Pakalu Papito

About

Pakalu Papito is a novelty Twitter account for a fictional Indian convenience store clerk which is known for posting joke tweets using puns and irreverent humor.

Origin

The @pakalupapito Twitter feed was launched on July 12th, 2013, with the first tweet announcing “hello twitter I am single.”^[1] Over the next two years, the tweet gained over 17,000 retweets and 6,000 favorites, while the account gathered upwards of 739,000 followers. The character is presented as a 7-11 convenience store clerk who has an intimate relationship with his pet camel.

Spread

On September 2nd, 2013, the Pakalu Papito Facebook^[2] page was launched, which reposts tweets from the @pakalupapito feed. In two years, the page received more than 478,000 likes. On October 5th, Urban Dictionary^[6] user pakulu submitted an entry for “pakulu papito,” defining it as “the act of crashing a camel into a bridge.” On March 17th, 2014, Imgur^[4] user somedaymynudeswillcome uploaded a gallery of notable @pakalupapito tweet screenshots. On January 18th, 2015, Redditor zealousear submitted a screenshot of a @pakalupapito tweet referring to Kanye West as his brother to /r/indianpeoplefacebook^[10] (shown below).

On April 20th, the men’s interest blog MensXP^[3] published a compilation of 36 tweets from the account. On May 4th, the Pakalu-Papito Tumblr^[7] blog was launched, which highlights screenshots of tweets from the @pakalupapito feed. On May 11th, the Yahoo Singapore Tumblr^[9] blog pointed out similarities between tweets posted by Facebook user Lee Nova^[8] and the @pakalupapito feed (shown below). On June 10th, Tumblr user oiltipped published a post titled “Those ’Pakalu Papito” posts need to fucking die," which accused the account of racism.^[5]