COPY-PASTE-AND-SEND




Pic.: Pradeep Nanda
My good friend, Manjeet, loves to say this: “We are a copy-paste-and-send generation… We have lost our thinking ability.”

Obviously, Manjeet is amused by the way we blindly, mechanically… dumbly… forward whatever stories – the crap – that  comes to us… The maximum effort we might take is to copy, paste and send!

It is so easy to fall prey to this epidemic… that, I have taken me off the WhatsApp and every group on my phone… At home, the TV is off for months now… The only reason I am on FB is for my daily blog. Else, it is an utter dumb-thing to be spending our hours and hours on…

Manjeet is off even FB.

Dr. Kalam was truly a great soul. But, the posts that we were getting to read – in the pretext of inspiration - so many of them were just dumb forwards, unexamined. Like the one which said: “For the first time in history, the American flag was brought half-mast atop the White House to honor Dr. Kalam.” I got it on FB from an over-enthusiastic group called ‘Proud to be an Indian’. For a moment, even my mind stopped working… and believed the story. Just then, I read below a couple of comments… “You dumb idiots! You have no brains inside your thick skulls,” they blasted left, right and centre, “Check the facts before you post your crap.”

When it poured cats and dogs a few weeks ago in Mumbai… I saw these two interesting Posts and almost believed… One was Mukesh and Nita Ambani’s (6,000-crore mansion… and, this figure, too, is a copy-paste… just floating around!) Antilia… It was all covered with the familiar blue-tarpaulin-sheets to save its inmates from the lashing rains!

When I mentioned about it to one of my friends, he said, “It is the height of joblessness… I drive by that road every day… I have never seen it on Antilia.”

The other Post. too, coincided with the same rains. Somewhere in Dadar area, where it was heavily flooded, our Sikh bothers were shown coming out and helping out the affected people generously… I was moved for a moment. But, then, another friend of mine (a Sikh himself) reminded me, that it was the classic copy-paste job. “That was a picture showing what we had done on 26/7/2005 when our city had gone under the deluge!”

Someone wants me to believe that Jesus’ image is seen in the clouds… Or, blood oozes out from His photo frame… Or, Sai Baba’s face is seen on a leaf… Or, Narendra Modi bends down to touch Dr. Kalam’s elder brother (99) who repairs umbrellas in a remote street corner of Rameshwaram… So, I should support “Narendra Modi’… Or hate Owaisi for (supposedly) saying that Dr. Kalam was not a true Muslim for he was a vegetarian and read Bhagwad Gita!

Whether these stories – the copy-paste-and-sends – are true or false, I am not interested… though, it is important...

Why I am saying all this, today, is: we have it all too much on our plate called ‘Social Media’  and ‘Media’…  And, we all can be so susceptible and gullible, so easily and so quickly… to this epidemic…

Well, I should have said ‘I’ and not ‘we’… For, I do not know about you!

GERALD D’CUNHA

Comments

Gerald Dcunha said…
I love your articles jerry. Keep up the good work.
August 4, 2015 at 10:16 PM
Gerald D'Cunha said…

Thanx dear, means a lot.
August 8, 2015 at 12:30 PM
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