It was 7th May, 2025. I remember we were glued to the television, trying to understand why India had attacked us across the international borders for the first time after 1971. This reckless action, especially between two nuclear-armed countries, without the luxury of a time lapse, felt like an extreme miscalculation.

And then a meme popped up on my phone.

Fierce, unapologetic and resolute, it kindled nationalism and passion deep inside my soul, capturing the conflict in a way that was immediate and visceral. It sharpened resolve, reinforced the belief in our armed forces and propelled a divisive society into a surge of collective identity of “Pakistaniat.”

In those few moments, I understood the power of a meme—its ability not only to reflect sentiment but to manufacture it.

The story of memes did not begin on the internet. It began in 1976, when the world-famous biologist Richard Dawkins introduced the term “meme” (as a shortening of the word mimeme from Ancient Greek mīmēma, meaning “imitated thing”) in his seminal book, The Selfish Gene. His genius was that he presented the meme for the first time as a unit of cultural transformation, which spreads through imitation and replication, similar to genes in the biological world.

The Oxford Dictionary defines a meme as “an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations.”

It is important to note that long before........

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