SHARING IS CARING?

                                                                

"Hey, Kashi I can not be your friend anymore, not with those hate thoughts you have about my community The LGBTQ+" , this was the text I received from my best friend. I did what any sensible person would have done, ignored the text. Only thing that drew my attention was even after following Billy Porter and using queer emoticons , how could I be blamed and be not cool like everyone else and he got hurt? I mean ,Come on boy, the only way we can totally show our support to someone or some cause in this era is by uploading status or putting or removing profile pictures . I did too, what now?

His reason was solid, I shared some posts that had hidden sense of repulsion about it. For an instance sharing memes that made fun of so called lip syncing creators by calling them chhakka(gay) or how that peculiar app converted my straight friends to trans. On giving second thoughts later, I realised that even unintentionally doing so without noticing, it symbolized gay as derogatory remark. You are male or female is not status symbol, only the overly expensive apple gadgets are, so how being gay lesbian etc. etc. could be any different. But that was the trend to support some famous youtuber, overall my attempt to gain acceptance in that cool community. I did that too without blinking an eye lid. Had I cared more than 2 sec, I would definitely have known. But who does,I mean that's my right to speech or the world can bleed whilst I speak for all I care.(sarcasm intended)

Having said that still my question to you readers is , how many of you pay that 5 seconds of thoughts before sharing any "meme" ,"posts" on your timeline.  In a research published by J Clement dated back to Nov'18 , only 45% of the people actually agreed with the content they shared online, rest 55%, well they just shared.According to the same report, 50 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 to 29 years reported to having unfollowed a social media connection because they disagreed with an opinion piece that the account shared. 

Going back just few years, can you remember how you expressed your first heart break, was it by sharing an overly dramatic status on your wall or by lamenting to your best friend? How many times you just posted a status or birthday wish for a person when in reality you couldn't care less. So. sharing is not that much of caring , I assume. On scrolling my whatsapp status, I found one of my newly-hit-puberty-gave-me-licence-to-pretend-to-be-adult but who's actually 16 years old shared a post that describes the hardships of actual life. Wow!! now 16 year old kids are facing hardships that have pretty much everything to do with parents yelling them for being a pain in their asses. One of my colleague  had a picture on his twitter account about how SEBI has modified rules that were brutally unfair to intraday traders needless to say how he himself was anonymous to basic regulations because for some reasons known  #unfairSebi was trending on twitter. Indians have whole new side to this episode like sharing black pictures for supporting people of colour while putting up their advertisements with filters changing skin tone on matrimonials. Also, sharing Xenophobia posts defending how people are being biased towards Chinese just to be cool on social media while China instigates war on Ladakh front. I asked my neighbour why even after not so deeply acquainted with federal policies of GOI, she always puts her posts that were so aggressive against GOI.  Her answer shunned me. She replied that she had to put up a charade because in her group it was considered cool to be an anarchist.Cute enough to highlight gospel truth of social media sharing.Remember ,when pregnant elephant died due to some unfortunate events in Karnataka, people got so crazed with #animalsarenotfood that they uploaded even poetries on the accident while eating pepperoni pizza.Much to the actual amusement,social media influencing is considered a job. these are some basic questions that are actually needed to be dealt with like What they do in that profile?What kind of resume is required to get hired?What are the basic eligibility criteria for that other than going gym and posting really sexy pictures? And most importantly who do they influence. Asking for a friend,obviously(not that I am unemployed and need a job) Remember when aimlessly sharing of a few second snap of Priya Prakash Varrior got her IG verified with millions of followers in the process. Credits to the people for not giving a penny of thoughts.You can literally count numbers when people did not give a damn but followed the trend because their favourite celeb account shared it and even googled some crap justification for so. 

Facebook literally had to roll a campaign for busting the myth "Sharing is Caring".I hope for next time, you share something,take the long run to ponder your thoughts for two seconds before posting/sharing because it do affect others(not that you could design a rocket in that 2 seconds)

-Kashi Sharavan

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