Twitter has been buzzing ever since news of Y S Rajasekhara Reddy’s helicopter went missing broke out around Wednesday noon. By night when Indians in the US woke up to the news, there was a spurt in the YSR tweet volume.

The realtime search showed an addition of at least 10 tweets every minute. Most tweets were either retweets of news updates or comments expressing shock and disbelief that a chopper carrying a CM could go missing the way it did.

Around Thursday afternoon when the news of YSR’s death was confirmed, `YSR’ made it to the “trending topics”, a list of 10 most-talked-about subjects on Twitter. It’s not often an India topic becomes a “trending topic”. Noting this, Tinu Cherian of Bangalore tweeted, “Wish he was (a trending topic) when he was alive.”