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How Indians and Pakistanis trolled me on Twitter

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Mehr Tarar
Mehr TararMay 20, 2018 | 19:49

How Indians and Pakistanis trolled me on Twitter

One day, I began to dread Google alerts.

In 2013, I didn’t know what a Google Alert was, and once I discovered its existence, it felt good to have two alerts a month. At that time I was working as the op-ed editor of Daily Times, Pakistan, and writing fortnightly op-eds for the same. Writing made me happy even if the topic was dull, and the twice-monthly Google alerts made me feel people were reading me somewhere far away.

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One day, I began to dread Google alerts. One day in January 2014 changed it all, tilting my life on its head, making it all so topsy-turvy I almost forgot how to spell the word “life”.

One day, I began to dread Google alerts. Photo: Reuters
One day, I began to dread Google alerts. Photo: Reuters

Since those two days in January 2014, when because of some tweets posted on a Twitter account in India I became a name known to people in a way that happens only in film screenplays based on fictionalised lives of people who do something extraordinary, I’ve been trying to make sense of what happened.

After the tragic death in India, it all turned into a hellish nightmare. The power of virtual that engulfs everything in its path, destroying every signpost that marks a familiar town, every milestone that soothes your mind that the next rest stop is only ten kilometres away, every billboard on the side of the road beckoning you to things you don’t really need.

You watch in horror the dimmed screen of your laptop, the scratched screen of your phone, watching words become little arrows that find a way straight into your back, comments that twist like jagged knives, slurs that slice like a sword, tweets that ricochet into your mind like a bullet of a misfired Smith and Wesson, newspaper reports that, while misspelling your name and profession, turn into words dipped in poison meant to hurt you, television tickers playing your story in a loop, each word like a shard cutting deep into your skin.

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There is a macabre theatre in action, making it impossible for you to take your eyes off the screen, as if someone has taped your eyelids upwards and your hands are tied with a rope behind your back. You watch as thousands of strangers play a part in a game of your life being shredded into pieces that spread like sawdust in a storm.

No one really cares, yet everyone becomes a bit player in the drama that is meant to be the unravelling of a life in front of an audience that, despite being virtual, is so real you hear its heavy breathing, you smell its overbearing perfume, you can almost feel its gnarly fingertips touching your burning brow.

Cutting through the darkness are slivers of words that soothe, thin strips of bandage that barely cover the wound but provides temporary relief, messages of solidarity that appear like fireflies in the stillness of your inbox, texts of support that envelope you like the aroma of a rain-washed earth after a long stormy night.

Every kind word acts as balm, every text of a friend makes you feel stronger, every call from a loved one dries your tears, as you stare at crumpled Kleenex covering your white bed-sheet like a wrinkled blanket.

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You watch as thousands of strangers play a part in a game of your life being shredded into pieces, that spread like sawdust in a storm. Photo: Reuters
You watch as thousands of strangers play a part in a game of your life being shredded into pieces, that spread like sawdust in a storm. Photo: Reuters

Words harm, and it is words that heal. Never take words for granted, they make you, they break you, as easily as a child making a skyscraper with old pieces of Lego in a 1970s movie.

Now four years later, there are Google alerts, but not the ones that make me wish to recoil within me. Now I get an alert about my tweets that are liked by many or quoted in some newspaper. I get an alert about a fabulous review my book, Do We Not Bleed?, has received from some kind reviewer in India. I get an alert about a TV show I appeared in, and someone liked what I said.

Now even when there is a new development in the case in India in which I became a part of despite being a barbed border away, most of the news reports don’t mention my name. I barely get any tweets about it, other than some curious ones asking me what I think.

Indians who tweet to me hardly ever troll me; in four years, it’s as if they have accepted me as a well-meaning neighbour, a pen pal who they know through her writing, a positive person who wants nothing but peace between Pakistan and India. The only ones who recently trolled me were a couple of pro-PML-N Pakistanis who wish to see me in hell because of my support for Imran Khan’s PTI.

The support I get from most female tweeters who follow me is so overwhelming it’s almost unreal. Twitter makes you aware of the ugliness of the world, but it never stops filling you up with wonder and gratitude for the immense goodwill so many people have for someone like me, who they feel they have got to know over the years.

And it’s not just women, it’s also from men. I wish to thank through my words here how much their support and warmth strengthen my faith in the innate goodness of the majority of people in the world that I exist in. The selfless niceness of virtual strangers is so constant now it is at times hard to believe I once felt like a target on a wooden stake with no end in sight to the attacks.

In the world of an individual becoming judge, jury and executioner, remember: people are not 280 characters. Their lives cannot be deciphered in a tweet or a long thread. What you know is only a tiny part of the full story. People are not the newspaper reports you read, TV debates you channel-surf through, stories you hear. Don’t be rash to condemn. Think. Reflect. Decide. Then tweet.

You pass judgements, you decide who is guilty, you choose the punishment, you brand people for life with scarlet letters that are written in indelible ink. You label. You turn a victim into a villain, a monster into a martyr. You build idols. You worship. Then you turn it into a symbol of hate. You unleash your anger, your negativity. You destroy. You don’t care. You turn to another topic to be enraged about. You turn to another person to smash to smithereens their humanity. You tweet-attack to prove a point. You become just another brick with which a human being is lynched. Stop.

Words matter. Words build the world. Words unite. Words heal. Words make.

Or: words are superfluous. Words destroy. Words divide. Words harm. Words break.

What do you think your words do? 

 

Last updated: May 20, 2018 | 20:16
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