Encountering a snake can be a terrifying experience for anyone, and the mere mention of a king cobra can make chills run down the spine. But don't we all know how much Twitter is fascinated by such reptile encounters? That's exactly why a post by business magnate Sridhar Vembu is going viral. He tweeted two pictures of — hold your breath — a 12-foot king cobra that visited him recently. In one of the photos, we can see Mr Vembu, the CEO and founder of Zoho Corporation, and a group of forest rangers holding the snake.
He captioned it, “A rare 12 feet long King Cobra paid us a visit”. He added, “Our awesome local forest rangers arrived and caught it for release in the nearby hills. Here is the brave me attempting to touch it. A very auspicious day!”
Late in 2019, before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mr Vembu had moved to Mathalamparai, a village near Tenkasi in the picturesque Western Ghats in southern Tamil Nadu.
The post received over 3.4k likes within a few hours of being posted — no surprises there!
Many users were stunned by pictures of the huge, magnificent snake. Some agreed with Mr Vembu about it being auspicious. One user wrote, “Super. Didn't know Pothigai hills also had King cobras.”
One person criticised the snake-spotting celebration in a now-deleted tweet, to which Mr Vembu responded by saying that the presence of snakes indicates a healthy ecosystem. "If we make the whole ecosystem sterile, it won't be just the snakes that we will lose," he warned.
Some users were stunned by the size of the snake. A user commented, “That looks really big and scary.”
Another user said that the snake could give anyone a “panic attack”. “If I was the one to have spotted such a large but magnificent creature, I'd have a major panic attack,” the comment read.
A user named Arun Kumar tweeted that the people weren't careful enough while handling the cobra: “Unprofessional way of handling the snake. There was no reason to hold the snake like that for photo ops. Their vertebrae are delicate and can easily get damaged.”
Then there were a series of funny comments where users took the photos in a lighter vein. One of them, Deepak Sugandhi, wrote, "This occasion should be celebrated by launching a new app/service "Zoho Cobra". Now we have to figure out what that app will be for”.
Some users were reminded of the programming language Python. A user named SMR Prasad wrote, "Maybe if Zoho designs a new programming language for ML & AI can name it King Cobra 12.0!"
Auspicious or not, the king cobra's visit has definitely got Twitter abuzz.
