The Personalized Truth
As January comes to an end, two of the world’s largest democracies experienced something that should not have happened. Many are trying to draw similarities between the two. Whether these 2 events are similar or not, I won’t dwell much on that. But there is a particular thing which is totally different in both of them, the reaction of social media companies. I remember the then American President getting banned, and rightly so, from various platforms. There used to be a debate around fake news that it can’t be controlled, which clearly doesn’t seem to be a problem after Trump’s tweets were flagged as fake or unverified. Speaking of what happened at the red fort, I didn’t read about any account getting banned or any tweet getting flagged as fake or unverified, which shows that these tech giants don’t actually care about the values and the poor people of a poor country getting killed for nothing. They are happy as long as they are minting coins out of the chaos.
As someone who usually stays away from social media, it was difficult for me to avoid the gram this time. This compulsion to log into your account stems from the hunger of information after something like this happens. The social media pages feed on this hunger. In our haste to satisfy it, we end up looking at edited, cropped and incomplete content, and consider it as the ultimate reality, because our ‘favorite page’ has uploaded it. How can it be wrong, this guy shares my ideology, so he must be true, right? It was really disappointing to see even my friends, who know how all this works, fall in this trap and end up spreading more hate and fake news, by just clicking that like or share button. This is something I used to do as well, and it feels really embarrassing now. Please verify or just double check the stuff you are sharing, you might end up radicalizing someone in some corner of the world for nothing. These social media admins do not have any authority, and hence no responsibility, they share whatever stuff that increases their reach and following. Searching for personal glory in some stranger’s increased following is no less than being a clown. I was actually surprised how people(and even the literate ones) shared a 30 seconds video clip out of a 12–15 hour chaos and justified their side. Utter stupidity.
I refuse to believe that the 10 slides written by my ‘favorite page admin’ or a short video posted by my ‘favorite vlogger’ are giving me the entire picture. This blind trust has to end. Whatever happened was unfortunate, and even before anything comes out of a due process of law, people have started taking sides. Two sets of ideologies are emerging out of this. First, just because a certain guy decided to do something foolish, the entire culture and community should be blamed for it. Second, people are treating goodwill as money deposited in a bank, you deposit something and you take it out. Similarly, just because you help people, you can kill them, as if you used your ‘goodwill credits’ to do something bad.
Most of the people who are spreading the hate on social media just for some followers and those who are helping them in the name of spreading the TRUTH, which actually is their PERSONALIZED TRUTH, do not know what the issue is. So, if you haven’t already read the raw copy of the bills, issues related to it and the demands of the protesting farmers, just take an hour out of your busy life to read about it and also about the states like Maharashtra, Bihar and Kerala which follow a slightly different approach than most of the country regarding APMC mandis.
Lastly, given the Thatcher-like mood the government is in, and their 2 out of 3 main issues i.e. Ram Mandir and Article 370 have already been addressed, it won’t be an overstatement to say that we can see a Uniform Civil Code before 2022 (because 2023–24 will be the time for social welfare schemes as we have elections in 2024). We can see similar scenes in Delhi again after that. So make sure you read about its background(need and issues), The Hindu Code Bills passed in the 1950s and the unique state of Goa which already has its own UCC, because of the Portuguese rule over there.
*Not attaching any image related to this incident with the article, because a 500*500*3 matrix cannot explain what happened in those 12 hours.
