Financial bulletins are the stuff of memes on Twitter

At first, it was about TCS (not the Tata company). Then came ‘Note Bandi 2.0.’ And just like that, a meme fest ensued on ‘Fintwit,’ or Financial Twitter, late last week.

“Typically, there is one development a week in the financial sector that is ripe for meme makers to lap up. But this time, memers have had a field day for three consecutive days,” said Azhar Jafri, a 32-year-old stock trader and popular finance meme maker.

It started with outrage against the finance ministry’s plan to charge 20% TCS (tax collected at source) on credit card spending abroad.


On the morning of May 18, a popular anonymous financial meme account, @Qid_Memez, riffed on the news for its 72,000-odd followers. It carried a picture of what looked like a truck tyre rolling over an already-flat toothpaste tube, with a hand holding a toothbrush at the opening waiting for any residual paste to be squeezed out. “Government squeezing taxes from taxpayers #tcs #creditcards,” the caption read. Hundreds of users ‘liked’ the tweet, while many replied to it with their own meme interpretations.

Securities lawyer Sandeep Parekh’s tweet, with a screengrab from Aamir Khan-starrer Lagaan (2001), featuring the character of Captain Andrew Russell asking for “dugna lagaan” (double the tax) also fetched thousands of ‘likes.’ In no time, variations of #20%TCS were trending.

However, by May 19, the finance ministry had made a shift, and announced that it will levy a 20% tax on international spending via cards only for payments above the Rs 7-lakh threshold.

Screenshots and Puns
This created an atmosphere of relief and near merriment on the often-angry platform. It didn’t last long.

Just as memeverse was about to go silent on TCS — can’t meme-fy what you can’t make fun of — RBI announced its plan to discontinue the circulation of Rs 2,000 denomination notes, while adding that it will continue to be “legal tender.” Calling the development ‘Note Bandi 2.0’ to invoke the demonetisation phase from 2016, Fintwit unleashed a fresh avalanche of memes.

Besides the regular suspects, like parody account @Cryptic_Miind, which has over 127,000 followers, even lesser-known financial memers like @MemeOverlord_kk gained traction. They posted screenshots from popular web series such as Mirzapur and Sacred Games, as well as recent ones such as Farzi and The Night Manager (the Indian version). Regular meme accounts also cracked puns on the phrase ‘Note Bandi’ when it seemed every meme template had been exhausted to death.

Unlike the news on tax collected at source that had riled up the single-percentage population of India that travels abroad, “most people were neither angry nor unhappy with the Rs 2,000 note announcement,” said Jafri, who also posted several memes on the two topics. “Here, everyone was tripping on the aspect that most people already don’t have Rs 2,000 notes for them to be affected by the news, making it easier to make memes out of it,” he added.

Financial memes became popular in the West at the end of 2021, when the US stock market boomed but many investors didn’t reap any benefits of it, recalled the stock trader. They are relatively newer in the Indian context, but at this point, almost every piece of news gets memefied, he said.

Earlier, static memes were widely popular on Fintwit. Now, Jafri noted that video memes, where you place contextual labels on top of actors in a popular scene from a movie or a series, work far better and even elicit messages from the audience about how they helped them understand a complicated issue. However, “since both TCS and Rs 2,000 note discontinuation weren’t complicated matters, they didn’t lead to many video memes,” he said.