The Filter Fad

As far as my childhood memory supports me, the two major incidents that made me stick to the television were the September Attacks (9/11) and the Mumbai Attack (26/11). I was terrified, horrified, scared in fact. But then I got used to minor attacks every now and then, only to realize somewhere some kind of a riot, lynch etc is killing people every day. But speaking of the earlier mentioned incidents, where was my support for the suffering people back then? I am in doubt if I supported them at all, because I didn’t take out the family album and colour the photographs.

Painting our face is exactly what we do now to show support, only instead of risking our skin we like to tint our smiling, laughing, happy photographs. I am not the person who will go on to lecture on how facebook has ruined our lives. But I admit that it has. Filtering our profile pictures to show support is something that I am totally against. In the course of six months, people have used the filters to show support for the legalization of gay marriage in America, the Digital India and the recent attack on Paris.

The question that follows is, how are we supporting anything by putting up a filter?

 How many of us can accept homosexuality without making fun of it. The gender spectrum is so blurred in our mind that we are still stuck with the two out of many. Again, we are somehow subconsciously bound by our upbringing to joke about one’s masculinity and femininity when shown in the ‘inappropriate’ body. But yes, we are all happy to have the rainbow on our virtual faces. That’s easy. But what’s difficult is to question our own ideologies on gender, because when one does so, it takes a lot of time to get out of a world of duality that we thought we had been living in.

The initiative by the Indian Government to provide internet access in the rural areas of India is also a big step towards the development of India. Better connectivity will definitely make life easy for people. But then, how is an illiterate person going to study and make windmills in his/her village? We do not have proper education in the rural India. Yes, many schools have been built but the maintenance is poor. I do not even have to go to an actual village to say this, because even in a metro city like Delhi the rural areas remain uneducated. So maybe it is a big deal, but we need to look after the offline needs of these areas first.

The death of 150 people is the first thing I hear when I wake up. That doesn’t really make me happy. I dig into the matter and when I open facebook, I see the French tricolor all over my timeline. The news of the attack makes me sad but there is nothing that I can do about it. I do not have the finance to send help. I can pray for the sufferings, obviously. But praying won’t change things. If prayers really worked, then God wouldn’t have let the attack take place, would he? I might have offended millions of theists by saying this but the intention was to question our ideology of God. I had been an agnostic for a long time without associating the existence of God to any religion. But then most of us associate the idea of God to religion. So when the attacks are blamed on one particular religion, are the people associated to the same supposed to change their religion for their prayers to be listened by God?

Changing the filter has become a fad. Something happens; let’s show our support by filtering our display picture. But then, many people don’t even know the reason behind the filter.  ‘There is a new filter on facebook, everybody is updating it so let me do it too.’ That's the sad state we live in.We follow the crowd blindly. In this case, the whole purpose of the ‘filter for support’ is nullified. If one really wants to show support and do something about the happenings all over the world, s/he needs to peep into his/her own ideologies and question them. How far are we actually willing to go when we want the world to change? Also, when we are talking about the sufferings, aren't millions of people suffering in our own country every second? Where do we show our support then? Suffering doesn't come with a major attack, it dwells within us.