India Vs. Pakistan – Impact Of Social Networking

“Like if you think Pakistanis are terrorists!”
“Indians are backstabbers, re-tweet if you know this is true!”
“Like for India, comment for Pakistan!”
“Share if you hate India too!”

Um… thinking you have seen these somewhere? Yep, you probably have.

For decades India and Pakistan have been experiencing extreme tension amongst each other. Granted things aren’t as bad as they were before, but the situation isn’t under control.

This is not a news blog, so I shall not waste any words on mentioning  what is already on the news, but would like to do is throw light on one of the various reasons of this tension between Indians and Pakistanis, namely, Social networks.

Have you been on Facebook? Well chances are, most of you reading this have. On social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, there are hundreds of stereotypical groups and pages full of utter baloney about India versus Pakistan. Join one of these and you will constantly be updated with ‘statuses’ about how bad Pakistanis are or how crappy Indians are. Social networks are full of our young generation, who as the doctors say are at the stage where their minds can easily be molded by whatever they see and hear.

Go ask any Indian or Pakistani kid about his thoughts and feelings about the people living across the border, and you most likely will be hearing abut their hatred and disgust for them. People on such pages write stuff to satisfy their hunger to get popular online, but what they don’t realize is that, just because they posted that, you just changed the way how a small child reading it felt about the men across the border. Now everytime it’s the Independence day or some patriotic event, the same child might post statuses to congratulate his friends on the occasion but deep inside, he is just fueling his anger against the other kind. in his way, each and every young mind gets polluted and as they grow up into mature beings, this pollution gets so dense that there is nothing that can change their mindset. Thus continuing the stereotypical thinking of our ancestors. Unless and until these men stop for a second and think about what they are going to write online, weak minded people will always fall under their misconceptions.

Interestingly, those kids who still are far away from the impact of social networking, have proven to show much more humane results, for this I thought I should do a little Q/A with a kid. I saw a poor child on the street and offered him chips if told me how he truly felt about Pakistanis and he this is exactly what he told me “Boss, jaise hum hi waise woh hai”. Translation, “Boss, they are exactly what we are.”.

The child’s response was indeed confusing. On one hand his innocent words portrayed to me that we all are one, no matter what brand tag (Indian/Pakistani) we carry, but on the other hand it looked to me as if he was trying to tell me that we both share an equal blame in the godforsaken hostility.

I will leave it to the reader to try to find the true meaning of the words of the child, because it’s not that I don’t want to write more, or that I want to get under my warm quilt, but it’s because everyone as a different understanding of what’s going on around them, and no one person should impose his thinking on the other.