It’s a chilly morning in December, December 9th to be more particular, and Shreetika is getting ready for the big day. She’s a little nervous but still on cloud 9 because it’s the day she had been looking forward for since years. And the day has finally come!
It was in the second year of MBBS at College of Medical Sciences in Bharatpur, when she realized that Sushil was more than just a friend. Their love story that started from the college was now about to turn into a fairy-tale happy ending, “…and they lived happily ever after”, after five long years. The girl from Baneshwor, Kathmandu and the boy from Gaidakot, Nawalparasi got married in Kathmandu.
Everything was going great and the two doctors were living a happy life until few weeks ago when they discovered that one of their pictures from the engagement ceremony that took place in November has gone viral and is all over the internet, without them having any knowledge of it.
Some of the memes that their picture had been turned into.
Their friends had started tagging them on the memes that had been made out of their picture, some of them even teasing them that they have become celebrities. But it was not a matter of joke. One of the most beautiful moments in their life had just been turned into a joke and people were laughing at it. It was not acceptable, it was not fair, everything about it was wrong, very wrong. But nothing could be done about it. It was not possible to report all of these memes to Facebook because they were all over the internet. They could not even go to the police to report cyber-bullying because they literally had no idea who to file a complaint against. And the most annoying part; what’s on the internet, will never be completely gone.
“I found it funny when I first saw a meme made out of our picture, but then suddenly there were so many of them all around the internet that I got worried. I felt like it shouldn’t have happened. It was a personal picture of a precious moment and it should have been left what it was”, Shreetika shared. “Even Sushil is upset about thing whole thing.”
With the increase in social media usage in recent years; these platforms have proved to be a boon in a number of ways but at the same time, they have become a curse at various occasions. The internet is filled with all kinds of people and there’s this kind of people that think that it’s completely okay to get random people’s private stuff and use them in any way they want to.
It’s time people start realizing that the virtual life too is a part of a person’s real life and what happens there will have a direct effect on their personal life. Picking someone’s personal photographs and stuff to use them in a way that might hurt them is not right. And it’s not only unethical, it’s equally illegal as well. Chetna Bhaya!
