Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts

Thursday, September 27, 2012

It's really the only way...

Unrequited love. That’s when you love without reciprocation.
Everyone has at least once in their lifetime loved unrequitedly. It may have been that time your eyes repeatedly met hers from across that crowded room. Just before she ran to her Scottish boyfriend, Douchebag McVaddaPhone.
Or it may have been when that dude who was being so nice to you asked for advice on how to talk to your best friend and they had to spend all day extracting your pirated copy of Twilight: Breaking Dawn from his colon. By the way, you have weird taste.

If you're still in doubt, there are some other crude tests. These include the “How did I end on this Facebook page AGAIN?” number; the “Whoops, that message wasn’t for you” index and roughly the number of times you’ve come close to doing borderline inappropriate things to your stuffed toy collection.

It’s also possible you feel like asking rhetorical questions. For example:

  • Conventional good looks is all it took? Are you blind to inner beauty or something?
  • I’ve sacrificed a head of cabbage. HOW MUCH MORE, God?
  • No seriously, do you know how much cabbage goes for?
  • Maybe she would’ve understood after the 28th missed call?

But then, I stand by the idea that all great love is unfulfilled. More so considering fulfilled love lends itself to circumstances like deciding who’s going to watch the kids and “What? Paneer? Again?”
So celebrate the very real possibility that you’ll die alone. 
Or that you'll adopt cats and later find yourself hiding in foliage with binoculars; madly hoping that allergy to pepper spray doesn't come into play.


In either case, know this: You may love without tangible cause and hope of fulfillment. But in doing so, you become a martyr. You rise to the idea that you’re inherently better than those who told themselves “it didn’t matter”. You allow yourself hope where others have plummeted to despair.

Make no mistake, you're fighting for a cause. One that is greater than the safety of satisfaction with the present. One that allows you belief in something that will make the world better. And how many people who don’t have bombs strapped to their chests/are Batman get to claim that?

So don’t give up.
And if you do, there’s always Twitter. I will personally retweet all your emo stuff.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Crapblocked...


“Iraq has WMDs. AMURRRICA!” – George W. Bush
“They took our jobs” – Literally Hitler
“No Twitter for you, enemy of state!” – Government of India

Yes, these quotes are roughly paraphrased. But they all play upon one thing: Fear.
Fear that unless someone is allowed to have his way with certain free world guarantees, unless someone drops a taxpayer funded smart bomb on a soft target; terrible things will happen to the unsuspecting average person. Children will suffer, food will have too little salt and downloads will be throttled.
Of course, proof and humanity's vestiges of humanity are necessary casualties.

There’s a good chance you’ve not been blocked on Twitter or Facebook. And that the Indian government is still letting people see your adorable kiddy videos on YouTube from when you were six and didn’t realize that people would start to notice if you wore superhero underwear atop your clothes regularly.
However, certain people think that an important part of preventing violence against minorities is blocking Facebook hate pages, Twitter profiles – also ones that mock the PMO (and hopefully that Rick Astley video I’ve seen way too many times).

The world is a lot more connected than it used to be. The actions of any form of government are scrutinized and televised. So I guess the ancient powers that be have to be seen doing something. And the first thing to do when tackling with a problem is to lay blame somewhere – in this case, on the spread of ostensible anti-India sentiment via social networking platforms.

Now the question you want to ask is probably: Isn’t the government doing the right thing by stopping the spread of hate speech and possibly region based violence?
Well, derp, you’re wrong. The question is this: When you suppress freedom of expression and things still don’t come under control, where do you go next?
ecause, you see, things won’t come under control. Not as long as depraved assholes who don’t accept the sanctity of life are actually held accountable. The only thing left to do then will be a further curtailment of whatever behavior that comes up as unfavourable.

There's also the fact that censorship is an inherently flawed concept. The notion of a great big nanny state which decides what’s you can or cannot see starts to have less appeal when you think about the following:
  • The Streisand effect
    Any attempt to hide something has the effect of publicizing that very information and getting it to a much larger audience. 
  • Gaps in the fence
    There’s very little that can be done to suppress that flow of information on the internet. There are ways to circumvent blocks. And ways to circumvent blocks of those blocks. In fact, the only thing you can’t get around anymore is Yo’ mama.
  • Assuming herd mentality
    Mouth-breathers who can get influenced by a non-confirmed piece of information sourced from the Internet can just as easily be influenced by a newspaper or people shouting loudly enough. And by the way, please stop watching those Salman Khan movies. It makes this argument look weak.
  • Controversial efficacy
    Case in point, our respective mothers have been deciding what's good for us for the longest time in an effort to make us better people. Yeah, that *totally* worked.
So finally, it comes down to the relatively benign “Sanjeevani Booti, AMIRITE GUYS?” or the whole “STOP RESISTING, CITIZEN! THIS KICK TO YOUR GROIN WILL SERVE THE GLORY OF CHINA!” way of doing things. I would argue that the former can easily lead to the latter once you start calling the destruction of constitutionally protected statuettes by other names like “National security”.

"Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."
- Thomas Jefferson, celebrated bad tempered person.

P.s. Yes, there’s a Godwin in the second sentence of this post. I’ll take that congratulatory plaque now.