Audiences and people are very fickle, they might like one trait of your personality and not the other. But that doesn’t mean that you should tweak yourself according to them, says Tahira Kashyap Khurana, author of the bestseller The 12 Commandments of Being a Woman. “I have realised that the problem is with the trolls and not with me. However, even though it does feel wonderful to hear people say nice things about you, you can’t take it too seriously as the people who are validating you don’t know you,” adds I’ve Never Been (Un) Happier author Shaheen Bhatt. The duo, who have approximately 7,00,000 followers on Instagram between them, were in conversation with Daniel Thimmayya, Chief Reporter, Edex at DakLF 2020.
Continuing her take on trolls on social media, Shaheen adds, “The stuff that I have been trolled about on social media has been so horrible and disconnected from me as a person. People have said a lot of chauvinistic and regressive things. Whenever I have spoken about mental health, people have reacted sensitively but there will always be those who won’t” Shaheen published her tell-all account of her battle with depression in her book last year. She further said the speciality of mental illness is that it leads you to believe that you are alone. But when someone comes out and speaks about it, you connect emotionally.
Speaking about whether social media affects her writing process, Tahira says, “I have made a conscious decision to not let it overpower me. What you need to realise is that everyone on social media is a human being who is bound to have failures. Use social media to spread some awareness but even if someone is just posting good pictures, it must be understood that hours and hours of makeup, preparation and thinking about what content to put up has gone behind it. Just don’t take yourself or anyone else too seriously on social media, it is just a platform. Encouraging the women of the society Tahira elaborated saying, ” I think a woman, our lives are filled with amazing incidents to share. Women are either shown as tragic characters or as total revolutionaries. We can be funny, crazy and witty too.
