From pappu to PUBG, every one made a mark in this year. Whereas pappu wanted to bring down the government with a fighter plane issue, PUBG players used passenger planes to gather chicken dinners.
It was a great year for changes, while a lot of important infrastructure improvements were done, there were some unnecessary changes done by the UP CM. The name changes don’t bring the glory of cities, the actual projects being executed in the cities do. But only if someone could understand.
Emphasis on cows and women have been a major topic this year. Whereas emphasis on women empowerment makes total sense, mob lynching in the name of cow protection is something that goes over my head. This is like taking pet love to whole another level. Gundaraj in UP reminds me of the movies that we used to see in the 90s. Whereas they used to end on a happy note, in reality it seems highly unlikely.
But the most affecting thing this year to me were the mindless spreading of fake news. It sends shiver down my spine, even thinking the huge impacts that these can have on families, society, cities and even countries. The social media has become a propaganda creating machine which can become a cause for worry and can be used as a weapon to form opinions. Every page that I see on Facebook these days is coloured with one of the party’s colors. You read one article from them and you can understand their affiliations. By following these pages, I now know which pages are affiliated with which political mindset and will spew venom on which mindset. A propagandist had never had such a great weapon at their disposal. We have all seen the impacts of it multiple times in the past few months.
So there is a strong need of fact-checking of every news that we talk about. Its time to take this initiative of fact-checking in our hands and not rely on anyone for it. There are only a few sources I rely these days to get an unbiased opinion and I also resolve to fact-check news before sharing to my friends and family in this new year of 2019.
