OUR HYPERREAL WORLD

The other day I overheard a patient telling another one, "the IPL controversy is shocking,isn't it?" 

I did find a grain of truth in his remark.The present times seem to be the era of Gates .In the last few weeks the media offered us a whole lot of them-the My Name is Khan-gate,the Shoaib Akhtar-gate,the Modi-Tharoor-gate,the IPL-gate,the Swami Nityananda-gate,the Pak mole in India-gate,almost all posts of gates under the sun except Bill Gates.

Well,cricket is just a game.My Name Is Khan is just a movie.Valentine's Day is only a made-up festival.Speaking in Marathi portrays the same meaning as speaking in any other language.Sania Mirza is just a tennis-player.And the television which makes these facts hyper-real,is just an electronic box full of images and breaking newsliner that may or may not have any connection with the real world-the world where we live in families,go to work to earn bread to feed our families and where we actually laugh or cry,celebrating or mourning the birth of a baby or the death of an old man.

If one retrospects on the most controversial and talked-about incidents in the recent past,it will be found out that a staggering proportion of all these events do not really affect our individual lives.They do not pertain to how we go about leading our own lives.They are actually superfluous if we consider their effects on the way we make our living,cherish our relationships,the things that we really value and the choices we make in volition,in our own lives.Yet they seem to be the most contentious issues of the day,which we debate hotly,with all passion and energy.We Tweet with indignance,SMS with fury,and record our views with unrelenting consistency in Facebook.We all seem to interact randomly in a world built by virtual stimulators of reality like the media which seems to frame our sense and perception of the current times.But it does not alter the fact that it is us,who have created an alternative universe which has got its own set of values,creates its own heroes and villains on its own terms,and has its own way of dealing with issues.

It feels like that we are all living in big,flashy bubble enveloped by the media and the digital world from which very little,not even our own sense of perspective,escapes with ease.Existing consciously in this seemingly all-inclusive cocoon gives us an illusion of completeness,a pseudo-security that lulls us gently into sleep every night and we wake up to a day where we keep shrugging off the significance of all that lies outside it.

The overbearing effect of the stubbornly loud media creates a self-perpetuating and self-justifying world which seems to offer us all the questions and answers that pervade our conscious entity.The world of information is hardly homogeneous.It herds Reality into small arenas of self-reference where we see on a magnified mirror,magnified reflections of things that interest us,the consuming class.Issues are appropriated symbolically and real problems are converted into symbolic ones by the media,and this is the only way the media offers for us a sense of complete coverage.A very clear example is that of Naxalism.As long as it was too real for television over the last 2 decades,it was completely ignored.Now that the consuming class is feeling threatened by this insurgency,it consumes huge hours of air-coverage,but it reaches us through the filter of patriotism and police action,and the actual issue of poverty and exploitation is blacked out.The digital world only amplifies this distance between reality and what seems real to us.The internet is a alternate hyper-universe which allows us to simulate many realities.We do post comments and twitter endlessly about issues that poke us,but it is actually our digital avatars which act with a sense of purpose and concern.And eventually our actions freeze down to one action-typing words into a screen.

Actually we have always existed in a world of symbols.In reality one can testify to a staggering number of rituals and customs that have hardly got anything to do with the actual reality,the reality which we can really perceive and palpate.We do not know why a knot is tied or why 2 people walk around a fire 7 times,but we do know that it underlined the symbol and the significance of marriage-a decisive part of our real lives.This transition to a form of hyper-reality is inevitable,but sometimes I feel that all this is part of a simulated game we play with our own free time in reality.

We and our avatars can pretend to care about everything under the sun through televisions and computers.But does it really matter much?

I still search for an answer.