The last week of last year saw the first fight in my family. It started, as fights these days often do, rather innocuously on social media. My sister-in-law shared a post on Facebook that contained pictures of a seemingly poor man wearing a nice-looking kurta and talking on his phone by the side of the road. It sought to warn the public, as it were, about burglars and cheats.

I should have ignored it. But being ‘woke’, and a bit tired of the poor-bashing that constantly seems to go on around us nowadays, I pointed out the ridiculousness of assuming that the phone the man was using was stolen. It wasn’t about that, I was informed, it was about pointing out that a beggar was so stylish. So, once again, I launched into a speech about how everyone has the right to choose what makes them happy and the charity one shows a beggar should not come with strings attached. Of course, but this is just to warn the public about the cheats, I was told. At which point, I did what I should have done right at the beginning, and decided to keep my opinions to myself. The next morning, my father came into the argument. Things escalated.

I talked to friends about my shock at discovering my family held these views. The family must have talked to each other about mine. I went to my therapist and cried about this a little bit. My disbelief at how alien my own family seemed was discussed at length. The term “loneliness of the liberal” might have been deployed more than once. Things are still delicate. We are a family that mostly held our tongue; if something bothered us, we bottled it up and got on with our lives. It wasn’t the healthiest system, but it was a system that worked. And now, this Facebook argument has brought us to an uncharted territory which, I suspect, none of us knows how to steer out of.

In retrospect, what is surprising is that this took so long. The last few years have seen a somewhat consistent erosion of relationships resulting from social media arguments. Friendships have been terminated on discovering that they support capital punishment. Or oppose secularism. Because someone wants the country to go to war. Or someone else doesn’t. People have stopped watching films of their favourite stars because their social media views seem toxic. I myself found it hard to sit through the scenes in which Anupam Kher appeared while watching a lovely film called The Big Sick . Kher plays a calm, collected, Pakistani father, trying to make peace between his wife’s conservative views and their son’s modern American ones. Kher’s views on Twitter are so contrary to mine that, often, just the sight of his image sends my blood pressure shooting. “But this is not true,” I kept telling myself while watching him on screen, unable to differentiate the actor from the character.

The easy answer is to blame this on the polarised politics that has spread around the world. But to my mind, the bigger problem lies in the multiple platforms that run solely on the basis of everyone expressing their opinions. There’s Facebook and Twitter, of course. Instagram for some — opinion plus image. Snapchat for others — opinion plus image plus the option to place an animal’s snout on your face. And then there is WhatsApp, relentlessly intruding your life with other people’s thoughts. The family WhatsApp group is a particularly annoying beast. There are ‘good morning’ messages that trigger others every morning. Then the sharing of the photos of children. To which one must always respond with an emoji of a red, pulsating heart or a face with hearts where the eyes should be. These merely get the day going, for there is a tsunami of rubbish to come — funny videos, fake videos, fake tsunami warnings, an image of a dead soldier, thousands of fluttering flags, caution about pesticides in vegetables, virtues of vegetables in pesticide, cancer cures and clips of road accidents. A WhatsApp group is the ultimate indicator of how anxious we truly are of the world we live in. Really, how ironical that the world’s quickest purveyor of fake news is also what teaches us to trust nothing and no one.

Tragically, this is where we are now. In the golden age of social media, struggling with knowing too little of the real world and too much of each other. When the calendar changed and the new year rode in, I — without really having made any firm resolutions — found myself scanning through the 1,500 or so “friends” on Facebook and unfollowing everyone I liked. I figure I can love people better when I don’t know what they think.

Perhaps, this is what they meant when they said, when you love someone, let them go.

Veena Venugopal is Associate Editor, The Hindu and author of The Mother-in-Law; @veenavenugopal

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