Anda the spell of an Insta egg

Which comes first — the egg or the chicken? That’s the wrong question to ask. Instead, the right question in these days of hyperbole, superlatives and ‘my daddy strongest’ is: which is the most ‘liked’ image on Instagram? The world’s most popular leader? No. Leo Messi? Nope. So, which celebrity is it? Answer: no celebrity at all, but an egg. A brown, freckled, ellipse of an uncooked chicken egg standing upright against an albumen-white background.

Is it the Om-ness of the anda that has mesmerised 55 million 35 lakh 3,550-and-counting Instagrammers to like it enough to ‘like’ it? After all, the second-most popular image, coming in way behind with 26 million 70 lakh 5,810 ‘likers’, is that of some singer-celeb’s kissing-at-the-wedding photo, and the third of a late rapper. Granted, the egg picture has been there more than two years on Insta. Probably, in real life, it’s hatched into a chicken, or, more likely, long eaten up by now. But the fact that an egg still holds our gnat’s wing-flap of an attention span more and longer than anything or anyone else must mean something. It could be that in some recess of our hive mind, we crave for simplicity. Or, it could mean that we are silly enough to go, ‘Wohhh!’ simply by seeing the image of an egg on a photo- and video-sharing social network where no one does anything. It’s probably a combo of both.