The latest movie I watched was a big time flop. The food in the mess is literally crap. The dress she wore, oh god, she looked like a freak. I can’t tell you how lame he is.
Day in and day out, we speak, listen or play audience to such sentences, such that a time has come when we do not even realize it anymore. This week, I wish to address the concept of criticism and how it has engulfed our society and system of functioning without our realization.
Criticism is defined as the act of analyzing and evaluating and passing judgement about the merit of anything, often in a negative light. It is synonymous with fault finding, censure and condemnation. Now, criticism is not always a bad thing. Often, it aids in promoting and aiding the one undergoing it on a path towards betterment. In the world of today, there exist professional critics in various fields, inclusive of food, music, movies, sports and more. But the sad thing to note is how quickly we ourselves these days are willing to judge and jump to negative conclusions about every small matter that rises up.
Taking for example, the movie reviews of the weekly new releases in the cinemas. Maybe the standards have dropped down a bit or maybe society’s expectations have risen up, but I have personally seen people these days who just wait for a movie to get released so that they may begin their criticism on the acting cast, the storyline, the producer, down to the makeup artists and costume designers too. There have been numerous movies in the past year that have received rock bottom ratings but on watching them, I realized that they do not deserve that scoring and rating. The main problem is that these days, people do not go watch movies with the entertainment purpose in mind first. There is a critic’s eye developed that instantly finds every possible fault in every possible scene that is later telegraphed to everyone else via the widespread social networks of today.
Similarly, coming down to music, fashion, dressing, sports and almost anything and everything under the sky, people these days have forgotten the essence of enjoying things and people for what and who they are rather have become machines seeking perfection. Criticism does not only contribute to pull ratings down or discourage, rather criticism in some cases can be very fatal in demotivating and may be the cause of depression and other psychiatric and psychological conditions.
Therefore we must remember one thing, before turning a critical eye towards anyone or anything, we should first observe ourselves. Everyone has flaws and everything has it’s minor glitches and faults; and therefore so do we. How would we feel if someone was to look at us and judge us based on those flaws and criticize us? Also, the things or people we criticize, do we have it in us to do better at that which we criticize?
We live in a society, and unity and support is key. Therefore, live in peace, appreciate efforts and be critical only when it is helpful and useful to aid someone’s development and betterment, and the judging and negative energy needs to be abolished lest we end up with a new generation of misguided, demotivated, discouraged and wayward young people.
If you have any comments, queries, criticism or points to add, you are welcome to write to me on [email protected] or [email protected].
You are certainly patient and awesome having read the article up to this point, now go ahead, criticize me ! 😉
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