On December 28th,2013 at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California, it was an overcast sky that greeted CEO Mark Zuckerberg as he got to work at 6am. As usual he checked user statistics and network statistics globally on the 1 Billion strong social media network that he had founded in a Harvard dorm some 10 years back. With internet usage booming, Facebook India was one of the key markets that he was interested in and he had been seeing a huge increase in usage in Quarter 4 (Q4) 2013. Facebook India is slated to become Facebook’s number 1 market at the end of 2015 with more than 150 million users at the end of 2015#.

Zuckerberg saw that activity had actually peaked on December 28th, 2013 and he looked at the report in more detail to see if there was any keyword that was responsible for this spike and he saw the keyword #AAP was responsible for this. Zuckerberg immediately called his head of operations in India and asked him “What’s AAP and why is it so popular in India?” The head of Facebook India just coming off a WhatsApp conversation with his girlfriend in Singapore said “Hi Mark, WhatsApp is the fastest growing messaging service in India and Facebook should definitely try to buy it.” Zuckerberg at this time thought that AAP was the informal name that Indians used to refer to WhatsApp.

Zuckerberg put in a call to a few Venture Capitalists(VCs) who knew the founders at WhatsApp and the rest as they say is history, culminating with Facebook’s 19 Billion dollar purchase of WhatsApp on February 19th, 2014.

So lets find out what’s AAP and what really happened in India on December 28th, 2013. Earlier in the day before Mark Zuckerberg got to work…… 10,000 miles east in New Delhi, India a young man named Arvind Kejriwal (AK) was sworn in as the Chief Minister of the province of Delhi which is the province in which the Nation’s capital is also based. Arvind Kejriwal (AK) (born 16 August 1968) is a former bureaucrat and politician who founded the Aam Aadmi Party (translation: Common Man Party; abbreviated as AAP) and led it to victory in the Delhi Assembly elections and defeated Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit in her constituency in the 2013 Delhi Legislative Assembly election. AK is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. He is well known for his efforts to enact and implement the Right to Information (RTI) Act at grassroots level and his role in drafting a proposed Jan Lokpal Bill. Kejriwal won the world renowned Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership in 2006 for his contribution to the enactment of the Right to Information Act. In 2006, after resigning from the Indian Revenue Service, he donated his Magsaysay award money as a corpus fund to found an NGO, Public Cause Research Foundation. In 2012, he launched the Aam Aadmi Party( AAP) and the rest they say is history and more history in the making.

By a strange twist of fate, the AAP, the fastest growing political party in the largest democracy in the world seems to have played catalyst to the purchase of WhatsApp the largest growing messaging service in the world by the largest social network, Facebook.*

References

# http://zeenews.india.com/exclusive/future-of-facebook-whatsapp-marriage-lies-in-hands-of-young-and-restless-in-india_6920.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/20/us-whatsapp-facebook-idUSBREA1I26B20140220

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-25534486

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/sheila-dikshit-delhi-chief-minister-delhi-polls-2013-arvind-kejriwal/1/328419.html

Keywords: WhatsApp, Arvind Kejriwal, AAP, #IsupportAAP, Facebook India

Disclaimer -*All the opinions stated in this article are the individual opinions of the author and him alone. Also in the spirit of full disclosure the author does not own any shares of Facebook nor WhatsApp but is definitely a supporter of the Aam Aadmi Party #IsupportAAP. For factual accuracy the author did ensure that it was an overcast sky in Menlo Park at 6am on December 28th, 2013 but other than that all the rest will need to be verified by the readers themselves and no factual accuracy is claimed. All logos are also owned by respective trademark owners.