TALES OF TRAVESTY
DR. JITENDRA SINGH
A senior UPA Minister nonchalantly quipped that following the censure of dignitories like Justice A K Ganguly, one would be scared of even talking to a woman. ‘‘I shall think twice before hiring a female Secretary’’ was something like what the media heard the flamboyant politician saying. Soon the women activists were up in arms. The media had found breaking news for the day. But, even before the Hon’ble Minister could have said anything in his defense, the Minister’s son, who himself happened to be a chief minister, was quick to tweet ‘‘Papa must apologize”. In a fraction of a second, the whole world was quoting the son’s advice to the father and it was too late to delete the post.
In a yet another bizarre though unfortunate incident, only two days back, a high profile Kashmir born socialite wife of an equally high profile Union Minister allegedly ended her life after she discovered from the twitter that her husband was having an extra-marital affair.
The fast pace of social media, notwithstanding a host of unimaginable advantages, suffers from the inherent disadvantage of being unamenable to be retrieved or deleted before having been instantly read by a multitude of anonymous friends and foes across the world. No wonder, many a twitter-happy pals have more often than not ended up being ‘‘trigger-happy’’…. a striking example being that of a Union Minister who nearly lost his job for hastily tweeting comments incompatible to the policy-line of his own party in government or the example of a Chief Minister who pushed his security guards in the dock by excitedly tweeting in advance the movement of his motorcade quite in defiance to the ‘‘Z plus’’ cover enjoyed by him.
The age-old dictum in the days of letter writing prior to the age of Internet or Twitter was… never write a letter in haste or in anger and hold back the letter to read it once over again before putting it into the letter-box. The most catchy instance to emphasize this dictum was cited from the fate met by Sarat Chandra’s ‘‘Devdas’’, enacted by Bimal Roy’s Dilip Kumar, who had posted an angry letter in hurry to lose ‘‘Paro” for the rest of his life. He went back soon thereafter, apologized for his twitter-speed letter but by then, ‘‘Paro’’ had already tread on a different path.
An infectious belief has gone around in political circles… that having a twitter account or a facebook account holds the prospect of attracting a larger number of followers who would also get converted into voters.
May be, that is true. May be, that is not so true. But, the outcome of this belief is that more and more number of high profile politicians, across the party lines, are engaging professional hands to update their twitter status. In some such cases, the over-enthusiasm to have a huge number of followers has ended up in the embarrassment of ‘‘planting’’ fictitious followers from places as unlikely as Indonesia or Kuwait as was discovered in case of a former Chief Minister.
Meanwhile, as the newfound craze catches on, let this not be forgotten that Twitter is like a mirror which reflects your image in a magnified profile but at the same time also uncovers some of the details that you may have never liked to be displayed… simulating the poetic dilemma ‘‘Aaene Mein Hai Chehra Ya Chehre Mein Hai Aaena, Maloom Nahin Kaun Kise Dekh Raha Hai?’’ And yes, the inevitable dilemma for Umapathy is……To tweet or not to tweet?
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