Social Media

Post Number 40 : The Dying Art of Being Present

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I recently attended a show which was 20 minutes of non-stop death-defying stunts. Instead of your usual jumps and tricks on bikes and cars, the artists created an interesting storyline and built the stunts around it. There were wheelies done through cars, a ‘Hot-Wheels’ track in real life, bikes rotating in mid-air and a Mortal Kombat styled fight sequence. It was so engrossing! Yet I was so amused at seeing how so many people were more interested in filming it than actually watching it. Was documenting that moment really more important than living it?

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Post Number 32: Holi – in the days of Social Media

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There used to be a time when Holi meant you wore your rattiest clothes because who’s even going to care what colour and print your clothes are? Nothing survives the onslaught of permanent colours and water. Is it supposed to be a Chikankari kurta? More like a kurta with chicken curry splashed on it. And who even cares if there’s that extra stitch around the waist or near the shoulder to give your clothes the perfect shape? They’re going to stick to your body like a second skin anyway. You might as well wear that old night suit that you’re planning to convert into a pochha (aka desi name for a house cleaning rag).

But lately, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp statuses have ruined that for me too. Now as soon as I go on WhatsApp, I am flooded with pictures of my friends wearing the classiest clothes. It’s like they’re straight out of the video of “Do me a favour, let’s play Holi!” where they are the impeccably dressed backup dancers for Priyanka Chopra. Their clothes look as if they were gently caressed by a naughty breeze with a little splash of colour.

courtesy – IBTimes India

In between their fabulous Holi celebrations, people make sure to take pictures of these said fabulous Holi celebrations. After all, your Holi isn’t fabulous enough if you don’t have a hundred pictures to prove its fabulousness. Add a dose of carefully choreographed pictures and videos where they are just randomly throwing gulaal into the air and bathing in its disintegrated form. Why couldn’t they just ask someone to smash some colour onto their faces is beyond me. Who even plays Holi like that? Can you imagine me alone on the street and blowing gulaal into the air and dancing around in it? Let’s just agree that my neighbours would preferably stay away from me in the future.

And what is it with people going out to play with seemingly perfectly blow-dried hair? Aren’t we supposed to drown our hair in oil before Holi? You know, so our hair can look perfect once again the next day, saved from the devastating effects of irresponsibly sourced gulaal? Looking at Instagram it’s clear that I am the only champu in Delhi (a goofball), who is glazed with oil all over her body just so it’s easier to get rid of all that colour later. Forgive me if I don’t want to look like “Jaadu” the day after Holi.

Related image

courtesy – memecrunch.com

What I feel the most sympathy for, is my 500 rupee, extra-power, extra volume pichkari or water gun that I bought a few years earlier and still worth its weight. Now, that’s something that deserves to be clicked from every angle. I can just imagine the caption that would go with those pictures, “A nozzle to bamboozle the crap out of anybody in a 50 m radius!” or “Is that sweat I see on your face? ‘Cuz there’s fear written All.Over.It!” But in a neighbourhood full of Instagram models, my dorky water gun is no longer a participant.

 

Post Number 28 : The Eternal Exhaustion of the Overstimulated Mind

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

As the constant buzzing of the phone jolts you up from your slumber, you flail randomly to press the snooze button. You’ve overslept. Last night, you were up till 3, working. Sort of working. You started with the intended task but clicks and scrolls later, temptation led you to YouTube and that was that.

Before you prepare yourself for the world, your phone is already prepared to bring the world to you. As you leave your bed, your phone is your loyal sidekick, informing you via its eccentric art of storytelling – who went to what party, who got inexplicably drunk, who’s ‘feeling awesome’ with 15 others, who has a factually incorrect political rant today, amidst other notifications of you being tagged in jokes and posts that are ‘OMG! So you! You can’t even!’. And that’s just Facebook. You’ve still got to go through Whatsapp, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. It used to be a chore. Now it’s so organic. You’ve mastered the art of skimming through this daily information. You even pride yourself at being able to absorb the most relevant of this daily diligence that you pay to the overlords of social media.

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Post Number 27 : Can an opinion be….just an opinion?

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

A fortnight ago, there was an uproar on Facebook. A website called The Quint had uploaded a video with its team member criticising the viral video ‘Bol Na Aunty Aau Kya’ by (rapper?)OmPrakash. The video by The Quint, was particularly critical of the lyrical content, citing phrases from the song and linking it to sexual harassment, rape threats and sexism and demanded its removal from YouTube. To say that it polarized viewers, would be an understatement. The woman who made the video received a harrowing amount of death and rape threats along with harassment online. The comment section of the video was rife with people divided into three noticeable factions – the ‘pseudo-intellectual libtards and feminists’, ‘misogynistic, patriarchal trolls’ and a bunch of people tagging others to spectate the argumentation. What was clearly a battle of opinions, soon devolved into a battle of ideologies.

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The original article that was uploaded by The Quint. It has since been taken down on account of excessive abuse that the website and the journalist has received.

 

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Post Number 23 : Grief in the Digital Age

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In the last few days, grief and loss were a recurring theme in most of the things I read. I read Paul Kalanithi’s memoir, ‘When Breath Becomes Air’. Paul was a neurosurgeon who was diagnosed with a life-threatening lung tumour which unfortunately claimed his life in 2015. His memoir shares his desire to leave behind a legacy, in the form of this book. The book deals with man’s never-ending quest to find purpose in life, particularly when faced with mortality. His wife, Lucy, shares how she struggles to make sense of her and her daughter’s life after this tragic setback. It was a sombre read and one that makes you realize how our perspectives and wishes change as we realize that the years we once thought we had, are now mere months or weeks. You can find more about this book here.

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Post Number 19 : Deconstructing Pooja’s Dhinchakness

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After the roaring success of her previous singles ‘Swag Wali Topi’ and ‘Daaru Daaru Daaru’ (sigh) ,Dhinchak Pooja has been kind enough to grace all ‘Dhinchakians’ ( a term that she has coined for her followers) with her latest artistic endeavour ‘Selfie Maine Leli Aaj’. The video on her YouTube channel, which has 70,000+ followers, has well over 11 million views. It doesn’t surprise me that the comment section has been disabled. I doubt it has anyone recommending her a good voice coach or lessons on songwriting. Nonetheless, 11 million views is no joke and it makes me wonder about two things – A. What’s so Dhinchak about Pooja? B. Why does everyone love to hate her?

dhinchak-pooja

Dhinchak Pooja in one of her videos

 

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Post Number 18 : Tag every Rahul/Ankit/Sameer you know. They need to read this

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

In what has become one of the most baffling trends to have taken over Facebook in recent times- the offensive, unfunny, insensitive and downright nasty memes asking people to tag Rahuls/Ankits/Sameers et al in posts carrying pictures of women who don’t fit the ideal image of perhaps a Photoshopped model on Vogue, has left not just myself, but many with a bitter taste. One cursory glance through the comment section of these posts is enough to make you question the value system of people who are actively engaging in these memes. What’s even worse is that many don’t even grasp why jokes like these are extremely deleterious.

 

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Post Number 9 : The dynamics of online debating. (And why I hesitate to participate sometimes)

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

On the internet, I rarely engage in social/political/religious discussions. That’s not for a lack of opinion. On the contrary, I am constantly reading up on various issues plaguing the world. Recently, there has been an unprecedented upsurge in social and political developments, developments that have reverberated around the globe, affecting most of us via the ripple effect of globalization. Naturally, people want to discuss and deliberate over the nuances of what is going on. So far, so good. The trouble is, the nuances of the nuances are privy to only a handful.

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Post Number 7: A Beginner’s Guide to Wasting Holidays

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

The following program has been crafted and perfected by an experienced individual with an extensive knowledge of whiling away time and accomplishing little of actual relevance in daily life. If you are a homo-sapien predisposed towards utilizing every second out of the 86400 given in a day, then this program is not recommended at all. It may lead to bouts of restlessness and hopelessness, followed by pangs of guilt and a feeling of inadequacy and I at no point encourage such emotions in the process of whiling away time.

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Post Number 4: Unresolved Resolves

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

Post Number 4: Unresolved Resolves

At midnight, on 31st December, as the minute hand went past 12, indicating the onset of the year of the Monkey, my Facebook wall was inundated with an annoying amount of “New Year, New Me”  posts and people behaving as if the increment from 2015 to 2016 was nothing short of the New World Order with Inspirational quotes to an extent that would give even Oprah Winfrey a complex. And amidst all this chaos of creating an occasion out of something that should seem ordinary, the passing of time, the common theme in almost every declaration of attention seeking (a.k.a  XYZ is celebrating the new year with his/her profile friends, their pets, the entire city, Superman, Batman, E.T., the creatures from Avatar and 50 others) all of them mentioned one particular thing, Resolutions!

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AH! Resolutions. A wonderful yearly reminder to oneself of one’s uselessness and lack of ambition and dedication. How among everything else, we fail at pursuing the most mundane of things, that too decided by us only! Now, who doesn’t like that? To be nudged not-so gently periodically and be told “You know that thing you wanted to do and should have done WAY ago, yeah you should ‘try’ doing that again.”

I got off my laptop without posting ANY DAMN New Year nonsense (where’s my medal for courage in face of social expectations?) and scavenged through my unkempt bookshelf to find what I wanted to, my dust laden, slightly cobwebby (I should really clean more….maybe I could make that a resolution?….LOL who am I kidding?) ‘Resolution Diary’ . And as theatrically as I could manage, I blew off the dust and opened it with a dreamy nostalgic look on my face. Now it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I hadn’t managed to accomplish most of my resolutions- most of which involved physical exertion(SHOCKING!!). But there was a saving grace- I had managed to fulfill one task, that involved reading around 20+ books in the year. I was ecstatic. 2015 hadn’t been THAT useless after all. I did ultimately pull off one resolution, although the rest peered back at me like sad, neglected children that had been overlooked for their more loved sibling. Why couldn’t I manage to do any other task? If I had managed one, theoretically I could have managed the others as well? *emphasis on theoretically* Why wasn’t I as motivated for the rest of the resolutions ? Why didn’t I end up in better physical shape by the end of the year? Why hadn’t a reunion for F.R.I.E.N.D.S released exactly 10 years after the last episode? Why hadn’t ‘Fetch’ become a genuine English word? QUESTIONS! QUESTIONS!

New-Year-Resolution

As much as I wanted to analyze the psychology behind my actions and inaction, I had other urgently important stuff to do such as judging people by their social media antics and commenting witty one liners on their posts to hoard likes ,so I found myself a new pen and neatly scribbled 2016 RESOLUTIONS in fancy cursive writing and very cleverly extended arrows from the 2015 page to the 2016 page ( Genius I know!) . With a grin on my face, I kept the diary back on the bookshelf, slighlty hidden because I didn’t want anyone else to see it and have a good  chuckle on my account.

I was glad to have taken the initiative to resolve the unresolved resolutions. And so I have decided and I’ll let you all know, that in 2016, I will learn a new language, lose weight, start exercising, eat better yada yada ………….. starting next Monday!

regina