Chennai:Ramesh Srivats, one of several great masters of Twitter, has urged the students to develop a sense of humour so that they could be able to laugh at life and open their minds up.
Srivats said this during a talk at IIT-Madras on Thursday.
“Not just you guys, but as a country, we need to learn to take things a bit easy,” he told an auditorium teeming with huge crowd in his half-hour address. “Everybody seems to get offended at the drop of a hat. We just seem unable to laugh at ourselves. It is up to you young people to teach every one to take a chill pill, he further added.
Right after Jyoti Basu's demise he had sent out a tweet which he recalled immediately that ruffled a lot of people. It read: “So if I say, ‘Jyoti Basu died at 11.47 a.m., thus again almost making it to p.m.', it would be in bad taste uh?”
“There are too many taboos in India,” he told a newspaper. “I wish it were not the case though.” Mr. Srivats' speech was part of IIT-Madras' Extra Mural Lecture series and was sprinkled with his trademark self-deprecating humour and plenty of references to his days as a student at IIT-M.
When one of the students asked him how his classmates from IIT-Madras react to his fame, Srivats said: “Get this straight, none of your classmates will ever appreciate you in your life. They all know what sidey things you did in the hostel.”
The Twitter celebrity, who is always in every list of “must follow Twitter accounts from India,” urged the students to open up their minds to things happening outside their institute and not lead an insulated life.
Talking to the correspondent of a renowned newspaper, Srivats said he truly admired the brand of humour of legendary American stand-up comedian George Carlin.
“Humour works best as a garb to send out a strong message. There are three levels of humour. The lowest form is making fun of accents and the likes. The second level is observational humour which people like Jerry Seinfeld are known for. But, Carlin was something else. His humour packed a punch because the message was an entire new philosophy and a way of looking at life. When I do something like that with my tweets, I am happy.”
