COLOR CODE

Three days back a tweet from the Indian test opener Abhinav Mukund became viral in several social medias.  This tweet was neither about match fixing nor about any on-field controversy; rather he expressed how flabbergasted he has been since his childhood because of a highly prevalent social issue.  Those who follow cricket or those who are active in social media might be aware about this tweet.  For those who are clueless, let me tell that it was all about “Color”, the skin color.  He was bang on expressing his anguish over this issue that has definitely reduced the morale of many people at different stages of life.

     I have not watched television since last 3-4 years but I do remember all those disgusting advertisements of brands like Fair & Lovely, Olay natural white, Emami fair & handsome in which the girls/boys acquire truckloads of confidence after becoming fair-lovely-handsome within one week after applying all those magic creams.  I feel these advertisements indirectly convey the nauseating message that black denotes “Unfair & ugly”, and it is their cream that makes people white i.e. “Fair & lovely”.  In a country where some of these cosmetics companies openly advertise the strong negative correlation between “skin color” and “Morale”, Mukund’s tweet getting viral is not at all surprising.

     There are people, in our friend circle, in our families, in our neighborhood, who love the color “Black” when it is related to clothes, vehicles, shoes, wallets etc.  However, some of those people do not like this color when it is related to a human being!  I am not sure when people will realize that black skin is nothing but a high melanin content and if you can love black objects how can you dislike black subjects?  Moreover, this color-coding has affected the female gender more than the male gender.  It does not matter what the skin color of a boy is (no offence), he and his family members (irrespective of education) invariably look for a so-called “fair” girl for marriage! I can not imagine what a girl must be going through when a non-Tom Cruise/non-Bradley Cooper/non-Gerard Butler (I mean a “not so white”) boy comes with his family and rejects the marriage proposal just because the girl’s melanin content exceeds the upper limit for arranged marriage! The same goes for the movie industries.  Many would realize that not a single so-called “Hero” or lead actor in Bollywood has dark skin.  Even if they are marginally dark, the make-up artists ensure that they look fair on screen.  So subconsciously the society has provided us the feedback that ONLY white represents beauty!

     Are we hypocrites when it comes to colors? My personal answer is “Oh…YES…absolutely”.  Majority of us must be worshipping Goddess Kali or Lord Jagannath or Lord Shiva or Lord Krishna on a daily basis (atheist, please skip this section).  We can well realize that most of our divinities were actually dark in complexion.  Even the devotees fondly address them as “Maa KALI”, “KALA thakura”, “Jaga KALIA”, “Krishna KALA”.  So my point is, if we can worship someone with dark complexion how can we dislike or bully someone with the same complexion? If this is not a good example of hypocrisy, then what it is? When someone like Mukund who plays for the nation gets bullied in the social networks, only for his dark complexion, imagine how much an ordinary citizen must be facing in his/her daily life.  It is time to move on, time to respect all human beings; trust me, skin color is nothing but melanin! I completely resonate with Mukund’s last sentence “Stay true, stay focused, be comfortable in your owk skin”. 

Social hyper-connectivity: A curse in disguise?

     Unlimited talk-time for local and STD calls, and abundant 4G data (2GB/day) at a price of 399 Indian rupees per month (for non-Indian friends: ~ US $ 6.5/month)! What we have witnessed in last 3-4 years is a revolution in the field of telecommunication.  If I have to go back to my childhood days, I could not have imagined the existence of something called “Cell-phone”; rather a landline connection was more than a prized possession those days.  However, things have changed remarkably over last 2-3 decades and all the 90s kids should feel lucky that they have witnessed the paradigm shift.  We have witnessed the journey from the costly landline BSNL connections to the inexpensive JIO offers, the big-fatty Beetel land phones to the slim and smart cell-phones, from “Shaktimaan” to “Game of Thrones”, from the Kodak roll-cameras to the sophisticated DSLRs, from the primitive videogames to the thrilling PlayStations, and the list goes on.  There is hardly any doubt that the technological progress has improved the quality of lives to a great extent. However, a part of my brain prompts me to believe that things are not as rosy as they appear! Is there any curse in disguise? My answer is: “YES”. Are we missing something? My answer still remains “YES”! 

     It all started with Orkut, which is now extinct, and was followed by Google plus, Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, and Telegram (The Tinder guys do not read this sort of articles!) The ever-burgeoning social networking sites have definitely enhanced our connectivity, but is this increase in connectivity effective?  As a researcher who is working on brain connectivity in several neurological disorders, I interpret any increase in the connectivity of two regions of the brain as either a probable “cause” of the disease or a probable “effect” of the disease (compensatory response), which may or may not affect the outcome of the disease.  Now, when I extrapolate the same logic to our social hyper-connectivity that is definitely secondary to the technological innovations, I wonder how effective or how aberrant these connections have become over time.  

     It seems I have more than 1700 friends in Facebook and some of my friends have even crossed the 2000 mark! Comparing these numbers to the number of friends I had before I joined Facebook, is same as comparing the size of a mammoth to that of a moth! I still have great bonding with my pre-Facebook friends and having or not having them in my friend list in Facebook does not affect my interactions with them.  Similarly, Facebook has no contributions towards my friendship with people who I came across in post-Facebook days.  Clearly we have plenty of friends but we don’t have enough friendship.  We are just in touch with each other, but friendship actually is much more than the sham touch! There are plenty of reasons why I believe that we are facing the ill consequences of the hyper-connectivity.  To be very forthright, I feel we consume more time to display our false sense accomplishments to our sham-virtual friends in social networks than we celebrate our togetherness with the real and close friends.  In short, we are just happy with the superficial romance with mirage! Communication through chats and texts in the social networks has apparently increased our connectivity but these superficial communications have been smothering the beauty of deep conversations in real life.  Clearly, we need to distinguish “communication” from “conversation” and undoubtedly the latter holds prodigious importance in our lives carrying the tagline “I-am-too-busy”.  The aberrant hyper-connectivity has actually made us lonelier than we used to be.  We spend more time in checking others’ status updates than updating our relationships with our real-old-gold friends.  We spend more time in displaying (“sharing” for those who are unhappy with the word “displaying”) our so-called success that include foreign travels, flight check-ins, photography skills (credit goes to DSLR), selfies in exotic restaurants, and academic accomplishments (and of course this blog post!).  In other words, we are so occupied with the aberrant connections that we hardly get any time for our fundamental connections. Most of us are parts of the infected crowd and we should gradually come out of this addiction. It is time to introspect and it is high time to prioritise the connections with due respect to the age old phrase “Quality matters, not quantity!”

[P.S I have not received any honorarium from Airtel for promoting their product through 1^st sentence of this article J]