A game got all the kids in the city in a frenzy, and all of them had one aim-- to get the most number of Pokémons
If you don’t know what Pokémon Go is by now, you’re probably living under a rock (wait... are you even on the interwebz?). The location-based augmented reality mobile game, developed by Nintendo and published by Pokémon, lets you chase Pokémon in real-time places and actually create a squad. Create your character, find Pokémon, and throw them a Pokeball to add them to your list. Of course, this might mean looking like a lunatic while running across the street. Completely normal.
"I once ended up in a dark alley I’d never known about before, in Girgaum at 11pm... There was not a single streetlight. My dad was so furious because one minute I was with him and in the next, I disappeared...
While you may have never visited an actual gym in your life, you know you’ve definitely visited a Pokémon Gym if you’re onto the game already. Dinner table discussions now involve how you haven’t found a Mew or an Arceus (we know of a colleague who has serious discussions with her mother about it). Or, it could involve you turning into a bully in the neighbourhood. “I actually meet up with the kids in my area and keep a check on them to make sure I’m leading,” says Gaurav Dharmani, a freelance photographer. He discovered that a road next to his house, which he’d thought was a dead end, actually connected to another one. Naynika Bagrecha, a marketing executive, would rather pick locating a Pikachu over food during her lunch break. “I once ended up in a dark alley I’d never known about before, in Girgaum at 11pm. I had read that you get rare Pokémon there. There was not a single streetlight. My dad was so furious because one minute I was with him and in the next, I disappeared looking around for rare Pokémon and Pokestops,” she says.
Natasha Pereira, a recent graduate, says she would've never imagined going for long walks by herself. “I’ve gotten so involved in the game that one day, I walked from Lokhandwala to Juhu without realising! Because of the game, I land up walking for a minimum of four hours a day and it is pretty much the best thing to have happened to me in terms of fitness,” she says, laughing. “I've been walking around Lokhandwala since two days and almost landed in a scuffle as people thought I was taking their picture. I got drenched in the rain and landed up with a viral fever." Clearly, people are hooked. And as copywriter Shiv Parashar puts it when we ask him if it's worth the hours, the exercise and the sacrifice of a social life – “Pikachuyes!”
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