Bernie's India connect

His Twitter post read I made a website where you can put Bernie in places using Google Maps Street View Enjoy The website was easy Just type in an address hit enter and Sandersmdashsitting on a folding chair wearing the now iconic mittens and a winter jacket mdashappears right there Depending on what image is pulled for that location youll see the US senator sitting on a sidewalk right in the middle of an intersection or on the street Its the perfectmeme generator that has the Internet going crazyWith Indian president Ram Nath KovindWe are particularly in love with the Bollywood edit especially Sanders in the sidecar of a scooter Jai and Veeru are riding onmdashwait for itmdashthe BengaluruMysuru road The official account for Kerala Tourism Ministry too joined the memefest placing the American politician against the Munnar Hills campaigning for Gods Own CountryIn Gods Own CountryFirst friends retweeted then friends of friends then a few verified accounts and in no time this perfectly timed Internet creation snowballed Around the world 9849938 memes were made using the website The 22yearold behind the website is Nick Shawhney The website was meant to be a joke between us friends I made it because I had an hour to kill and thought itd be fun I was able to execute it quickly because it is a simple idea and the tools to put it online were readily available says Sawhney whose Indian parents moved to the US when young The Californiaborn student says he hasnt visited India and his parents are ecstatic about the sites success Sawhney is a postgraduate student of Computer Science at New York University studying artificial intelligence and machine learning He has also written a paper titled Fair Evasion on policing in New York CityNick SawhneyWhen the website Bernie Sits was launched last week the Sanders memesmdashmade using Photoshopmdashwere already doing the rounds What Sawhneys website berniesitsherokuappcom did was add layers of personalisation and absurdity to it That it was free and easy to use made it accessible to everyone The sheer simplicity of it proved that the most impactful ideas dont have to be loud or flashy While Sawhney may not have heard anything personally from Bernie yet the coolest praise I got was a retweet by my favourite YouTuber Casey Neistat His semester began this week and he is trying to strike a balance while still enjoying the afterglow of fame that came from an unlikely source He has had to work to stop the site from crashing after it went the free tier offered by Heroku the cloud platform used to host the site The website comes with a price Google charges me money to get data from maps Thats themain barrierEarly into the traffic surge Sawhneys friend recommended crowdfunding in no time more than 7255 supporters contributed to his Buy Me a Coffee page The host site Heroku has thrown in some complimentary monitoring services to help keep the site stable At the time of writing this article the site had been archived and while Sawhney does intend to keep things going he is also assuming the interest will start to die down Im excited for whatever comes next he adds