It must've started with one curious student scanning the QR code on the CBSE Class 12 mathematics question paper, wondering what it's there for. Soon, social media was filled with videos of students landing on a YouTube video that had nothing to do with the paper or even math at all — it had someone dancing and singing, “Never gonna give you up.”
Meme culture has a name for it: “Rickroll”. We'll come to that.
The Central Board of Secondary Education has clarified the QR code is meant to be security feature “to verify the genuineness of the question paper in case of suspected security breach”.
The Class 12 mathematics exam was held on March 9 from 10:30 am to 1:30 pm.
“The matter has been viewed seriously and necessary steps are being taken by the Board to ensure that such issues are not repeated in future,” said Sanyam Bhardwaj, CBSE's controller of exams.
Now for the “Rickroll”. It's a popular online prank whereby someone is tricked into clicking a link that leads to the music video.
And that video is always this one: Rick Astley's 1987 hit song ‘Never gonna give you up’. There's no set theory to how this meme originated around 2010, when social media exploded, but it remains a common online prank, most commonly on TikTok.
The song isn't just any song anyway. It is a chart-topping dance-pop hit of its time.
Released in 1987, the single by the English singer-songwriter Astley reached top of the charts in 25 countries and won awards, before becoming timeless with the "Rickroll" meme.
Rick Astley, who is now 60, has been asked about the “Rickrolling” phenomenon, which he has termed "really weird" but embraced.
