Hi Nandini,

First, I think take the many, many comments about how ‘people mourn differently’ with a giant handful of salt, because here’s the thing: people who do this self-promotional grieving on social media aren’t mourning. They’re participating in an already stunted dialogue between those who live in a bubble of hashtag activism and themselves. So, everyone can just spare the equalizer argument about letting them mourn. I’m sorry but I’ve seen these people, spoken to them, taught them and watched them brush it off with generic tautologies about how the world is what it is and platitudes about how governments/individuals/society/military isn’t doing enough to save anyone and hence, it’s just a dark age…blah. It. Just. Doesn’t. Help.

But the reason I came to comment here was also that just yesterday, I deleted the apps for Instagram, Facebook and Twitter (these are the only ones I’m on atm) because after reading the truly disturbing news from Pakistan about the social media star who was brutally murdered by her brother “for honor”, I went into a spiral of negativity and felt the now less-intense pangs of depression (diagnosed after my father’s untimely demise last year) and mood swings courtesy of personality imbalance, and I thought to myself, I can’t do this to myself any more, because I’m not able to help, and I’m not helping myself in the process. And when I saw your article headline in my e-mail, granted, I thought it was going to be something else, but I clicked on it nevertheless and I have to say, I feel better now that I’m a little bit away from the peripheral chatter about everything that is wrong with our world today, and can concentrate on my immediate reality without the guise of ‘sending prayers’. I mean, let’s face it, my prayers aren’t reaching anyone, are they? People are still killing people, and they won’t stop on my no-matter-how-moving cyber expression.