India, for anybody who is looking from outside right now, is a place which is equal parts inspiring and bad shit craycray. There are a bunch of things that the country is doing great right now. And there are also a bunch of others where we seem to be getting terrible-er at each passing moment.
I am very active in social media (who isn't) from way back when we were all chilling it up in Myspace. I'd carried over a lot of those friends to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. Many of them I have known only within the confines of some sorta screen. I have seen their graduation speeches, liked their wedding pictures, and congratulated them on their first-borns. I have people in there from countries that I didn't even realize had working internet, one of my first friends was a Kyrgyz grad student who used to say her town did not have working electricity half the day.
But now, as much as I like social media. The world being in the state that it is. The internet is the most scary place you can be in right now. Twitter and Facebook bring the news to you at such a pace that half the time you do not have time enough to think over what any of it means. And the ones supplying you with the headlines have even less time to make any sense of it. They have to publish the flashiest news the fastest to keep the clicks coming. In their haste, missing out on the basic filter of weeding out the bullshit. The actual job they were being paid to do.
When I was a kid, my father used to badger on about how we should read the newspaper daily. Be informed of what is going in the world around you. He put that sort of knowledge in high regards. If you were well read, you probably have already made a good impression with him without even having to say a single word. I barely read anything related to current affairs back then. But now there is no escaping them. Every other post on your newsfeed is related to some random guy's rant over some random politicians' some random policy or comments on something. All of a sudden everyone is a Poli-Sci genius and knows everything about everything.
I am in a bunch of fandom groups and read-a-thon online and off late there are rarely any posts in any of them that has anything related to the themes they are supposed to be about. Almost all of them are against/pro some sort of political agenda. Especially the ones that have even a handful of Americans in them. God, seriously. What the hell is really happening over there. How are they even considering a guy like that to lead their country. Wait a min. We have a PM who was allegedly involved in a communal riot. And another group of politicians who have ruled and looted the country for ages. Then we have this other politician from a divisive party who demands his followers intentionally insult the deities of the other religion to incite violence. Just as an excuse to kill people. Umm. Well atleast it is sure now that this sort of absurdity is not limited to any specific country. Stupidity is spread around quite evenly.
When I look at my real world people. The ones that I know and actually speak with on a daily basis. I don't see this sort of anger or frustration or fear or hatred. We are all just a bunch of normal people with normal people problems. We all realize that we do not really have any control over who becomes the president or prime minister. We all realize that we do not really control who gets to eat what kind of meat, or follow which kind of religion, or fall in love with which gender of people. We realize that all those things are something that is to be considered at an individual level. At a family & friends level.
People have to figure out things on their own. And if you are not directly effected by the outcome of something. You shouldn't give a hoot what happens.
You see, there is a news going around in social media of people being assaulted because they were caught consuming cow meat. Now, before you go on a rant about how it is against religion. Let me point out that, people have been eating cows and pigs and rabbits and frogs and even animal poop, for quite some time. And I don't care one bit about any of them. I love chicken, I love lamb, I love fish. I have never eaten beef just because I am pretty sure if I ever did my Ma wouldn't allow me inside our home. Now why she wouldn't want us to eat cow meat, might be a religious thing. But the reason I do not have it is because I care about things that my family cares about. As simple as that. Your most opinions do not really get shaped from that one post in social media. Eventhough those are the ones that make the most noise and with the most shock factor.
If you suddenly seem to feel frustrated, angry or scared to live in your own country. Just try getting off the internet for a bit. Just get a sense of the people around you and in your community. There is a good chance that you wouldn't find just as many intolerant rants and abhorrent incidents of people randomly assaulting each other. Sure there are bad eggs in the lot. But they are too few of them when compare them with the actual normal people who really are just like you.
They might go with a different sounding name than yours, or pray to the invisible man in the sky in a different way, or even eat or love differently than you do. But you wouldn't see a lot many people being openly disgusted by them or even spewing hate at those different than you. Most often you wouldn't see any of them recognized being any different than you unless they themselves say they are. People are just people. Lame, stupid, naive chunks of meat who by some freak of nature can form intelligible words. Which they somehow ended up using to put each other down by a few tweets.
Is there any actual need to be this hateful. Is there any goal that anyone hopes to achieve by sharing a one hate speech by any politician for all your followers and friends to see. By doing that you are only really adding to the noise. There is already enough of that going around. I am not saying you are not entitled to have an opinion. But if you happen to have any opinion which are the kind that you wouldn't want to discuss among the real world people and have them run away scared from you. You probably should not post them all over the internet either. Just add this one rule into your social media consumption. Maybe that would reduce the frequency of vileness in your posts. The world be thankful to you for that.
The world is not really a scary place. It is us who end up painting it that way. Your world doesn't really revolve around who sits in the high chair in a fancy conference room somewhere. Your world is really built of the people in them. So I guess what I am asking of you here is, don't scare them crapless by your angry rants in social media. Instead try talking to them maybe. Real talk, not sarcastic social-media-comment-speak. Maybe you will find that you don't really have to murder them after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment