Death of Criticism
When did “good” and “bad” become “offensive”?
Disclaimer — The following post will state my opinions which are not supposed to be taken as facts, though my tone may suggest otherwise. They are simple opinions — not forced on the reader’s perspective. Feel free to disagree with my statements, and healthy criticism is always welcome. But hate is where I draw the line. Ironically, the need for this disclaimer is why I wanted to explore the topic. So without further ado, let’s begin.
The Modern World
Yes, the advanced, interconnected, yet bleak world of today. A place where minds come to scroll, fire a jolt of happiness, then descend back into their brooding darkness only to repeat this vicious cycle. Where all you say, type, or even think is up for public scrutiny. Where nothing belongs to you in its truest sense, but the power to reach everything is in the palm of your hands.
Welcome to the world where mere opinions get demolished by loudmouths and hate is sprawling wild. Where criticism has perished, flaws do not exist, and everything is deemed perfect. This today is no place for a healthy discussion, no… It’s a purposefully engineered win-win situation for all.
Yes, a world where everyone is winning. (Exactly what we needed. Yay!) But can we stop once to ask, “When everyone is winning, who really is losing?”
Spoiler alert: We are.
“How?”
To find that out, let’s strap ourselves in and explore what has become; The Death of Criticism.
The Life of Criticism (Then Vs Now)
India, in the early 2000s, was an exceptional place, and one that my child-self was fortunate enough to be a part of. The internet was in its infancy, only beginning to take root in dingy internet cafes around each corner. Colored televisions were shifting from rich to middle-class homes, and so were personal computers with those flickering dabba (box-shaped) CRT monitors. While in schools (as per my experience), CDs of The Matrix, Memento, or Lord of The Rings Trilogy tagged with GTA San Andreas game setup were being pushed around like 2 rupee coins.
What a time!
Safe to say that media, in every shape and bone, was booming! Satellite (Dish) TV was bringing a revolution in the entertainment industry, and capitalizing on it was a new string of reality shows never before put in front of Indian audiences. In them was the groundbreaking first edition of Indian Idol (Our version of American Idol). A fresh show tailor-made for Indian eyes.
I would sit huddled with my mom, as I remember, sometimes dad too, and two older brothers. It’s fascinating how I can still name finalists of that time, which many Indians reading this can do as well. (Remember Abhijeet Sawant? Of course, you do!)
Yet the reason I am accessing this vivid memory is not only for nostalgia but rather for what I witnessed and first learned while watching such shows, observing the judges judging contestants. To my 7-year-old mind, the performances seemed perfect, spectacular, flawless! Still, one or more judges would point faults in a faultless voice of a participant.
“The highs should be higher…”
“Lows are better, but needs more practice…”
Khulke gao, daba daba nahi (Sing openly, do not suppress the voice)
Huh!
Was that so?
Yes, it was really so, as then I would conclude after constructive thought. However harsh it felt to me — the battering of an otherwise spectacular act — I did understand the judges’ perspective, which resonated with the singers too. Realizing such weaknesses, the contestants would work to gut them out, polish their already honed skills, and improve drastically. While some may go overboard; grow cruel and rude just for the sake of it, (Which is never good), this was tough yet needed, I felt.
This was criticism.
Growing up in a time when these shows were surging like fire in my country, I saw this criticism take shape everywhere in the world of entertainment. Let it be Nach Baliye (Dancing with the Stars inspired concept), India’s Got Talent, DID (Dance India Dance), or countless others sprawling into fame. Like most Indians (coupled with my infantile curiosity), I gulped in these shows for the sheer entertainment they were, craving to see perfection but finding it rare.
What a time, indeed!
Now let’s whirl back to the present when a few days ago, I caught my father watching the 200th installment of India’s Best Dancer, Superstar Singer (I had to google these names, to be honest), or some new combination of both. Not to sound too dramatic, but it shocked me to the core. And it was not the performances; they were fantastic, some may even say perfect, but rather the mind-numbing judges.
Each act ended with a cheesy catchphrase-praise, a standing ovation, hundred redundant whistles, thousand artificial claps, million recorded cheers, and three green flashing buzzers. Each!
Yes, the good should be lauded, I agree. But where is the bad at? Where did the flaws go, the good criticism? Has everything become that perfect all a sudden? No comments on improvement, nothing on what wasn’t liked. Oh no, apparently, everything was liked. Flawless in its true meaning.
Moreover, this trend followed across most similar reality shows as my father confirmed, being better-versed than me in this due to his retired life. The stark contrast was appalling, that too in shy over a decade. “Times have changed,” he had said, and I thought to myself, “The perfection I was craving for is finally here… No longer rare. Here it is, right in front of me!”
Yet now… it seemed everywhere.
Take nothing away from the remarkable talent in today’s world, quite breathtaking what people can achieve in modern times. But there is, and always will be, a place for healthy criticism, for what can be done better, and what was outright bad. Yet the so-called judges today look almost afraid of showing the human element, of showcasing opinions and dislikes, as a human with a working brain should.
Criticism, I ask you, “Where have you gone to? When the world needs you, where the heck are you?”
“Fear has taken hold of me,” it says, shrouded in one dark corner. “Fear of the little fingers tapping away on Twitter (now X), the red circles on Instagram, and the purrip of Snapchat. Those who have used me learned the hard way…” criticism warns. “They have learned… if they oppose someone’s opinion, especially someone who knows how to be loud, then the internet army will dismember them, defame them with raging hate and shouts. They will get canceled, I say… CANCELED!”
Hearing this, I become speechless, wondering how it came to be. What battered our innocent criticism to hide in desolate darkness? We saw it all transpire with our dreadful eyes and did nothing to stop, leading me to realize its helpless current state. It only urged me more to write such a piece and make an attempt, however frail or successful, to save criticism through my words.
“But why now?” a valid question. “Why are we discussing this? Aren’t there more important things in the world to worry about? Why should some reality show judges even matter to me or anyone?”
Because my dear, when everything deserves a standing ovation, nothing deserves a standing ovation. When everyone is winning, nobody is losing.
The Death of Criticism (And The Need of Losing)
Hold your wits!
Before plunging into further depth, it is instrumental that we first ask ourselves and understand with precision: “What truly is criticism?”
Criticism, in its bare bones, means to show disapproval or flaws. There is no scheme, no agenda behind it. And it is never just about flaws. True criticism is unbiased and neutral, tells what is “good” and “bad”. Yes, good and bad. Not just one. That’s the mark of healthy criticism.
If we turn its dial too much in any direction, it quickly loses purpose. All abusive-bad reaches hate, while all goody-good leads to ignorance. Sadly, this is the version we get today.
It’s either love or hate, boycott or support, left or right, strong or weak, greatest or the worst. Nothing neutral, nothing between. The moment one points out the “bad”, they are labeled racist, misogynistic, hypocritical, and delusional by many. Though some absolutely deserve these titles, it drowns the actual criticism completely.
For example: People worldwide (regardless of gender) have historically loved well-written female leads in stories, as years of entertainment have aptly shown. Think of Basanti in Sholay, the entire women’s hockey team of Chak De India, Rani in Queen, Piku in Piku, all the way to Princess Leia in Star Wars, The Bride in Kill Bill, Clarice in The Silence of the Lambs, and even Hermione in Harry Potter who is just as instrumental to the plot as Harry himself (surely you can think of many more). Some of them were issued almost 40 years ago, some 50. All are universally beloved and critically acclaimed.
But what isn’t beloved, and should always invite valid criticism, is lazy writing, paper-thin characterization, ridiculing of the other sexes to look good, and awful manipulation of narratives to support an agenda. I am certain many modern examples of this are flooding your brain.
Moreover, to avoid this is what criticism was created for, a hero we needed. Yet it grew to the villain we conveniently hated.
God forbid that you show even the slightest constructive criticism over a modern piece of entertainment, and inevitably, you will get barraged with reminders of what color your skin is, what ethnicity you belong to, what gender you are, and what hypocrisy runs in your kind. Are you a male who disliked a strong female protagonist? Get out of here! It doesn’t matter if she had no weakness, was unrealistically written, had no character arc, faced no consequences of wrong choices, and had convenience embedded in each step. You do not deserve to criticize, sir! You belong to a different sex.
*Sigh*
On the opposite spectrum, things are tumbling down the same disastrous trajectory. The plague of over-criticism is eating away a mammoth portion of our brains without us even knowing. A harmless thing (a post or a video of someone enjoying their time, for say) will often spiral into a wave of vicious unrelated comments, which are never justified when viewed objectively. You might be enjoying the rain, but someone will definitely point out how wrongly you are doing so, and will definitely get offended by it. What magnifies it exponentially is the devious algorithms present on social media platforms that feed off this negativity, deliberately promoting hate-monger arguments to increase user engagement. Quite pathetic.
“Well, the Social Media is at fault here!” you say.
“But who designed those awful and unethical algorithms in the first place?”
“Humans.”
I can’t help but imagine what we have done with criticism, and how we have treated it. As if its wounds weren’t enough, we snatched it from the dark alley and tossed it into an unforgiving ocean; there it is choking, overridden, battered. It reaches us with its hands and breathes the last gulp of air. We look into its eyes, do nothing as it drowns, watching it sink to the endless bottom.
We have just witnessed the death of criticism. And with it, we have lost the most significant thing in life; The act of Losing.
“But why should we lose?”
Let’s consider an infant learning to walk, his penguin-shaped body drooling and mumbling all over the place. He plants his palms to the ground, shoots his ass up, gets the knees sturdy-straight, and lurches upright only to crash back down. He tries again, all to no good. Learning that his arched back is messing with the center of gravity, he shifts his lower body forward and falls. His head-neck movement needs to balance his lean, so he tries again, managing to wobble-stand for a few seconds and falls.
Stands.
Falls.
Stands…
Then falls again.
Like that, in split seconds, our first relationship with losing has sparked new neural pathways. It took about a hundred losses to win for three seconds, then a hundred more to get ten seconds (in total).
This is the need of losing, and what enabled us to lose was the non-biased criticism from nature — our greatest equalizer.
If we remove these losses, the terrible falls that made us cry the first time, can we ever learn to walk? Can we win?
You see, the problem of criticism isn’t restricted to the world of entertainment now, it is gleefully seeping into our lives, bleeding its trot into our everyday activities, shaping our brains, dictating our thoughts, and messing our entire good-bad perception.
We have freedom of speech, but suddenly we cannot freely use that speech, cannot scold our kids, cannot criticize our governments, cannot question our laws, and cannot disapprove of troubling decisions. Because if we did, we either risk giving in to hate, or WE WILL BE CANCELLED. No doubt, we tremble at the sheer thought of criticizing, pointing out the “bad” and messing with the “good”.
We are all afraid… how criticism once was; backed into a dark corner, shivering, sulking, before we tossed it to its death.
We fear our own children today. Hard to believe, but don’t take my words alone for truth, ask any new parent and you will be astonished the same. Most are frightened to death of their toddlers, a feeling in tandem with teachers, too.
See? Either all out or none, that is the growing problem.
This is best explained by a Social Media Giant like Youtube removing the dislike button counter. It helped find a genuine piece of content, gauging the like-dislike ratio. But what did we do with this power? As always, we abused it. And that right there is the crux of the issue.
We had an exclusive right to criticize and we enjoyed it for so long, but we bullied it for so very long. There was no other outcome left but for the bruised criticism to be afraid, hide, give up, and sink to its demise.
The right to criticize has been taken away, for better or worse. Yet, for the most part, we do deserve it. The kind of things we have done through it in the past, the hate we have shown (and still do), the anger and distaste, it was inexcusable. We never deserve to criticize if we continue the same. Too late now to turn its fate around and carry its body back out of the ocean. Too late.
Or is it?
The Resurrection of Criticism
This part is where I usually devise a clear solution to our grave problem, where I word tangible tasks to avoid it at all costs. But in this case, I still feel at a loss.
A part of me genuinely believes that our actions alone have caused this abomination over true criticism. Our abuse is to blame, we are to blame. It may be inevitable human nature to abuse any power, this being the recent-most case in a long repeating line of our history. We are facing the immediate consequences of our own actions. But consequences, you see, are quite like criticism. Not inherently “good” or “bad” but both; neutral.
That is what we have to relearn; being neutral. No matter how much hate is in trend, or how many eyes a standing ovation garners, we should strive to criticize the T out of things when justified and leave it be when valid. Take everything with not just a grain, but a fistful of salt. Destroy misinformation with your investigation. Destruct bias with neutrality. Weigh in the good and the bad, never one, always both. Evaluate, not assume. Deduct, not act. And then, we will never be blinded by the rage of hate or star-struck by the illusion of good.
Be the Yin and also, the Yang; meaning what you give, you must take. We cannot criticize and not be ready to be criticized. It’s a delicate line to walk on, perhaps why we fell way off it so frequently. But there is a line. There is hope. We start today and tomorrow, the consequences may lead to a better world, a healthier one where we are free to criticize, free to improve our (and each other’s) lives. Free to manner our own children, to truly speak. Free to grow — the fundamental purpose of this post.
And my purpose?
I want to bring back the free-ness that we once had with Criticism. Be able to point out distinct flaws and not be afraid of outrage. To tell the “bad” without getting your own “bad” spit back, and the “good” without overshadowing the clear faults. Be able to speak my mind and listen to other’s opinions, without hate, without bias (one of the reasons I adore writing). That’s the stuff a perfect society is made of, the perfection we always needed but rarely ever searched for.
“Keep on dreaming, buddy!”
Yes, I get how superficial this sounds. But we have to try, don’t we? Who are humans, if not a bunch of try-ers? We have to try! To keep the dial from turning to one extreme or the other, to bring back the balance of “good” and “bad”, make perfection rare as it should be. To lose with dignity and praise with humility. We have to try, folks.
After all, the death of criticism was by our hands, and its resurrection has to be done by our hands alone.
So, clasp your hands together and start banging its chest, Criticism may still be alive!
Thank you so much for reading!
I hope this unique post instils grave thought in my readers and makes one realize the exceptional philosophies that seldom hide under the mundane-est of things in our daily lives.
I wish you all to stay safe and have a great life ahead. Please leave your claps and thoughts in the comments below. I would really appreciate it!
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