A recent excellent essay in this paper’s Literary Review (yes, that’s a shameless plug for a section you really must read, if you like reading at all) speaks of how the digital network, tailored as it is to the intellect of a 15-year-old, is guilty of pushing humanity into cretinism.
I think this is unfair criticism. Facebook, WhatsApp and listicles are our new encyclopaedias, compendiums of every bit of knowledge ever known to mankind and doing stellar service in working towards making geniass... oops, sorry, geniuses of each one of us.
I love how people who have never read anything longer than the advertisement for a high-definition TV are now suddenly discovering that there are subjects like physics, history and geography, and these are not mere rumours circulated by evil, possibly liberal, schoolteachers. So now we have excited 40-year-olds breathlessly informing each other about a mountain called Fujiyama in Japan that is an active volcano. This piece of mint-fresh information is usefully accompanied by pictures and videos of the snow-clad peak.
One forward demanded aggressively: ‘Do you know that our Constitution (thankfully, it explained what that was) has a most progressive section called the Directive Principles?’ I find this positively exciting — imagine the opportunity! We are learning on WhatsApp everything we somehow managed to evade in school! This same group has also variously educated me about evaporation, Mona Lisa and the cultivating soil for cotton.
Last week alone, I have been kept on my toes with important information about the height and flow rate of the Niagara Falls and the election process to city councils in Finland. One important aspect is that these factoids are compared, mostly unfavourably, to (a) similar waterfalls that used to flow from greater heights in undivided Vedic India and (b) the village election process in the kingdom of Kosala. This gives thousands of people in India the proper metrics against which to measure their self-worth and is vital to the furthering of our country’s glorious future. (You can, at this point in the column, stand up but it’s not mandatory.)
During the jallikattu controversy, for instance, thousands of city-dwellers who had fondly imagined that the milk for their morning coffee came from plastic packets in the fridge woke up to startling information about native cow breeds and their milking potential. Suddenly, we were bombarding each other with detailed break-ups of exactly how many litres of milk an Ongole produces versus a Holstein, and we threw words like casein and proline into conversations that, until then, had been peppered exclusively with tussar silk and 24 carat. I had so much information from social media alone that I almost went into the dairy (native breeds) business, but, thankfully, I waited, because I now know that the potential for success is fantastically higher in bottled peacock tears.
There are many such desi ventures that, like Patanjali, can make multi-crore profits. You need to wait and watch patiently because business ideas come at you constantly from social media. I am quite annoyed because one company has already beaten me to at least one product that I had my eyes on. Someone called Cowpathy is already selling Cow Dung Bath Soap in two varieties — Himalayan Flowers and Orange Peel. If I had acted faster on my WhatsApp B-School lessons, I could have been quite prosperous by now (and this column happily discontinued).
A former classmate tells me that her family is much quicker on the draw. Apparently, they discovered the Ajanta Caves only last month through a timely forward. And already this summer, they have visited the place and scratched their names on the historical rocks. Between discovering there’s something called Ashoka’s Edicts and strictly not following them is only a matter of days these days.
From Shakespearean quotes to Faiz couplets to pithy advice on how to be a better boss/ dancer/ lover/ idiot, there is a plethora of education being shared out there, each with a diagram complete with animated arrows and flashing bullet points. If you are still an average human being who is getting nowhere on the popularity or career charts, trust us, it’s no fault of social media. You are probably just in all the wrong groups.
Where the writer tries to make sense of society with seven hundred words and a bit of snark.
