One summer morning, when I was in the fifth standard, a classmate came home to show me a miracle. He took me out in the open and, under the sun, held a magnifying glass against a piece of paper. Soon there was a hole in the paper and it caught fire.
These days, very often, my mind feels like that unfortunate piece of paper. Since it is not possible to travel back in time, when only Doordarshan and All India Radio gave you the news and the morning’s paper got stale by noon, I often consider the possibility of migrating to a country like North Korea, where dissemination of information is strictly controlled. Ignorance, after all, is bliss.
Each morning when I wake up and scroll through the newsfeeds on my Facebook and Twitter pages, I find myself caught between two mobs: one anti-Modi and another pro-Modi. Even in the silence of my bedroom, I can hear them scream, “Attack! Attack!” The attacks continue throughout the day and night, until I put my phone aside before hitting the sack.
It was almost a month ago when an elderly man was lynched in Dadri on the suspicion that he had eaten beef — a very shameful incident, a blot on Indian culture — but ever since then not a day has passed when I didn’t come across the words ‘lynching’ or ‘beef’ in the newsfeeds. Each day, several pieces on the lynching are published by newspapers as well as news portals, and even if one-fourth of my ‘friends’ on Facebook share the links to such pieces, it amounts to revisiting the tragedy about 500 times in a day. Now you know why I feel like that piece of paper.
But I would rather burn into ashes — or migrate to North Korea — than become a mobster. Social media is slowly turning India into a nation of mobsters: “We are right, you are wrong, listen to me or else...”
Individually, a mobster is often the most harmless person on earth: he could be the emaciated cobbler seated on the pavement down the road, but once he joins the mob, he can kill without remorse. Ditto for online mobsters: individually they may have only a dozen or two followers on Twitter, but once they join the mob, their voices — even when idiotic and irrational — begin to matter.
There is so much of negative news circulating on social media that our sense of humour has been forced down the drain. I can’t recall when I last came across a good joke or cartoon that I found worth sharing. The last time I shared a cartoon was a couple of years ago: it showed Manmohan Singh’s dentist telling him, “Open your mouth at least now, for God’s sake!”
I often wonder what people living in countries such as Denmark or Iceland must be posting on their Facebook or Twitter pages. For that matter, what kind of news do their newspapers publish? People there eat beef, follow no caste-system, don’t have to pay bribes, don’t pry into others’ lives (and kitchens), drive on good roads, and take their freedom of expression for granted — so what kind of news is considered bad there? It will be worth making a long journey to find that out: these days planes are the most peaceful places on this planet; with your phones switched off, your mind gets to think of the things it should be thinking of.
