No, this idiot does not interest me. But obviously, I am in the minority. However, this is not about him and his rantings but his popularity (even after being exposed time and again for being a fraud).
Check out the statistics at the time of writing this (Note: This Facebook post has since been deleted for reasons best known to him, but the statistics below were true at the time of writing; the YouTube video, though, remains):
- 43,000 Comments
- 75,000 Shares (with perhaps a thousand comments on each share)
- 22,00,00,000 Views
- 71,000 Likes (and perhaps an equal number of likes on every share)
One does not have to wonder why films like Border, Gadar, and Uri are such hits! We Indians love bravado and “khaulta khoon”. We love “Maa kaa doodh piya ho to” and “Kutte kamine, main tera khoon pee jaaoongaa”.
If we lived vicariously through Amitabh beating up smugglers and rich industrialists in the 1970s, and Sunny Deol beating up Pakistanis in the 1990s, we are now attempting to do the same in the 21st century without realising that because of technology, what used to begin, build up, and climax inside a film theatre on a cold and clammy rexine seat can now be displayed in an unending orgasm to the entire world via Social Media (I have always read “Social Media” as “Social Medusa”!).
Not just that, it can attract other, like-minded people orgasming with us to create a “wave” that can topple governments, change polity, and even drive us (and the army) into an unnecessary and dangerous position, perhaps even war (and/or extermination), without any one of the inciters being aware of the real-life repercussions of their hate-filled screaming.
The problem is that once we grip the tiger’s tail and get on it with all this bravado and style (“Don’t angry me” and “Ataa maajhi satakli” types), we attract others naive like us to do so too, who assume (mostly wrongly) that since so many of us are riding it, they can’t all be wrong (or in some cases, the fear of missing out or being left behind too comes into play). Collectively, we make it seem as if this is the tiger we have chosen to ride and not been pressured into mounting.
To anyone who wishes to appeal to our intellect and emotions for our votes (political entities) or our money (businesses), it seems like this is the tiger everyone likes to ride! And then, they start using this tiger and our riding on it as a starting point for their appeals, without realising that most people on it are now satiated after all the shouting and wish to dismount but cannot because so many others are now piling on them.
This (the dismount) used to be easy when the movie ended and the lights came on. With the social media revolution, it is getting more and more difficult to do so. The lights, in a way, never come on.
What is likely to happen is that all of this ends up in some kind of slow collective suicide, with almost every participant trying to wriggle out of dying, and only the innocent and idiots dying first, and subsequently the slightly smarter and then the slightly less stupid and so on. Sometimes, it may all stop just before it consumes a specific file of people, but never before extinguishing many others before them. The survivors are the “winners” who will write the myths under the guise of history, and then the cycle repeats.
पुनरपि जननं पुनरपि मरणं,पुनरपि जननी जठरे शयनम्।
इह संसारे बहुदुस्तारे,कृपयाऽपारे पाहि मुरारे ॥२१॥
I wonder if even the Murari would be able to save us from this cycle now and more so in the future when we all would be living in a world where the tools we wield would allow us to take actions without being immediately made aware of the consequences (not just on us but on others). Jai Internet Baba! Jai Social Media!
