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Recently, our Rotary club’s President asked me to be the chief guest for inauguration of some school projects that our club did. I had a small role to play in these projects, but the significant contribution was by a few generous Rotarians via donations. I posted the pictures in some of my WhatsApp groups, and lo & behold, within no time many of my loving friends discovered, what I had long (unconvincingly) suspected : I was ‘great’ & ‘amazing’ ! 😊. I could neither accept this tenet, nor reject it outright (as would have been the right thing to do)! But it left me seriously uncomfortable. And then I typed 3 words in the search box of a few of my WhatsApp groups – ‘great’, ‘awesome’ & ‘incredible’! And what it threw up left me squirming – these epithets were used for feats as trivial or even lesser than mine, and rarely actually deserved!
It led me to a revelation – something which we all know deep down– how social media, led by WhatsApp, renders ‘Greatness’ meaningless. Here, there is a free for all landslide of verbal generosity & inflation at play, where the most mundane (accomplishments?) are celebrated with superlatives we once reserved for genuine excellence. ‘That’s amazing’ accompanies a photo of someone having breakfast. ‘pure genius’ celebrates a basic participation in an amateur singing event, ‘Tussi great ho’ chimes in, another. These dysenteric hyperboles represent more than indiscreet enthusiasm – it signals the systemic devaluation of words that once carried weight, dignity, and meaning. The social media language is engineered for instant gratification, and creates an ecosystem of artificial excitement – prioritizing validation over authenticity. Exaggerated praise, where ‘awesome’ becomes the baseline response, results in linguistic obscenity, where words lose their discriminatory power – if everything is amazing, nothing truly is!
Damagingly, ‘great’ loses its capacity to recognize genuine greatness. Historical figures who revolutionised the world – artists who created timeless works, scientists & innovators who transformed civilization, writers who gave wings to our imagination, sportsmen who lit up arenas – get equated with the mundane. Another downside of this phenomenon is that this quest of ‘not to be left behind’, creates a competitive landscape where people join the rat race with their effusive praise, given hastily and accepted lustily ! This also prompts some people, given to self-deception, to (mis)appropriate credit, and lap up undeserved praise and applause nonchalantly, without flinching.
This verbal flatulence not only creates a perverse situation but also comes at a terrible cost – the inherent human emotional incentive structure breaks down. Simultaneously, this leads to a crash of values, where society loses its capacity to distinguish between different levels of achievement, nay, even the capacity to understand what constitutes achievement. Young people growing up in this environment learn a vocabulary stripped of its ability to discern between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the competent and the exceptional, the routine and the pathbreaking.
It will require conscious, painstaking effort to arrest & reverse this linguistic devaluation to restore precision and weight to our ‘vocabulary of praise’. It would mean resisting the assumed social pressure to respond to every post with superlatives, instead, offering appropriate & commensurate responses. It means letting go of words like ‘outstanding’, ‘incredible’, and ‘genius’ and reserve them for people/situations that truly warrant such adjectives. I would rather say ‘ nice song man’ instead of anointing them as Mohammad Rafi incarnate. High time we stopped chasing (and discouraged) dopamine highs & looked for more fulfilling serotonin boosts, for genuine contentment, peace & self-command.
Restoring sanctity to our language of praise is essential not just for germane responses, but for maintaining the crucial cultural equilibrium required to recognize, encourage and honour truly pathbreaking human pursuits & achievements.
Let’s not forget this stirring quote by Lin Yutang :
‘When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the Sun is about to set’
Shree Bhave
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