Are facts, facts? This was a discussion which came up in a much circulated interview with filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri on an online news portal. Mr Agnihotri at some point did say facts are not facts, or as he put it "your clothes may be white, but your heart could be black", which is really a comment about perception, not facts. It was a revelatory response. We definitely find ourselves living in times of heightened subjectivity, where our own perceptions, prejudices and emotions take on a centrality and significance, allowing someone like Mr Agnihotri to send out Twitter calls for violence, murder and injustice with a certain relish, as if it were a video game he were in, not life.

It is an era of chimera where perception, or fantasies — negative and positive — take on the form of fact. It is a time and tendency marked by an election that featured holograms. When a university, not yet even built — the Jio Institute — was given the tag of an Institute of Eminence. A time when people hanker for blue ticks, one viral tweet making them feel a claim to significance. When one news story repeatedly plays across numerous platforms and hashtags create a hologram of reality which leaves out dozens of realities, allowing us to live in our self-justifying echo chambers.