Saturday, July 4, 2015

Where opinions come and go

Since everybody has an opinion nowadays, we've arrived at a stage where we really don't know how to draw a line. One can clearly see this change exposing itself on the online world. If somebody doesn't agree with somebody else's thought process, that somebody becomes this somebody's enemy. Just because their opinions didn't match! The fact that their underwear matched on that day doesn't count. Perhaps this is what happens when we are overflooded with data—most of it unverified. Everybody begins to form a thought school of their own, each building on the legend that they know everything about everything. In such a scenario, rigidity of discussion grows ultimately leading to poverty of intelligence. After a point, arrogance in one's knowledge sinks so deep that there's no space left for philosophical intervention. To make matters pitiable, words like overrated and underrated is used to express a point. 

Wait a minute. 

Who is rating whom? 
Let me take a guess. 
You? Oh yes. 
You are the one who is rating based on your own experiences and you wholeheartedly expect even Standard & Poor's to oblige your expertise. 
The topics of debate don't even have to be about black hole or how Angelina Jolie manages to look hot despite doing whatever she did to her boobs. It could be a plain vanilla chat about how somebody's tweet is stupid or jokes, lame. 
Big deal. 
Needless to add, when such a conversation takes place in the offline world, the dynamics are quite different. 

Offline world scenario: 
A: *smiling like a shy chimp*
B, C, D and E: "Your haircut doesn't look good, man."
A: "OK."

Just pull back for a second and see what happened above. A seemed OK with his haircut. Chances are he liked it a lot. Maybe he's having an affair with the barber. We'll never know. But the point is he was OK with his haircut. BCDE group felt otherwise and expressed their opinion. For some reason, they felt it was their duty to let A know what they thought and more bizarrely, that they thought that their thought mattered. For a few seconds, they made A realize that his haircut was the second biggest mistake of his life. Not that BCDE's opinion would make things better either for themselves or him but still, opinion has a way with people. An opinion is like those streakers who expose themselves hoping somebody will notice them. 

However, let's not neglect several points: 
a. A wanted that haircut hence had it. Just like they wanted to be opinionated. 
b. BCDE felt they knew better, not because they actually did but they just felt like that.
c. A could have easily given rise to a conversation which wouldn't have ended with OK.
d. His biggest mistake continues to be his absence on Facebook, where everybody likes everything. 

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