'This Blog Post will Change Your Life'

“25 photographs that will put your picture taking skills to shame”

“This girl went to the ice-cream wallah. What happened next will change the way how you look at ice-cream.”

“This video will make you kill yourself.”

These are a few examples of what we've been seeing on the web these days. We are living in an age of superlatives. The good old good, pretty and well-written are replaced by jaw-dropping, drop-dead-gorgeous and the best-piece-I’ve-ever-read, respectively. I mean, if I write that I liked your article, I’m made to believe that I don’t really like it enough, or probably don’t like it at all.

Since when did everyone, EVERYONE in this world become like an 18-year-old teenager who needs to be reassured a million times? I think it all started with commenting on pictures. Our social needs require us to not only like a picture but write a comment on it as well. Actually it depends on our relationship with the person. It goes like this - acquaintance = like; friend = you look nice; sister, brother/Best friend = like + you look awesome.

But what do you do when someone above you has already written nice/awesome. You are as good as your thesaurus and so you dig new words. So yes, that probably started the epidemic of superlatives. It also brought along a string of new words – cuteness, superlike, bootylicious…

Since the Internet was replete with videos and pictures, someone out there decided to create attention-seeking headlines because ‘Breaking news’ was not good enough. I think they took lead from India TV and that other channel with Sansani, the one of ‘Aage ki khabar aapko Chauka degi. Baba bana Gunda’ fame.

These titles are actually effective. When I see a girl falling from a roller-coaster, I don’t click on it. But when I see “Accidiant terrifiant blah blah” written on it, I open it even though it forces me to like the video and display my curiosity and velaness to all my 400 friends.

The funniest thing happened with an aunt on Facebook. There was an iffy looking picture in circulation - a man and a woman were getting cosy in it. The caption was – comment mein 8 likhiye aur chamatkaar dekhiye. Now poor aunt, she typed 8. The picture was publicly shared and so the whole world got to know that she was interested in it! Although my day was made, she buried her head in shame for the whole week!

If the word ‘chamatkaar’ wasn’t on the picture, she wouldn’t have written anything.  Hence proved - superlatives lure us; normal is certainly not good enough.  Just like 90% gets us nowhere in boards, 95 and above is what we need to do well.

Even the vacation we go to has to be ‘the best vacation ever’. Even though I know you had written that the last time. I kind of understood the normalcy behind superlatives when I was at a party. A couple who was there with us at the boring bash went home and put a picture of it on Facebook. The tag-line read – the best days of our lives. Now I am all for positivity; but I’m not in favour of white lies!

In all this there is just one solace – that I have friends who would write ‘whistle-whistle’ and ‘you look divine’. Otherwise even a 100 likes and a few nice/good comments would have made me feel like a mere plain Jane.

That would have certainly made a stupefying dent in my super-awesome, fantabulous, stellar life.

P.S.  Surprisingly, a simple comment like ‘I love your blog’ still makes my day :)