Post script: Rising tempers, heavy viral loads and no vaccine in sight

BENGALURU: It’s high time we got the vaccine. No, it’s not about Bihar vs Karnataka. In fact, I am not even talking about the Covid-19 vaccine, although that’s a priority, of course, free distribution or not. But we, or at least I, do need something to boost the immunity against the noxious social media posts that have the tendency to go viral in no time. Impolite conversations are apparently extremely infectious too, and there would scarcely be a place that’s more of a super-spreader than social media platforms. 

The past few weeks have once again thrown open a big field for people to display their hurt sensibilities, disrespect others’ opinions, and clamour to prove themselves right – and all this while flinging about abuses. And this time, they got plenty of chances to throw around four-letter words. Besides ‘Modi’ and ‘Shah’, that is. 

Imagine, people the world over blaring to prove if idli (yes, that’s four letters) is boring or not. Or if it is more, or less, flavourful than puttu. What next? Arguments over whether plain rice is dull? Or roti? What about couscous then, or polenta? Seriously, when did we start fighting over the taste of food? How did we come to this? 

How did we come to being a community where a former chief minister calls a woman politician ‘item’ (that’s four letters too), and then refuses to apologise? The self-styled activists, fuelled by adrenaline and mismanners, reacted as they always do – by hurling insults at each other, which often matched the derisive term they were protesting against. But this time, they could not launch their usual call for boycott.

There’s no use asking fellow opinionated netizens to boycott a politician, right? If they could, the men with the four-letter surnames at the helm of the country’s affairs would have been long sent out of public light. And anyway, social media users were busy making calls for boycott, and calls for boycott of calls for boycott, of Tanishq. Okay, no four-letter words there. But remember, both ‘love’ and ‘hate’, the talk of which the ad prompted in huge volumes, are. Imagine, people appreciating the oneness oozing out of the campaign while lobbing slurs at the opponents. And the latter, talking about their bruised sentiments, and denigrating the adversaries with vile comments in the same breath. 

Scarcely had the controversy over the jewellery advertisement subsided that another one erupted. This time, it was over the Navratri posters floated by Eros Now, which, in the first place itself, looked like a job done by trolls. Like Tanishq, the entertainment platform too withdrew the ad. Just the way actor Vijay Sethupathi pulled out of the proposed Muttiah Muralitharan biopic, soon after backlash against him – including rape threats to his daughter – began circulating on social media. 

But of course, there would be no withdrawing of the slanderous terms using which people argued with each other. Nobody will issue apologies for breaching the lines of civility and courtesy that are taught in moral science classes in school. The lull will last only till the next controversy, till the next trending hashtag stirs emotions. It’s a pandemic out there, with people living a masked identity of sorts, and yet being able to spew venom at each other. We, or at least I, will need an antidote, and soon.