The art of survival in a world of unknowing zombies

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 The art of survival in a world of unknowing zombies

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• We are living a zombie movie, influenced by reality: The author of this column describes the state of the world, the stories in mainstream news media and what seems to be going on, as a zombie movie.
• The reader is the hero: Every successful story or movie aspires to make the viewer identify with one of the main characters. Stories are all about the viewer and the viewer’s moral self-absorption. This one is no different. The reader of this column is the hero in this story. 
• Hero’s realization: The story’s hero realizes that everyone around is obsessed with developments that have little relevance to their lives, a depiction of what is happening indeed. For instance, Indian viewers are obsessed with the Sushant murder mystery. 
• One-liners: Despite following the story passionately, no one has much to say about it, a one-line description at best. It’s a global story but Indian characters have the unique quality of saying these one-liners in multiple languages. This indicates the accessibility and the scale of multiplication through word of mouth.
• Information one consumes is the virus: In real life, everyone consumes information from different sources (mobile, newspaper, phone screen etc.) and reacts differently to different kinds of information. This is how the author describes the virus in his zombie movie. Everyone contracts the virus from different interfaces and is susceptible to the virus in different ways. There are right-wing zombies, religious zombies, woke zombies. 
• The zombie inception: The hero, the reader, is not affected and is smart, lucky and sane. Just as people in real world are unaware of the subliminal impact of stories getting circulated and being talked about, everyone in the zombie movie thinks they are not affected. Thus, everyone in the zombie movie is a hero in a zombie movie. 
• Hero is the sane one: Friends and family share their fears with the heroes in respective zombie movies which further makes the heroes think they are the sane one in their movie. This is akin to discussions in real world where everyone thinks everyone else around is not in their right mind. 
• Degrees of susceptibility and transmission: Some people on different media can impact a large number of people who consume their content while some others impact far less people. Similarly, reaction and susceptibility of people who consume information and content differs. Heroes, in their respective movies, subscribe to the general view that intellectually superior people who consume knowledge everyday are less likely to pay attention and be impacted by the virus (stories being circulated in mainstream media).
• The solution: Heroes figure out that the infected need to be quarantined. But everyone is a hero and everyone thinks others are infected. In real life, this means everyone thinks others should not be believed, heard, or involved in interactions. No one would self-quarantine. So, heroes tweet their ideas to try and improve the condition but realize the more sense they make the smaller the number of people it reaches. They conclude the system is corrupt. Heroes keep fighting the good fight on social media and engage with other like-minded people but soon realize like-minded people are also infected. 
• The end: People give up eventually and end up lonely as they isolate themselves and refrain from any interaction with others. 
• Summary: The state of news media and the impact of its consumption is like a virus. Everyone thinks the virus is infecting everyone but them, and so they want to cure the world with their ideas. But since everyone thinks others are not in their right mind, everyone dismisses others and thinks less of them. Everyone eventually isolates themselves resulting in a world where everyone is lonely.

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