Meet the Indian grumpy cat

This cat, with her grumpy, unimpressed face, became the internet sensation after her photo was posted on Reddit on September 22, 2012. Three years down the line, ‘The Grumpy Cat’ is the first ever cat to be inducted into Madame Tussauds and her Indian version Backchod Billi continues to make people laugh with her satirical humour and bad temper.

Inspired by the cat’s facial expressions, Harshit Gupta, Shivansh Sharma and Sumit Rajput started the Facebook page Backchod Billi on March 21, 2013. “We were very inspired by the Grumpy Cat and wanted to make jokes relating to the cat in Hindi. Since the owner of the cat has given the permission to make memes using the cat’s pictures and expressions online, we thought it was a great opportunity to make people laugh,” says 21-year-old Gupta who is based in Bilaspur and also handles his family business side by side.

Of the three admins of the page, Sharma is a first year BCom student studying in Jaipur’s Amity University and Rajput, based in Ghaziabad, is pursuing his MBA. So they all run their online venture from different places and have been able to carve a niche on social media portals, for making “jokes very close to reality”. 

Along with the Facebook page (with 8,51,739 likes), they also have an Instagram handle, ‘bcbilliofficial’ which has around 2.8 lakh followers. They post almost five posts daily, which are jokes on relationships, Bollywood, songs, friendships, gender-based jokes or jokes based on any current social and political issues.

“Our main motive is to make people laugh. We cannot deny the fact that no two friends in India speak to each other without abusing. And when we use the same for our memes, we expect people to react healthily,” says Gupta.

They have often been accused of using ‘pervert’ language in their trolls, because of which Facebook had blocked their page and the ID’s of the admins quite often, reports Gupta.

Nonetheless, some of their posts are known to make people feel nostalgic and laugh their hearts out because of their relatability. What makes them even better are the ‘irritable’ yet funny expressions of the grumpy cat, who makes the posts look what they are in the most apt sense.

For instance, Aaj kal 12 saal ke bache ko sacha pyar mil raha hai...mujhe subah uth ke chappal sahi jagah mil jaye to badi baat hai”; Kaash kismat bhi neend ki tarah hoti...har subah khul jati and Jale ko aag kehete hai, bujhe ko raakh kehete hai...jiska call dekh ke nasha utar jaye, usse ‘baap’ kehete hain” are some of the memes drawing as much as 11,000 likes on Facebook and Instagram.

“It is for the first time that we have used an animal for making jokes and people have appreciated it tremendously. Relating each and everything to a cat converts a normal joke into something really funny and this requires a lot of imagination,” Gupta tells Metrolife.

On being asked about the challenges faced, he says, “The cat has grown to develop a certain character and we sometimes find it very difficult to relate the joke to her. Also, not repeating any jokes, and trying to be inoffensive in the eyes of our audience is also a challenge that we face for most of our posts.”