Smoke + Mirrors

Some of you might recognise this phrase (or, as it was stylised to be) from 2015’s Imagine Dragon’s sophomore record. Smoke and mirrors is a classic technique used in the anterior times by magicians and charlatans alike to conjure a theatrical effect. Stemming from this practical use, the phrase came into popular use and was used to refer the obscurity of information with misleading information. Today, the magicians and the charlatans may have disappeared (pun not intended), but the term has sticked in modern times, now ever more than before.

Just have a look at the information fed to us by news agencies; if one can even call that news. I was recently joking with a friend how InShorts, the news app had gradually become a source for hilarious gossip and rumours, far from the native business model of it being an app with terse and concise news content. Or the the agenda-driven, pathetically biased media which has moved to shape our views in its own image, just in the time when we need our minds and our thoughts to be emancipated, freed of any orthodoxy.

This problem of lies and deceits, however, is not restricted to the bigger picture here. In fact, this shady game is played none more so by ourselves, everyday, at a much personal level. Ask yourselves a question, how many times have you lied, or simply screened the truth from someone in the past week? Did that question make you uncomfortable given the sheer enormity of that number? Or, was it the fact that you don’t even remember them, that you are so adept at looking someone in the eye and lie that it does not even pervert your soul anymore?

So when you’re done with the introspection, I hope you understand how we’ve become a part of a grim, superficial culture. We need to reflect upon us as a society, stop us from being a diabolical mirage of what we used to be. And what you give to the society, is what you get back from it. So start today and stop living a life of smoke and mirror, but one with even the slightest bit of glimmer.