Fake appreciations better than honest feedback!

I was at my friend's place for a function. While we were having a serious conversation her cousin came in and asked ,"How do I look?". Both I and my friend looked at her. The cousin had heavy make up and was wearing jewelry that didn't  suit her. I was about to say her that, my friend interrupted me and said, "Awesome, fabulous, you look great",I looked at my friend, she just smiled and nodded her head. The cousin seemed pretty happy, and she left the room. I couldn't resist asking her why she just lied! My friend as always smiled at me and said, "My cousin would have definitely taken feedback from others as well , I simply do not want to be the wrong person!  The wrong person? Seriously? Giving a honest feedback makes you the wrong person? I couldn't stop thinking about this incidence even after many months.I wondered how many times have I been the wrong person? Most of the time I might have ended up being the wrong person for the simple reason that I always gave honest feedback. Thinking hard ,I  realized that people prefer getting fake appreciations than any critical feedback! By giving what we call honest feedback we also become the "Bad or wrong person".Gradually people start avoiding us, for nobody likes criticisms. If I were them, I am not sure if I would take the criticism in the right spirit either. As another friend of mine once said it right, we do not belong to the honest feedback generation. You like or you don't like it, fake it with a smile!! This is how you end up being politically correct!

  

Befriend and Unfriend -- A button away!

Few months back, just like any other day, I logged into Facebook while I was working on my laptop. I suddenly saw a  post of a  friend with a tag of a person A I knew very well. I was little curious to see the post as in the recent past I hadn't seen any post from person A. When I clicked on the profile of person A, I discovered that I was no longer a friend of  person A! Phew! What , how and why?? Off late I hadn't paid much attention to person A's post or update, but still wondered what have I done wrong to be unfriended!!! Why did person A unfriend me, do I really deserve a snub like this ? Did I hurt person A in any way? Or did I do that myself by clicking any wrong button? Too many questions arose and I couldn't refrain myself from logging into other social media sites like Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. to check if person A was still connected to me.  I found it too embarrassing and my ego was hurt very much.  I had done this to too many , and little did I realize that they would have felt the same when I first accepted their request and then did the same unfriend.

Late realizations do happen and it then struck me that friends in Facebook are never real friends. Friends of friends become your friends just because you share something in common- a school, a college, a workplace, or even a family! The algorithm does it all for you and you just expand your network. A person who doesn't have even  5 real friends has a friend list of 500.  Posting and being active is again a social pressure. You wish your friends and like their updates. But when they don't reciprocate, you end up thinking why they didn't. Next, how many of us post a picture without any image editing work? how many of us post something in original? How many of us use it to showcase our sense of pride in achieving something? and how many of us just use it as tool to stay connected? Social media is just an illusion that shows us something that does not exist like a mirage. 100 likes for a photo or a status doesn't mean that you are awesome or what you did is extremely important for the mankind!, yet we post and expect the likes! We expect people to send us requests and then we decide whether to accept them as friends or not, we add some, reject some to boost our ego. I have seen people exiting groups , just to show to the world, that they are extremely important to the group and people must listen to them for them to be in the group.  It doesn't take much of a time to remove you from the same group, but people chose not to!