"Women have a tendency of feeling a lot of guilt. We are always trying to be perfect in playing different roles, so I feel it is important to take time for yourself and do it without guilt. Even if women go for a spa session, most women are thinking 'Oh, I have to go pick my kids from school' or 'My husband must be coming home'.
"Women are constantly worrying about someone else... But it's okay to take time for yourself and do it without guilt," Deepika said at an event on 'Finding Beauty in Imperfection', organised by Ficci Ladies Organisation (FLO).
In a pristine white ensemble and with her hair neatly tied, Deepika gave a motivational talk on how she dealt with depression, and the work being done by her NGO The Live Love Laugh Foundation, which was founded in 2015 and deals with mental health issues.
What Deepika was not ready to talk about was the speculation around her November wedding to actor Ranveer Singh.
"I am certainly not answering this question... It's an extremely insensitive question to ask at an event like this," Deepika told a scribe who questioned about it.
However, the actress was at peace while she spoke how sharing her own experience of dealing with depression was life-changing for her.
"Sharing my experience with depression made me feel lighter. It was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders, I felt transparent with no fear of being judged," Deepika said, adding that it left her happier, more sensitive, aware, and with an understanding of how fragile life is.
One of the highest paid actresses of India, Deepika, who started her career with "Om Shanti Om" over a decade ago, says when she had come out to tell the world of her battle with depression, she didn't think of it as being "brave or revolutionary."
"I just felt that it was important for me to share something that was very personal to me, something that had changed my life, and something that I felt had a lot of stigma when I was experiencing it.
"I remember telling myself and all the people around me during my journey of recovery, and saying that if by sharing my story, I can even save one life... The purpose is that... Having this conversation is itself a huge step in that direction of change that our country really needs to see, and we are definitely headed in the right direction. But we have a long way to go," Deepika said.
She outlined the "big difference" between sadness and depression, and said while people suffering depression must be willing to seek help, those around them need to treat them with love and understanding.
It is easy enough to ridicule 'Satyameva Jayate'. God knows, it renders itself vulnerable to severe slamming. It wears its jingoistic patriotism on the sleeve and every other visible part of its canvas, growing more and more shrill with every frame and dialogue.
Yup, these kinds of tactless films get easily trolled, or stoned as we earlier used to refer to the savage lynching of crude cinema.
But hang on. "Satyameva Jayate"(SJ) is not designed for those who dug their grey cells into Newton and came out feeling like alumni on a space odyssey. This is a film for the masses, the commoners who everyday have to face discrimination and corruption on the streets where a lot of people don't just work but also live sleep and defecate.
Road rage for them is not about a dent in their gleaming cars. It's about survival.
For all its sins of loutish characterization and aural extravagance the film throws a very opportune question at us: why do we tolerate corruption in our system on such a hideously aggravated scale? Is corruption part of our DNA? The corruption in the police force, which this film, takes on headlong, is specially worrisome. If a society doesn't have law enforcers who do their jobs honestly, the law-breaks are bound to be on a rampage.
Early on in this lengthy anti-corruption diatribe swathed in a flag-fluttering fury, a street hawker's wife comes under a rich man's wheel. He moans, wails and pleads for justice while the cop on duty cackles and taunts, "You are trash and trash needs to be treated like this.
Too crass for your tastes? Well, let me tell you I've seen a cop react exactly this way to a destitute man's lamentation on the street. Truth can often be much cruder than fiction. The film takes that path without apology, as a disgruntled raging vigilante Veer(John Abraham, clenched and implosive) takes on himself the responsibility of eliminating all corrupt cops from the Maharashtra police.
I am not sure if Bihar, UP and other states are on Veer's mopping map in planned sequels. But for now he goes about the business of finishing off decadent cops with the zeal and guile of a clumsy assassin who has taken a crash-course in mass killing.
The ritualistic slayings are gruesome and in many ways, apt. That's the disturbing part of a film whose steep volume of violence ought to offend. But doesn't. The killings pile on and so does the outrageous level of grisly blood-flow. But you really can't blame the film for its excessive brutality when it is all around us. But yes, the bad acting by many of the actors, some reputed names, could have been avoided.
My favourite high-drama moment in the film is when a young Muslim boy is being tortured by a sadistic cop to confess to a crime he hasn't committed. The sequence is designed as a pseudo-religious symphony rendered shrill with religious zeal. Later there is a sequence in a Moharrum procession where John, fashionably bloodied, finishes off a lecherous cop.
The sequences of cop-killing are designed in bright voluptuous crimson colours. You can't miss the film's zeal or the persuasive powers of the two principal performances. John Abraham and Manoj Bajpai as the two adversaries play off against each other effectively. They know this is the time to drop all subtleties and they get to that task with full-on enthusiasm.
"As with any message bomb, it involves sending and receiving a specially crafted message with hidden symbols in between spaces. Tapping on a portion of the text will basically make the app 'expand' the hidden symbols, potentially overloading the app and even the OS," SlashGear reported on Sunday.
Such messages or "message bombs" are not new and not limited to Android. Even iMessage is not immune to bugs that could send the app crashing.
"There seem to be two variants of this WhatsApp message being forwarded. One involves an ominous black dot that comes with a warning on what will happen if you tap on it which most curious cats will do anyway," the report added.
Another "message bomb" which is causing the messaging platform to crash is more "nefarious, looks too innocent" and does not come with a warning.
The message includes special characters that do not display visibly but are used to change text behaviour.
A superfluous amount of these invisible symbols causes WhatsApp to freeze.
Facebook-owned WhatsApp has not commented on the potentially disruptive bug so far.
"For certain people, Snapchat enables them to overcome communication apprehension by using a different means of communication where they do not have a threat in their face. At the same time, there are people who are addicted to it," said graduate student J.J. Delacruz at Texas Tech University.
For the study, researchers recruited students in the College of Media and Communication through the department's Sona survey system, where students earn extra credit in certain classes for participating in online surveys.
They also administered the survey to those who responded to requests through TechAnnounce -- the official email announcement/communication method for Texas Tech University -- totalling almost 500 students altogether.
The survey asked students who use Snapchat about their reasons for using the medium, including needs and motivations.
It also asked about general social media use motivations, such as personality characteristics and what made them tend to gravitate toward Snapchat as a social medium. It also asked questions to help researchers analyse differences between males and females.
The brevity of Snapchat posts was a key factor for two big reasons.
One, people using Snapchat felt much more trustworthy with how they shared content with others. Two, because the content disappears quickly, users are able to share their lives and don't feel the pressure to present themselves in any extraordinary form -- they can just be their normal, real self, researchers said.
"They thought that was a good way to maintain ties with people they were already very close with, interpersonally," Delacruz said.
The researchers also mentioned that Snapchat can be a useful tool to help overcome apprehension about communicating on a public forum, it can also swing the other way and become addictive.
"Knowing their motivations would definitely help people who advise those with the addiction. It can help them have a better understanding of how to be confident and effective communicators," the graduate student added.
According to WABetaInfo, a fan site that tests new WhatsApp features early, the mobile messaging platform has moved closer towards introducing a 'Recall' feature.
With this feature, the users will be able to recall or unsend texts, images, videos, GIFs, documents, quoted messages and even status replies within a five-minute window, The Independent reported on Tuesday.
The messaging app will enable 'Recall' in version "2.17.30+" of the app. The current version of WhatsApp is 2.17.190.
"WhatsApp has added in beta the possibility to edit messages that you already sent. It is actually disabled by default and it's under development," an earlier WABetaInfo's tweet read.
The users will be able to edit only recent messages and not the old ones.
With 1.2 billion monthly active users, WhatsApp is available in more than 50 different languages around the world and in 10 Indian languages.
WhatsApp currently has 200 million monthly active users in India.
The Facebook-owned platform is also believed to be considering bringing back the old contacts list that vanished with the arrival of 'Status', but only for iPhone users.
"Security researcher Karan Saini found years-old messages in a file from a data archive obtained through the website from accounts that were no longer on Twitter," TechCrunch reported on Saturday.
Earlier Saini claimed to have reported a similar bug, found a year ago that allowed him to use a since-deprecated application programming interface (API) to retrieve direct messages even after a message was deleted from both the sender and the recipient.
Previously, Twitter allowed users to delete messages from the chat itself with the "unsend" feature but now, users are only allowed to remove messages from their own account.
"We are looking into this further to ensure we have considered the entire scope of the issue," the report quoted a Twitter spokesperson as saying.
As part of its privacy policies, Twitter notes that anyone wanting to leave the service can have their account "deactivated and then deleted" and after a 30-day grace period, the account, along with its data, disappears from the platform.
"But, in our tests, we could recover direct messages from years ago - including old messages that had since been lost to suspended or deleted accounts. By downloading your account's data, it is possible to download all of the data Twitter stores on you," the report said.
According to the report, Saini believes this is a functional bug rather than a security flaw.
"Saini told TechCrunch that he had concerns that the data was retained by Twitter for so long but argued that the bug allows anyone a clear bypass of Twitter mechanisms to prevent accessed to suspended or deactivated accounts," the report added.
This issue could expose users, particularly high-risk accounts like journalists and activists to governments, which could demand for data from years ago.
Asked if Twitter thinks that consent to retain direct messages is withdrawn when a message or account is deleted, Twitter's spokesperson had "nothing further" to add, the report noted.
Going against the stand of social media companies, professor V Kamakoti made the submissions before a bench of Justice S Manikumar and Justice Subramonium Prasad which is hearing a PIL seeking a direction to the authorities to link Aadhaar number with social media accounts of users for easy identification of accused in cyber crime cases.
Countering the contentions of the social media companies, especially WhatsApp, that the original sender of a post can never be traced since all the messages sent through the application were encrypted, Kamakoti said it was technically possible to add an identification tag to messages.
The bench then directed the professor and his team to file their views as a report by July 31 to enable the social media companies to submit their reaction and adjourned the matter to that date.
Internet Freedom Foundation, an intervenor in the PIL opposed the prayer for linking Aadhar numbers, saying any direction by the court in this regard could potentially restrict fundamental rights of over 600 million internet users from the country.
[caption id="attachment_327991" align="aligncenter" width="750"] Pic Credit- dazeinfo.com[/caption]
It also opposed the professor's suggestion that phone number of the original sender of a Whatsapp message be included whenever it was forwarded, saying it would raise concerns regarding privacy and free speech of internet users.
"Anonymity permits dissent and it can enrich public discourse by overcoming hierarchical structures present in the society which silence individuals based on caste, class, religion, gender, and sexual orientation," the foundation said in its affidavit.
Pointing out to the "#MeToo" movement through which many women anonymously posted their experiences of sexual violence, the foundation said if these women had to disclose their identity they would have been forced to remain silent to avoid social stigma and retaliation by the perpetrator.
(With PTI inputs)