【Michael Maien】

While the rest of the world chattered about Brexit,Michael Maien the US Presidential Elections and Pokémon GO, India seemed to care largely about sports. And this is barely surprising.

Twitter’s just-released year-in-review reveals that sports dominated other conversation categories by a mile. India has always been a cricket-obsessed nation, but its people are now warming up to other sports as well.

Much in line with global trends, #Rio2016 was the most used hashtag in India too as the country’s ace badminton player #PVSindhu went on to bag an Olympic silver. Sindhu managed to bring together a nation of cricket fanatics to root for her, in turn, becoming a popular hashtag herself.

Four out of the year’s top five hashtags centered on sports events. Rio Olympics was followed by the ICC World T20 championship in terms of popularity.

As the national cricket team reached the semi-finals of the tournament riding on star player Virat Kohli’s glorious run with the bat, passionate fans ensured that Twitter kept buzzing. Every match that India played finds a place in the year’s top 10 hashtags.

Incidentally, Virat Kohli’s tweet in support of Bollywood actor Anushka Sharma, whom he’s reportedly dating, has been anointed India’s Golden Tweet of 2016. It has been retweeted close to 40,000 times. In the tweet, Kohli had slammed people for trolling Sharma in relation to his on-field performance.

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While hashtags were dominated by sports, the Indian government’s November ban on high-value currency notes – demonetization – was the most influential topic of the year. The micro-blogging platform recorded 650,000 tweets in 24 hours following the announcement and millions more tweets in the following weeks.

“The magnitude of these conversations by experts as well as common people put the global spotlight on India,” Twitter said in a blog post.

And this is likely going to dominate social conversation for some time now as inconveniences continue to mount.

Second among most influential topics were, of course, the Indian women at Rio Olympics. PV Sindhu, Sakshi Malik (wrestler who won a Bronze medal) and Dipa Karmakar (gymnast who stood 4th) became overnight heroes and fans came together like never before to publicly admire their inspiring tales.

“Twitter recorded millions of tweets for these moments of national pride as part of the global conversation for #Rio2016 from 5-21 August,” the social network stated.

Other issues that captured mass imagination ranged from Delhi pollution and International Yoga Day to the Global Citizen Festival that saw cult British rock band Coldplay perform to an 80,000-strong crowd in Mumbai, India’s entertainment hub.

The November concert was graced by a bevy of Bollywood stars, who continued to be the most followed Twitter accounts (nine out of the top ten) in India. But the top honors went to Prime Minister Narendra Modi who boasts of 25 million followers.

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