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Time to stop stalking, talking and living around others’ lives!

Very recently the nation witnessed the excitement and thrill of a celebrity wedding! From waiting for pictures to be uploaded, to making quick memes and posts on it, many of us were engrossed and obviously indirectly involved thoroughly in the wedding. Ironically while the couple getting married was staying at a safe distance away from people, we played the role of a typical religious neighbor who gets involved in any matter in the padosi’s house even when they are not expected to be involved. Out of the excitement yet? Or stalking the next wedding already?
Unfortunately in times today we are exposed to more than the required amount of information about others lives. From what they ate to what they wore or achieved we know it all! By this, we imagine a picture-perfect life that we feel others are leading and obviously, try projecting ours as the same. The vicious cycle continues and in this tug of war for posting the best updates online, we all lose a bit of ourselves everyday offline.
I was having a healthy discussion with a colleague recently, where we were imagining and talking about life when there was no social media buzz. Wow! Imagine walking down the lane without scrolling through your phone, imagine sitting idle in a café and waiting for someone without the constant stare at those bright screens, imagine looking around in a beautiful scenic place and living it, rather than capturing it, imagine getting up in the morning, and getting up to yourself instead of a red notification, tempting you to open it and read it. The crux is when the social media hadn’t taken over us; we focused more on our own lives than the lives of others, we focused more on living instead of constantly looking out for our next update.
Image result for paparazzi cartoon
The human brain is an amazing organ which gets trained the way we train it, we can fool it easily and we can use it just the way we want to! Remember how a very popular movie mentioned training it for “All for well”.  In times today by the means of our constant interest in people around us, we are training it the most for getting involved in everybody but ourselves! With every like, love and wow that we hit we are silently telling our minds, that “All is well with everyone except me” It’s time to stop paying heed to this eyewash. It’s time to be the wise circus masters for our brains and shut it up before it gets too late. It’s time to unlearn some things which we have learned over a past decade and relearn them for our own good. It’s time to stop the entire culture of stalking, talking and living around others lives.

 Let’s start living our lives outside those screens, let’s start looking at things without those filters, let’s get more real and let’s focus on things that truly matter. And yes as far as the padosi’s house is concerned, of course, it’s entertaining to peep into it but only and as long as we do it while going to or returning back from our own work, instead of constantly hovering over them from our balconies!
Vandita Mishra
Published in Hindustan times, Lucknow edition newspaper
on 29.11.2018 

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