TWEET AND TROLL... AND LOSING THE HANDLE













“Each reaction we have is there to inspect us
and reveal our own nature to ourselves and for ourselves;
it is never about others.” 

― Bryant McGill,

Right now, as I type these words, a bird is chirping. There as a small garden just outside my office… She is sitting somewhere on the branch of one of the trees in this garden… She must be a small bird… For, I cannot spot her despite my efforts to do it… But, her chirping – call it her communication, voice or song whatever – yes, I can distinctly hear…

What is that this little bird wants to tell the world?

Who cares, anyway!

It is a different scenario early in the mornings while I do my rounds of walk… It is pitch-dark and there is absolute silence… In this silence, I can listen to my heartbeats… I can hear and feel each breath I take as I walk… Suddenly, the birds wake up from their sleep… and they all start chirping together incessantly, endlessly… My attention goes to their sound, and I can sense a different rhythm in it, a different beauty… I don’t understand even a bit of what the invisible birds are trying to tell the world… But, I want them to keep telling it…

“The Song of the birds,” I like to call it… I can weave a poem or a song through it… But, once the darkness goes, once people start appearing on the scene… the song of the birds gets lost in the frantic human buzz!

I do not know how many of us know this: The gentle chirp of a small or young bird is called ‘Tweet’… and, in folklore, an ugly cave-dwelling creature depicted as either a giant or a dwarf is called ‘Troll’…

Do you get my point? Can you see the correlation?

The dictionaries tell us the ‘other meaning’ of these terms, too…
“Tweet: A short message, image, etc. posted on Twitter.”
“Troll: “Someone who leaves an intentionally annoying message on the internet, in order to get attention or cause trouble.”

The less we react, the more peaceful our life becomes. I do not know if we really know the depth of these words… It seems, the mankind has lost the grip on this ‘Twitter Handle’… thereby making Life a chaos, a disruption!


GERALD D’CUNHA

Pic.: Anil Bedi


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