Pokemon GO going good. Terror trending, too

Harvinder Khetal

Yaaar .. !!! ye POKEMON kya hai .. kya bimaari hai ye .. what? what is this Pokemon .. ???” tweeted Amitabh Bachchan recently. You wonder too, smilingly. Akhir, kya cheez hai ye? You make inquiries, happily. You seek Google’s help and read the latest on the meteoric rise of the popularity of this mobile game, indulgently. The going is good for Pokemon GO.

As you are surfing the net, the news of the shooting in a Munich mall pops up, pitchforking you into a pall of gloom. Like a pendulum, you find yourself reeling towards the other end of the spectrum, even as the Kabul attack story breaks soon after with graphic pictures of bodies. The carefree mood turns sombre. You wonder what’s the world coming to, sadly. Terror is trending, terribly.

These past few days have been such. The happenings in the world leave you oscillating from one extreme to the other. The extraneous factors make you swing from hope to despair, and back. 

It’s incredible the way everybody is going for Pokemon GO. Rather, everybody is going out, staring intently into their phone screens, looking to catch Pokemons. In the game, you have to collect Pokemons (pocket monsters). It’s an augmented reality game and you are expected to go out of your room in the real world, walking, looking for the right location to catch the little devils. In just about a week’s time, the smartphone game has so many players and followers that is has beaten even Tinder and Twitter in the number of users. Candy Crush, Farmville, Angry Birds take a back seat. It’s a real coup. A coup is a brilliant, sudden, and usually highly successful stroke or act. 

But you again feel a pit in your stomach as this coup takes you to that other coup that made the headlines: the failed coup d’etat in Turkey. A coup d’etat (French, pronounced koo deta) or coup is a sudden attempt by a small group of people to take over the government, usually through violence. While the fact that Pokemon GO is going great guns makes you feel that all is well, despite some safety concerns related to it, the guns you see going off in Turkey, leaving so many dead and injured makes you do a double take. All is not really well. 

You recall the blood-bathed incidents of Nice and Munich. Terror has taken root and is striking at will. It’s lurking everywhere, both as groups and lone wolves. A lone wolf is an animal or person that prefers to be and work alone rather than in a group. It comes from the behaviour of wolves that normally live in a pack. The one that is left or excluded from the pack, usually an old male, is called a lone wolf. 

The terror unleashed by the monsters with weapons is in stark contrast to the cool, cute and adorable Pokemon monsters that are named as per their ratings in the game levels, such as Mewtwo (strongest), Smogon (number two), Charmander, Zubat, Pidgey and Rattata (lowest in rank). There’s another type of extremes hidden in this analogy: while you pray for terror to end, in the mobile game, the quest for catching the Pokemon characters is endless. 

And, if you are not a gaming buff, the jokes that have created a stir in the social media following Rajinikanth’s latest movie Kabali smashing box office records should do the trick. They will wigwag like the windscreen wipers and clear your mind of the dark forces, at least for a while. 

Sample this: Hey Guys, a friend of mine bought the tickets for the show of Kabali @ PVR on 23rd July evening, just forgetting that he is to get married on the same night. He had bought them much before the engagement. So, now he wants to know if someone is interested in getting married.

— [email protected]