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  Imagine peace through #hashtags

Imagine peace through #hashtags

Published : Mar 19, 2016, 6:29 am IST
Updated : Mar 19, 2016, 6:29 am IST

Mumbai-based advertising professional Ram Subramanian holds no bar when it comes to expressing his opinions.

Ram Subramanian
 Ram Subramanian

Mumbai-based advertising professional Ram Subramanian holds no bar when it comes to expressing his opinions. He is a social media activist and prefers to call himself an artivist (activism through art). His recent campaign on social media #profileforpeace has got a lot of attention worldwide. To stop the hate games on the field during the ongoing T20 World Cup, people are changing their profile pictures to the opponent team’s profile frame — for example —an Indian will put up a Pakistan team profile frame while a Pakistani will change her/his profile to an Indian team’s profile frame. The campaign was an immediate hit. So much so that Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook took notice and shared a post on his Facebook page.

Talking to us, Ram points out that he had been doing such campaigns since last year. “It started when Shiv Sena had problems with Ghulam Ali’s performance. I felt it was very wrong in our time and age, since it sent a message to the world that Mumbai was regressive. But I am not regressive and I din’t want somebody like them to speak up for me. I have a voice of my own and I can express it very well. So I decided to put up a picture with a little note on it saying I am from Mumbai, I am an Indian and I don’t hate Pakistan. I am not alone, there are many like me. I hashtagged it as #profileforpeace. I asked people if they agreed and if they did, then they could put up the same thing too. That campaign well extremely viral. More than 15 lakh people changed their profile picture on different social media platforms.”

Ram is of the opinion that Internet can bring about social changes. “These social media platforms give you the opportunity to be creative and express yourself any way you want to. And it gives people the idea that if you want to change something in the real world, you can express your views online — express dissent but in a polite way,” he says.

Talking about peace, Ram is convinced that it’s only a minority who prefer guns over peace. “We don’t really care about guns and s*** like that. We just want to do our jobs, come home, have a beer, go and meet friends, have a great life and move on. We don’t really need violence,” says the artivist.

Needless to say, he has had his share of belligerence from the trolls. “Initially it was a bit unnerving, but now I’m used to it. But then I also realised that all of these guys have fake profiles, 99 per cent of them are fake profiles actually. They are guys who are sitting without a job. It’s very bland, boring and devoid of logic, like airline food at best. So I try to avoid it.”

But this is not where Ram wants to end his campaign for peace. In the future, he suggests that the Facebook developers implement some ideas that he thinks might work wonders. He says, “I would request Facebook to make #profileforpeace a permanent fixture on Facebook, where a person from one country can wish the person from another country on their Independence day, or say, Eid. If I can change my profile picture to wish Pakistan on their Independence day and they can do the same for us, it will be a lovely feature which will promote peace and it will be numbers again, so the governments can actually see if the country is ready for it or not.”