The race is on for Ansari to Chopra, Modi to Gandhi, Bhagat to Rushdie, Jindal too.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Indian Americans have been making strides in all sorts of fields – medicine, business, law, entertainment – but another sector that they are beginning to show their presence in is one that often gets overlooked: social media.
Some Indian American celebrities, socialites, and luminaries have amassed substantial fan followings on popular social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Some have a legion of Twitter followers that number well into the millions. But despite their relatively high numbers within the Indian-American community, they still have quite a ways to go in terms of competing with non-Indian celebrities in the US. In fact, even Indian celebrities back home have amassed a higher number of Twitter and Facebook fans than many Indian-Americans, even though both social networks have more users in the US.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN fame has 1,723,117 followers. This means that every time Gupta sends out a “tweet” – a 140-character message that gets posted on his Twitter account – it gets shown on over 1.7 million people’s individual “Twitter feeds,” allowing them to know exactly what Gupta is posting instantaneously.
Gupta’s CNN colleague, Fareed Zakaria, has a Twitter following of 389,533 – certainly nothing to scoff at, either. Indian American physician, author, and spiritualist Deepak Chopra has a Twitter following of 1.6 million. Dr. Phil, arguably Chopra’s closest American equivalent, has 1.19 million Twitter followers.
Comedian Aziz Ansari, the prolific stand-up comedian and star of NBC’s Parks and Recreation, leads the pack with 3,235,774 followers, almost doubling Gupta’s number. Mindy Kaling, creator and star of FOX TV’s hit sitcom The Mindy Project, has 2,544,573 Twitter followers. They each also have 410,000 and 62,457 “Likes” – user endorsements of celebrities – on their respective fan pages. Actor Kal Penn, who is also a former Director of the Office of Public Engagement under the Obama Administration, has just over 200,000 Twitter followers.
Meanwhile, non-Indian celebrities still dominate the Twitter landscape. Titanic and Inception star Leonardo DiCaprio has more than 7.7 million Twitter followers, while Ashton Kutcher – one of the first adopters of Twitter – has over 15 million followers.
In India, Twitter has caught on very quickly, with Bollywood stars and cricket players racking up huge Twitter numbers. Actor Amitabh Bachchan leads the pack with over six million followers. Shahrukh Khan has over five million followers, Salman Khan has just under five million followers, and Aamir Khan has over 4.6 million. Actress Priyanka Chopra, the leading lady from Bollywood, has the most followers too at 4.65 million, followed by Deepika Padukone with 4.22 million.
Sachin Tendulkar has 3,671,649 Twitter followers, and current Indian national team captain MS Dhoni has over 2.4 million followers. Author Chetan Bhagat, whose books have provided the inspiration for Bollywood films like 3 Idiots and Kai Po Che!, has over 1.9 million Twitter followers. Salman Rushdie, another author of Indian descent, has a Twitter following of over 635,000.
Facebook numbers tend to be lower for celebrities because of users creating fake pages and diluting the number of Likes going toward any single fan page. Twitter doesn’t have this problem because the company vets and authorizes each celebrity’s Twitter account to make sure that the account does, in fact, actually belong to that celebrity, thus allowing users to follow the correct Twitter account.
Indian American politicians have also made their mark in the “Twitterverse.” Louisiana governor – and 2016 Presidential hopeful – Bobby Jindal (R-LA) has a Twitter following of 136,592, with around 170,000 Likes on his Facebook page. Nikki Haley, the Republican governor of South Carolina, has 64,590 Twitter followers and 71,854 Facebook Likes. Rajiv Shah, the administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has over 37.5 thousand Twitter followers but less than 500 Likes on Facebook.
But what about non-Indian politicians? Former President Bill Clinton has over 1.1 million followers, Arizona Senator John McCain has over 1.8 million followers, and President Barack Obama has a staggering 36,995,864 followers on Twitter.
Indian politicians have also taken to Twitter in an effort to reach out to voters. Shashi Tharoor, the former UN official and current Indian Minister of State for Human Resource Development, as well as a Member of Parliament for the state of Kerala (in addition to being a prolific author), has a Twitter following of 1.9 million. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi has a Twitter following of nearly 2.4 million. Rahul Gandhi has a Twitter account with a much smaller number of followers – just under 32,000 – but it has not been verified by Twitter that this is the actual Rahul Gandhi’s account.
Other Indian-Americans on Twitter include Vinod Khosla, head of the venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, who has a following of 365,698. The newly crowned Miss America, Nina Davuluri, has a personal Twitter account with 8,241 followers, as well as a Miss America-sponsored Facebook account that has well over 88,000 Likes.
Although Facebook is by far the most popular online social network, with an estimated 1.15 billion users as of March 2013, Twitter has become an increasingly powerful tool in recent years for celebrities, such as movie stars and even politicians, to connect with a mass audience. Because it allows a seemingly more personal interaction – anyone can “tweet at” a celebrity and the celebrity can then tweet back at the original user – Twitter now has about half a billion users, despite being only seven years old.
Canadian-American pop star Justin Bieber has the most Twitter followers of anyone in the world, with 44.9 million.
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com