I’ve been friends with people who have a moral compass, but I’ve lost much of it since they started reading my columns. Like a young journalist named Nidhi Suresh, she was thinking of cutting ties with some of her friends, and I still know some of them. It’s the era.
I’ve been friends with people who have a moral compass, but I’ve lost much of it since they started reading my columns. Like a young journalist named Nidhi Suresh, she was thinking of cutting ties with some of her friends, and I still know some of them. It’s the era.
She was in Ayodhya last week. Her enthusiasm for the new temple there hasn’t consumed her, but her friends, who may have shared the broccoli and other bountiful vegetables, are posting their joy on social media. she saw. It’s a kind of joy that necessarily involves a quality of glee, and she wonders what she likes about her friends, and that she knew there was something mainstream in them. I began to wonder if it was possible to love them. She wonders how she can stay true to her friends when she can’t discuss their deepest beliefs. In this way, she becomes involved in the turmoil of modern times.
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She was in Ayodhya last week. Her enthusiasm for the new temple there didn’t consume her, but she did share her broccoli and other bountiful vegetables with her friends, who posted about her joy on social media. She saw that there was. It’s a kind of joy that necessarily involves a quality of glee, and she wonders what she likes about her friends, and that she knew there was something mainstream in them. I began to wonder if it was possible to love them. She wonders how she can stay true to her friends when she can’t discuss their deepest beliefs. In this way, she becomes involved in the turmoil of modern times.
People are losing friends they’ve loved for decades. They are losing their opinions because of their opinions. There was a time not too long ago when very few people had an ideology. In fact, only old people had ideologies, and there was a term to describe them. It wasn’t “Uncle”. It was an “ideologue”. Now we know that being an ideologue is the essence of humanity as a whole, so no one uses that word anymore. And it seems that no one can hide their ideology any longer. As a result, people across the country are losing friends, especially in the educated middle class.
Once upon a time, we hated people simply because of what they did to us. Nowadays, people hate people close to them because of the way they think. When I told Nidhi about this, she said: “You’d probably roll your eyes, but I think as a woman, we, at least I, always need to know what the person we’re talking to is thinking. And just doing it. No. I don’t know how to separate the two.”
Being able to give up a friend just for your opinion was a rarity until recently. In my 20s, I lost several friends because of my opinion that Rahul Dravid is a mascot for people who have no dignity in their profession. But sadly for me, I find it inevitable that this view is a personal comment on my friend. However, such losses were rare. Until about ten years ago.
Things changed quickly after that. Anyone could act like a writer, which threw international friendships into turmoil. You may feel like things are calming down, but that’s because everyone who has lost a friend has already calmed down. But then a new generation emerges, a happy group of different friends, who do not yet read newspapers seriously, but are beginning to discover politics, and their bond is probably doomed.
Everyone is affected by this, but it is not a universal behavior. People who consider themselves “liberal” often have old friendships with people they consider “too right-wing,” “too religious,” “too conservative,” “too nationalistic,” or other European things. more likely to break off.
Despite all the hoopla, the people on the “right wing” who are the targets of their anger will never end a friendship just because someone believes in climate change, transgender rights, or even secularism. rare. They may dislike intellectuals who support all of this, but not if they are friends. Sometimes, when they make fun of people as a whole, they immediately say the famous words: “Don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends…” It sounds hollow, but they don’t mean the truth when they say it. may be talking. They may ridicule a group of people, but say they love their friends among them.
There is some consolation in this. The surprise of our time is that much of the intelligent world turns out to be “right-wing”. Many conscientious women found their kind fathers to be colonial chieftains. Oh, what they started saying. Who knew a loving father could say something like that? Then it turned out that their mother herself was no slouch either. And urban youth, too, were not saved from the fear of becoming cultural orphans despite their sophistication.
“For a long time, I thought I’d never liked a right-wing man, but that’s not true. Everyone, and most men, have a right-wing shadow inside of them. I am carrying it,” says Nidhi. In her view, “Right-wing men…understand women in a very particular way. And that way clearly permeates the everydayness of this country. So I think I see shades of that in my lovers, too.” I found it. Maybe there’s a shadow of it in me too, who knows. It’s getting harder and harder to say that I wasn’t with these right-wing men.”
“Besides,” she says, “What I’ve noticed while reporting is that, strangely enough, I feel physically safer around people on the right than we do on the left. Because they[those with a moral compass]are strange creatures,” preached feminism to me and taught me what I needed to know about the world. ”
Perhaps one of the great flaws of our time is that men pretend to have the same politics as women. The bond between man and woman was the first inkling that friendship was doomed by opinion. Spouses criticize each other in very personal ways, but often they are simply reacting to fundamental differences in the way most men and women think.
What marriage is supposed to teach us but we never remember is that people are better than they say. People are better than their own opinions. A friend is more than just his ideology. People like us understand something right about the world. It doesn’t matter what suddenly comes into them. Half the ideology is morning cortisol anyway.