Technology has made it really easy to share a topic among wide audiences. We just need a topic on Internet. FB, G+, Twitter’s likes and share makes it a click-a-button easy to spread it like a wild fire. Pay it forward, Kevin spacey’s movie, only talks about forwarding to 3 more people. For sure, in that case it was some real effort that was required from a person to make it to 3 people. May be this was the reason, they limited it to only 3 and not 4 or 5. Despite the number 3, they believed the impact could be enormous. Now, forwarding a message to all your friends, considering FB average 100+ friends, is just a click away. Imagine the explosion of “forward sharing”. Typically it has small amount of “pay back” too, but that can be ignored. No wonder, this has made “Facebook walls” full of catching titles like “you won’t believe what happened next”, “most amazing thing of life”, “top 10 things to do”, “top 7 ideas”. All it needs is a question at the end to engage people. Questions e.g. “what is your big idea?”, “what is your amazing story”, “how is Internet speed at your place”,”what google auto complete shows when you type ‘ what am”. People fill the comment sections like this is the 1st time somebody gave them privilege to reply. Probably good for people as it keep them busy, let them share or whatever. People have different motives and needs, but they do read, share/like and comment.
One of these days, I saw a post “Top 26 questions people from India are sick of answering“. First I was surprised to see “26”. This is probably the 1st article that did not pick the famous 3, 5,7,10, 20,50 as a number. I have seen sometimes 25 also; but 26? Anyways, it was liked, shared and commented by thousands of people on the article page and separately on everyone’s Facebook/social network pages. I noticed a lot of Indian replying, yes it happened to me, this question I was asked and that question too. People added their own questions as well. Questions are probably valid and reactions are normal human reactions. However, I was asking a different question to myself. It was Why?
- Why is that people ask these questions to Indians?
- Does it mean that Indians never ask such questions to people from other countries?
- Why others do not know some of the basic things about India?
- Does it mean that we learn all about other countries and cultures and need not ask such questions?
and if we are fed up then
- What have we done to educate people?
- Have we thought how can we make people aware of our culture and country?
- Why is that people do not read about India by themselves?
- Why after many years of global presence Indian is still a country of Snakes and Elephants?
- Why is that “yog” is coming to back in India in the form of “yoga” and getting more popular?
- What is missing that will make people voluntary read atleast wikipedia page of India?
I am not sure if someone met an American and asked
- Have you met that Baywatch girl?
- Is it true that aliens come to America?
- Is everyone super rich in America?
I tried a simple google search “questions that American are tired”. I got rather opposite page saying 10 questions that I have for Americans!! Seems like no one likes to ask questions to Americans. Change the same sentence with Indians and you know the result. I believe that most of such questions are valid and very innocent ones, when we do not know about other place/cultural. Sometimes we only have an image based on what we have heard from others. If I am asked such a question, then I think I will give a reasonable answer as per my understanding and try to give some references for further reading. I hope that person is genuine and will learn something and may tell some other friends. It is possible that person was just asking for fun. It still would not matter as in this case he is simple helpless. I believe if I was able to answer with a smile and somehow can bring a smile on other’s face, then half of task is done.
Keep smiling
Arundeep