want to be like him.

Seeing his memes and hearing him speak I often feel he knows what he is doing and this "image building" is almost a way to call out the blind following that we see these days for anything that's spoken vehemently and loudly, over a period of time. It almost is a reflection of our times when it is so easy to convince people of lies and facades without any supporting evidence and a commentary of the absence of constructive and conscious thinking that you would expect people to have the basic minimum of. To have a man build an image of himself without anything to his name and to build the mass following that he has is a sad commentary of where we are today as people and I would go as far to say as a nation. It almost feels like a metaphor about what is happening in the world and a shocking realisation of how fast we are declining as a race. It would be simpler to think that Orry is just plain crazy and his plans of building an Orry Institute and a demise and comeback and related stuff is just a result of his own delusion. But what is scary is that it's perhaps not and he knows exactly what he is doing and this is really a spoof of who we are as people today.