What is the most interesting thing which you did this Diwali? The festival of lights was not so ‘lit’ this year as it fell on a Sunday, unfortunately. As usual, I expected the same old forwards being passed from group to groups, one forward stood out from the tons of forwarded messages - the one about the Google Pay stamps!
Google Pay India recently introduced a Diwali stamp feature. The user has to collect five different stamps which are, Jhumka, Flower, Diya, Lantern, and Rangoli. According to Google Pay, you would get an assured Rs 251 gift from Google Pay and a Diwali bonus ticket when you collect all the five stamps. The Diwali bonus ticket is a special lucky draw ticket that could win you Rs 1 lakh. When collecting the first four stamps was a cakewalk for most users (including the writer), the struggle for getting the Rangoli stamp was real.
People took to Twitter with hashtags like #Rangoli and #Rangolistamp. Many users went to the extent of saying that they were even ready to pay for a Rangoli stamp. Some users also alleged that it was a scam while a set of users said that they would uninstall the app and give it with a single star rating! While this was the case with Twitter, something else was cooking on the other side of social media. Yes! The ‘memes’. Several movie templates were used, which made the ‘hunt for rangoli’ highly relatable. On the other end on YouTube, videos on hacks to get the Rangoli stamp popped up in many regional languages too!
Well well, when the search was about to end, Google Pay India extended the feature till midnight on November 11, 2019. On the bright side, this hunt for stamps made ‘dormant’ users active.
