By Valson Thampu
Trollers are after the Dangal star Zaira Wasim. “Justice with you. Is to kill you,” is their verdict on her. (Never mind the un-English). For what? For meeting with the J & K Chief Minister.

The target of this fundamentalist ire is a teenager; a budding star, an innocent thing of delicate beauty in her sweet sixteen, who happened to act in a feature film that has already raked in a paltry Rs. 400 crores at the box office.

Hate seems to be the only universal thing these days. It makes no difference if you are an Indian or a Pakistani or a bubbly import from Burkina Faso. Zaira is Indian. So what? A Kashmeri. So what? Kill her!

My worry here, even so, is not for Zaira. It is for her trollers. For all trollers.

I too have been trolled and targeted since mid-‘90s. Here is an instance; cited only to buttress my case for trollers.

I got an angry, vituperative letter from one R. S. Saxena (an assumed name, in the interest of confidentiality) in the wake of one of my articles that appeared in the Statesman. The letter had little to say on the demerit, stupidity, or fallaciousness of what I wrote. It was all about me. That I was a covert British stooge. That I was a Christian mercenary on the payroll of overseas NGOs.That I was anti-Hindu. And so on.

As luck would have it, the letter contained its irate author’s contact number.

I rang him up. Thanked him for reading the article. An author, I told him, feels grateful towards all who read him. All the more, when they care to respond in writing. In responding, the reader becomes one with the author.
“Now that we are thus mentally connected,” I asked him, “can I come and see you?”

He was taken by surprise. He found himself in an alien territory.
In the interest of brevity I omit much of the conversation that ensued. Suffice it to say that our conversation ended on the agreement that he would come to see me. A date was fixed.

Unfortunately an emergency developed and, on the appointed date, I had to be in Kerala. When I returned a few days later, I was informed that one R. S. Saxena had come to meet me.

I rang him up at once, feeling inexpressibly awkward at having missed the appointment and, even more, for having rushed off without intimating him. I offered to set off right away and meet him at his residence in Shahdara.
“No, Sir,” he replied. “I shall come over. I will be there in an hour.”
R. S. Saxena walked in. I was astonished. Where I expected to encounter an aggressive, youthful man, I saw an elderly person, nearly ravaged by rheumatism. He was accompanied by his nephew, on whom he leaned as he walked, because of his physical debility.

I received R. S. Saxena with utmost affection. Less than five minutes into the conversation, he brought up the article and his response, reference to which I had meant to exclude from our consideration.

“Sir, I have read your article a second time. My apologies. I found your piece quite different from what it was when I read it first. I am sorry, the prejudice was on my side, not on yours.”

Saxena volunteered the information, further, that he was part of a small group of people assigned to troll and demoralize me. Their task included not only confronting a designated author but also mounting pressure on editors against publishing him.

I have several such experiences. That’s why my heart goes out to trollers, rather than their victims. The tragedy of trollers is that they are not free to think. No one who is a slave to any ideology, or prejudice, is a free or full human being.

When it comes to being human, anything less than being “full” is pathetic.

-Like two-thirds of a nose,
-Like half a mouth,
-Like one-tenth of brain.

A brain may be substandard, but it is still a complete thing. A mouth, likewise, may be ugly; but it is whole in itself. Short of this, both brain and mouth are bizarre.

Trollers are not free to think because thinking requires keeping an open, free mind. When anything is approached from a fixed, prejudiced standpoint, what the person concerned does is not thinking, but reacting in a mechanical or animal-like fashion. One of the essential conditions for thinking is realizing that the given situation is evolving. It is not complete at the instant time. You cannot condemn anything which is incomplete; for you know not what it really is.

To think is to seek. Seek what?

Tollers seek enemies where none exists. That is not seeking, but hunting. To be a hunter you don’t have to think; you only need skills, weapons and the killer instinct. In fact, you can’t hunt, if you think.

Trolling is symptomatic ofour growing incapacity to think. It portends a rising sociological epidemic.

Yet, it is thinking that distinguishes us from machines and animals. A computer can process data, but not think. An animal can respond to stimuli, but not think as human beings do. Thinking involves not only responding to the given stimuli or data, but also intuition about the emerging outcome and its relevance to the commonweal.

Those who are trolled are, compared to their tollers, in an enviable situation. Why should we pity them? We must admire them. They must deem themselves fortunate.

The trollers are like conditioned animals tied to a tree. The only scope of their compromised freedom is to bark and bite when a designatedvictimcomes within the radius of their fixation.

So, Zaira should not have apologized. She will learn that in due course. Let’s give her time. She, poor soul: nearly a child,barely sixteen years of age.

(Valson Thampu is former principal of St. Stephen’s College, Delhi)