Time to make conversations more real

A few days ago, I Whatsapped a friend on her birthday. It was a proper wish with complete words. I got a rather terse message: Tysm. I started using Whatsapp very recently and I'm still not able to understand the kind of lingo popular on social media.

I had to ask someone and then I could decipher, rather decode, that Tysm means Thank You So Much! The person didn't have the basic courtesy to write a full 'thank you so much.' The point is, this is how we treat a person in this age of WhatsApp, Instagram, FB and all that jazz. The reason, why relations nowadays don't last or have become perfunctory is because of our extreme casual approach and attitude.

We're not bothered about the other person's sentiments, his/her act of goodness. A relation hinges on 3 T: Talk, Touch and Tenacity of purpose. We're hardly bothered about what other/s will think if we just send an emoji or TC (Take Care) across. Emojis may emote your mood/s but not your true emotions. That's why, in this age of social networking, we're all so much like islands.

We hardly ever realise that when we send a Tysm or TC, we're not only showing our lack of emotions but are also unwittingly showing our disrespect for the person we've chosen to send an abbreviated message to. In order to consolidate a bond, we need the investment of emotions, be it friendship, love or social bonding. Where's that investment of emotions? Emojis cannot be substitutes for words or an exiguous Tysm cannot strengthen a bond. Rather, it'll create a dent.

In this age of social media, we're all digitally connected but emotionally separated. There's no heart-to-heart conversation nowadays. It's all virtual and too technical. It's, therefore, time to reassess our fast-eroding emotional quotient and intensity and introspect as to why this is happening. All questions have answers within. We have the solution/s but we don't want to apply them. We must stop investing too much time and energy in social mediums and instead venture out to mingle with people in flesh and blood. If we don't do that, we soon will become living zombies.