Manjulatha Kalanidhi, a senior editor at Oryza.com, a rice news, research and analysis website, says she is wary of marketing, but ask her to explain why she thinks her Rice Bucket Challenge (RBC) took off as it did, and her answers include words like ‘customisable’ and ‘crowdsourcing’.

Probably the most viral of the IBC’s many spin-offs, its success is probably due to the fact that “it is very flexible, very easy, very local and has a desi angle to it,” says Kalanidhi.

The RBC involves cooking or buying a bucket of rice and biriyani and feeding a needy person, posting about it on Facebook and challenging friends to do the same thing. All it needs is “smart folks with smartphones”, and not much other effort, she quips.

Kalanidhi drew inspiration from the IBC but her initiative drew the aam aadmi into its fold, unlike the IBC where it was celebrities who gained prominence. She thought she would make an effort at something that was more relevant to India, and came up with the RBC.

The first beneficiary was Sattibabu, an idli-dosa vendor who does business around her neighbourhood on his bicycle. Some of her FB friends took this up, but only for fun.

The aggregation of likes and shares happened only a few days later. All on its own, without using FB’s commercial services. It has gone across the world to countries as far apart as the Philippines, Bangladesh, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Indonesia, and apart from individuals a host of institutions ranging from corporates and clubs to charitable institutions and schools and colleges have taken it up. Kalanidhi says that so far 35,000 kg of rice has been donated, and adds that this number is a “very conservative estimate”.

Read also: >How yours can be the next Ice Bucket Challenge

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