With lockdown and spare time in hand, people are more active on social media platforms these days. With this activism comes the hunger to become a SM celebrity having thousands of followers endorsing your views, liking and commenting on it. It might look like the definition of a narcissist in making but on social media these people are called ‘intellectuals’.
But how to attain this status of being an ‘intellectual’ ? Now some have cracked the code. Criticising government was not enough you see, you must oppose and mock everything Mr. Modi says and do.
He asked to clap for people working on ground, intellectual response was to mock it with ‘thaali peetne se corona dar gaya’ and never mind the message was just to show the solidarity and support for the people working on ground.He asked to light ‘diyas’ and intellectuals on SM calculated the number of people they could feed with that oil and candles already lying in the houses, so what if he was just trying to spread positivity and reassurance to people scared and uncertain in face of a pandemic. Now you can easily understand their response which I was afraid would turn into kind of endemic itself, to the ‘flower petals for corona warriors’ initiative.
When PM called for people to promote local, I thought there would be no opposition on this as this was a call to come together as a nation and there were no sides to take. By this time these almost established intellectuals had reached the stage where logic didn’t work. Opposing an individual turned into opposing betterment of your own country and countrymen. How dare he asked his countrymen to promote ‘swadeshi’, help economic growth of own country and create job opportunities for own people. Why not just stop the trades or call openly for boycott, never mind the silliness of such action as a representative of the largest democracy in the world. At this stage these intellectuals have found the ever sparkling pearl of wisdom ‘iss desh ka kuch nahi ho sakta’ (nothing good can happen to this country).
Not everyone is following and endorsing them blindly though. Some of us were foolish enough to go and try to reason, to have a discussion on their posts and thus became the last seal of approval which established them as a true intellectual as we received no counter argument but a name, ‘Bhakt’. This word ‘Bhakt’ is the end of every discussion, every argument for them and for us as well, fetched some more likes , cheers and comments congratulating them for such clever and ‘original’ response. What now? One can get curious about their next step after acquiring the ‘ status’ . Would they upgrade to intellectual2.0 ‘bash Mudi & Yogi’ or they will disappear with the end of lockdown? One can only hope. Hope.!
