At a protest gathering against the cold-blooded murder of Bengaluru-based journalist Gauri Lankesh held in Mumbai on Wednesday, several attendees held up banners with #GauriLankesh or #JusticeForGauriLankesh printed on them. The horrific incident, which took place on Tuesday evening, has dominated online conversation since and will hopefully not die down completely any time soon, although many of us are quite uncomfortably aware of how ephemeral online outrage can be.
It got me thinking about mass-mourning in the age of social media, and how it alters our social behaviour. Had I not been on Twitter, Gauri Lankesh’s death would’ve been a tragic headline I’d have seen on television news or in the newspaper. It would have affected me, yes, but in the somewhat detached manner that the news of a train derailment or a natural disaster in a state far away from mine would have. Social media has the quality of making tragedy feel immediate and deeply personal, which unfortunately restricts it to those with access and social capital — this explains why floods in Mumbai and perhaps even Houston may have taken over more timelines than those in Assam and Bihar.
Of course, this is just one side of the story. There were the dirty, rotten apples who, being opposed to her politically, expressed satisfaction that this despicable crime had occurred, a stance that will hopefully come back to bite them hard someday (the Internet never forgets… some things). There were also the cynics who questioned the intensity of the outrage; one enterprising user on my Twitter timeline put up a poll that sought to find out how many people were even aware of Lankesh’s work and existence until they found out about her murder. This may seem grossly insensitive — well, it is — but it isn’t unusual. At no point in our social histories has it been this easy to hop upon a bandwagon and to witness others doing the same. All it takes is a dollop of cynicism for many of us to wonder the same thing, even if we aren’t curious (or stupid) enough to actually run a poll on it.
All one hopes is that this rise in interest has some sort of lasting impact that goes beyond the immediate, which can be almost overwhelming. On the day #GauriLankesh trended, I spent much of my time in a pall of gloom. For different reasons, I was in a similar funk for a day after the iconic rock frontman Chris Cornell, who was part of the American rock bands Soundgarden and Audioslave, committed suicide earlier this year. Reading tweets and tributes from friends and fans all around the world made the tragedy hit home harder than even the most eloquently written obituary might have. Overwhelmed by all that I had read, I found myself listening to ‘Black Hole Sun’ (by Soundgarden), whose lyrics include the lines, “Heaven send hell away/No one sings like you anymore,” and sobbing silently in the back seat of an Uber.
Our public figures now have public funerals to which we have the option to invite ourselves. To avoid overtly appearing as impostors, some (or perhaps many) of us pretend to have known about them and their work — after all, a primer is just a Google search away. Is this pretentiousness? Perhaps, but of the best kind. When we take the first step, we uncover a potential rabbit-hole. Through trending hashtags, the legacies of inspirational figures live on, as they well should.
Suprateek Chatterjee is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist who writes on film, music and popular culture, and tweets at @SupraMario