Can Twitter Change The Way India Works?

I recently participated in an interesting panel discussion on “Can Twitter Change The Way India works?” organised by IndiaTC. The panelists were Abhijit Dasgupta, Subrata Sen, Abhishek Rungta, Aniruddha Chatterjee and Arun Agrawal (yours sincerely) 😛 It was very efficiently compered by Simarprit Singh.

We had a hotly debated discussion with Abhijit and Subrata pretty much disillusioned by the young generation who would endlessly tweet (as in chat) but not take up a serious stand on the really important things that matter to the ‘India cause‘. Add to this the fact that there are less than 20000 Twitter users in India out of a total population of more than a billion. Looks like a really uphill battle.

On the other hand, Abhishek, Abhijit and I felt that we are definitely making small impact to the society by sharing our notes on Cricket, Politics and Movies (CPM – a term coined by Simar) and by acting as whistleblowers on corruption by tweeting when we find a deficiency in someone’s service or attitude.

Can we make a difference to the way India works? If you are talking about being able to change the way India works or the way India works, well no. But as one audience member put it – we are definitely making a small impact. And if we can change just one thing, we can consider repeating that performance over and over and soon, we will find people taking note and changing. This is the way big revolutions were started.

My message to you is – when you see something nice, appreciate. When you see something bad, complain – loudly. Share with your friends and Twitter followers. Some will take notice and you will be causing an impact – however small. And you will be pleased you did.