#365DaysOfWriting — Day 239

Opinions

Reading an opinion piece back in the day used to be fascinating. You read it in a magazine/newspaper, and if you agreed or disagreed with it, you wrote a letter back to the editor, and sometimes your responses would be featured in the next edition. I’m sure they had an effective filtration method to sort out particularly nasty replies. There was no question of not publishing differing opinions though, as long as it was well-articulated.

Social media has changed the game.

Publish an opinion that differs even slightly from the common consensus, and BOOM! Sparks fly in all directions, and if you make as much as a punctuation error (which happens more often than before, sadly) then it’s a bloodbath. I was reading an opinion piece on Facebook by a film reviewer, who put out his list of best Bollywood actors in 2016. He made a couple of glaring omissions (in my opinion) and I calmly replied to him saying that I was shocked he actually omitted those actors. The other comments weren’t so generous – somebody accused him of fanboyism, another said the article was ghostwritten by a director, a third insulted his choice of movie and actor… it wasn’t a pleasant sight. I understand. Even I was shocked. But yeah there are ways to put opinions across.

Today it’s just about ‘my opinion is more right than yours’.

Now, even I had put up a list of films I liked in the year. It was met with some opposition, but we did have an amicable argument over it. Nothing nasty or personal. I’m probably thankful to have good friends. Of course, there’s always the occasional heated argument, but it ends at that – an argument. I used to be hot-headed earlier (I once told someone I could smell jealousy in the form of burning rotten eggs in his comment simply because he didn’t like a film I did) but I suppose I’ve mellowed with age.

IN MY OPINION, we should all take a chill pill and argue in a sane, sensible manner. At the end of the day, an opinion not worth letting your blood pressure shoot up.

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