There is a bit of celebrity in everybody's life

DHEERAJ KUMAR

(Writer is IIMC alumnus and Senior Associate Producer in CNBC-Awaaz)
It may sound familiar line but I have tweaked it a bit for my convenience. In my last article "We are a confused lot", I have got some off the record remarks that the article is not deep enough to convince any reader to agree with my arguments. I accept that the article just touched many facets of our today's life only and did not give any concrete examples as well. So I thought to write the follow up of that article with some of my new ideas about our generation's life and style. When I say that there is a bit of celebrity in everybody's life, it means that all of us are celebrities in some way or the other. Our universe of fan and followers may be small, but it exists and that's why we continuously try to expand our universe to become bigger and bigger. I would strengthen my point by presenting some facts which inadvertently are part of our life.

 Almost all of us are part of at least one social networking site these days and we try to add as many friends as possible. Hardly have we given it a thought that to whom we are going to add as our friend is s/he is really our friend or not. And the result is that our friend list becomes longer and longer but we don't keep in touch with more than 95 percent of the 'Friends' even on the social networking sites. A very small percentage of our virtual friends continue to talk, mail, chat or communicate with us. In this process, you must have noticed that when you search for the people to whom you can talk anytime, you find that those are counted on your finger tips. And mind it that in most of the cases those people are your friends to whom you meet regularly in blood and flesh. Here your social networking sites don’t play any role. Then why we tempt to add more and more people in our friend list?

Facebook : new world of next-generation

In the answer of the above question lies the truth that we want to become celebrity in our current status and add 'friends' less as the friends and more as the fans. For that we give our updated status message, post our blogs, videos or any work which we want to show to the world. As our status is not as big as real celebrities, we show our works to our social network friends and wish appreciation from them. And it is natural that if your network is big, your chances to become big celebrity are higher. You would agree that for this, we add many seniors and reputed names in our friends' list so that they can look at our work, though there may be that those reputed friends hardly visit your pages. But in our yearning to attain the celebrity status, we ignore this fact.

One more thing may add weight to my point. We become ever ready to let the people peep in our personal lives through our status messages, personal photos and videos. That's why whenever we party, go for picnic, go to any hill station or any xyz place, we post our photographs on social sites. We just don't want to show our photography skills to our friends, but we make them acquainted with our strength and weakness as well. We give them chances to be intimate with us and breach our privacy (and later complaint that privacy should be protected even on the social sites). This is a trait of celebrity and we love to follow that trait whether knowingly or unknowingly. Don't forget that for most of the time we enjoy our small celebrity status but when we become bore of it, we start cursing that.

In my last article too, I have asked why we can’t satiate ourselves by leading a normal, happy and peaceful life rather than to follow the false status. A very strange thing is that during most of our times, we run for collecting money, name and fame and when we are tired of the thing, we go to an Ashram to find peace (and for that again we spend money). Why can't we balance our life so that there are less confusion, less complication and more satisfaction? I would seek the answers from you guys only but before that I would tell you a story which some days ago, one of my good friends told me.

Once a rich man from a metro city went to spend vacations to countryside to take a break from his hectic lifestyle. There he met with a fisherman and asked him to boat the river there. During conversation rich man asked fisherman," how do you run your livelihood in this small village"? Fisherman replied," by fishing and boating". Rich man asked." why don't you take a big boat so that you can catch more fishes"? Fisherman said " what would happen after that"? Rich man said," you would have more money, gradually you can buy more boats, you can do business with the city businessmen and when you become big, you don't need to live here, you can live in city in a big house and employ people to catch fishes here". Fisherman again asked " what would happen after that"? Rich man said," you would earn name and fame, you would be able to live with modern amenities and whenever you wish, you can come here to enjoy this beautiful nature". And fisherman replied," THE SAME THING I AM DOING RIGHT NOW".

Need I to say anything more now????


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• We are a confused lot