One more time, with less feeling!

There was a time — certainly in Denmark during Prince Hamlet’s teenage years — when there was nothing either good or bad, but thinking made it so. For millennials today, of course, ‘thinking’ is so passé; it’s all about ‘feeling’. It’s our touchy-feely age, after all, that has spawned an emoticonemoji industry. It all started with a Twitter meme that asked, ‘What’s something that ISN’T racist but still FEELS racist to you?’ In the US, of course, these ‘things’ can include White people wearing bedsheets over their heads, and serving fried chicken to African-Americans. Seemingly innocent items like White men wearing chappals — they call them ‘flip-flops’ there, especially in Silicon Valley — White women with hoop earrings can also be felt to be haraam.

Here in India, of course, we have been always a step or two ahead. Within our outrage-a-day borders, we have always had our ready supply of ‘feelers’ who have felt their ‘sentiments’ — the motherboard of feelings — to be hurt by some film, some uttering, some something. For our hyper-emotive meme-sahebs, the question that should be asked is, perhaps: ‘What’s something that is ACTUALLY malicious but only FEELS malicious to you?’ The list will certainly be long and, hopefully, somewhere down the line, everyone will realise how stupid it is to feel outraged, because it is silly