The unkindly intelligent.

The denotative and connotative meanings of words have experienced a distinct semantic shift in this age of our too much exposure to digital screen. Great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy says: 'The more intelligent a person is, the more he discovers kindness in others.' As every technological revolution catalyses transformative changes in man, today to be intelligent means to be remorselessly sharp, clever and manipulative for personal advancement. Or rather to be best put, intelligence is Francis Bacon's simulation and dissimulation.

Simulation is pretending what one is not and dissimulation is hiding what one really is. Today people use all their brain energy and life time in order to appear what they are not, and hide what they actually are. By a little stretch of ethics, it can be diagnosed as hypocrisy. To be what we really are is the summum bonum of real intelligence.

Though simulation and dissimulation lends the person a momentary saccharined elation of victory over others through a smoke screen, actually it creates hollowness that grimaces at us in loneliness. Wasif Ali Wasif, a great thinker and writer of many books, says: 'The blessed is the one who transforms his loneliness into solitude.' Semantically, loneliness bears negative connotation while solitude, positive one.

The socials (hypernym for social media and small video apps) have overexposed our youth to the digital screen, and consequently deprived them of blissful moments of mindfulness. The fear of missing out (FOMO) and addictive scrolling digital pages up and down have turned mind into a galloping horse. The fidgeting itch to hanker after knick-knacks of information without chewing the cud to assimilate what has been learnt makes our youth in the digital world 'information nomads' who lose their moorings in the realm of mindfulness, and develop blindspots of self-knowledge.

The lure of digital world dehumanises the users of digital screen that they end up becoming the epitome of Machiavellian cunning amorality: the end justifies the means. The digital landscape is deluged with misinformation...