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“Go back, There are people waiting for you at home”; Kerala police spread awareness through funny content

May 18, 2021, 10:11 am IST

A clear road with police officials standing every few meters with a note on a placard. The placards read, one after the other: “Where are you going? Why are you going? Think again if you have to go; there are more than 40,000 cases of COVID-19 every day, more than 5,000 deaths so far. Think again. Go back. People are waiting for you at home.”

After the last message, everything turns black and white and the vehicle seems to go in reverse back home. The State Police Media Centre of Kerala issued this short video against a soundtrack of melodious music – flute cover of ‘Poomuthupole’ from the film Joseph on the first morning of a nine-day lockdown in the state. The lockdown was declared after advice from doctors, as cases per day raised by tens of thousands during the second surge of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is, as the video says, more than 40,000 cases a day presently.

The state police, recognized for their online appearance, has been publishing videos to publish COVID-19 awareness in humorous and thoughtful actions.“The idea is that these messages should reach the maximum number of people. Sometimes we get criticized, and some people ask if the police have no other work. But these online posts and videos help take messages of safety to a large number of people,” says Arun BT, who is a member of the media cell, managing social media for the Kerala Police. He is the person after the ideas of most of the videos produced by the media cell.

There are presently seven police officers in the unit including Arun. The others are Kamalanadh KR (ASI), Bimal VS, Santhosh PS (SCPOs), Santhosh K, Akhil P, Nidheesh C (CPOs). Guiding them is social media nodal officer Manoj Abraham, IPS. The Facebook page of the Kerala Police had become so widespread that at one point it was determined as a matter of study by Microsoft when it passed the New York Police Department’s Facebook page in terms of the number of followers. However, it was only recently that the Twitter page too started gaining recognition.

“We use Twitter to reach out to people in places outside Kerala. Once we used a video by [Telugu film star] Allu Arjun for a promo of the police app Pol-App. And it had gone viral among the people of Andhra. We realized the power of star reach. Next time we used a video of Rajanikanth to spread a message on following COVID-19 protocol. That worked too,” says Arun. In another short video, they applied animation to present the coronavirus – walking like a human – during the earlier lockdown, away from the city into the darkness. But once the cases decreased and people began getting careless about the following rules, the coronavirus returned from the darkness, bigger and stronger. “I am back,” says the caption under it.

A more serious video bestows a man breathing his last as a message scrolls by: “a mask is better than a ventilator”. More such messages are in the video, “home is better than the ICU”, and of course, “prevention is better than cure”.The Pathanamthitta police went a step further and created a song to spread awareness of the pandemic.

Read more; “Mera Zila Corona Mukt” ; Tribal-dominated village thrive in suppressing the pandemic

Film clips often get applied to spreading fun-filled information messages. One of the most famous comedies in Malayalam cinema – Nadodikattu – gets drawn into such humorous videos and memes. A recent one has the film’s actors Mohanlal and Sreenivasan looking worriedly at the coronavirus originating from one end (in the film, it is a scary looking policeman), and then they see a mask and sanitizer at the other end and cheer up (in the film, it is a picture of Mahatma Gandhi).

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May 18, 2021, 10:11 am IST

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