Tuesday 21 April 2015

Hypocrisy, pretence and the dot com world

I was Facebooking recently when a post caught my eye. An acquaintance of mine, albeit an FB friend had posted about a spinster who refused to get married because her prospective in laws did not want her to continue running a shelter she ran for the orphans. The post gave a gist of how she went about it and the encouragement she received from her mom. The FB friend of mine wasted no words in praising her courage and effort and urged others to be like her. Reading this, however, made my blood boil. No, I do admire the lady who stood her own and did what she believed in, despite the odds and resistance. I also believe that, this, was a post worth sharing. What made my blood boil was the fact that this person who shared it on her wall was not someone who believed in it in reality. She was the same person who is busy digging up gossip on why another friend remains unmarried. She is the same person who does not think twice before doling out advice on "landing" good guys in marriage. I wonder what she must be thinking when she hit share on this post. Was it because it would make her look cool? Whenever I run into her I always get the feeling she truly believes in her antiquated and often misplaced views about how things should be. A girl should behave a certain way, you are too ugly to get married (Yes, she did say this to someone dear and therefore the volcano in my blood), girls should get married, stay married. And she has made these views of her very public in her talks and gossips yet it baffles me why she chooses a diametrically different view when it comes to her online persona. Why does she want to be projected online as someone that she so clearly is not? It leaves me with another question, are people's opinions in the virtual world the same as their opinions in the real world or are they just two different people in two different worlds? Why this pretense, this hypocrisy in the virtual world? Why are you praising something when in reality you abhor it? Does it not implicitly imply that you feel somewhere deep down that you may be wrong and you need to right the wrong? Are you justifying for something that you are not? Trying to project that you are broad minded? If that's the case why shouldn't you try to right the wrong in the real world? Why the virtual world where it probably makes nothing better for you. Baffling to me. Perhaps she believes that her words on the virtual word are far more heard than those in real world. Or maybe she believes people are stupid enough to think the virtual her is the real person. Different people, different understanding. The only good that I had was that now I know she's a hypocrite. But what's sadder is probably the fact that she knows she's one.