Corona To Karuna, The Power Of Positive News!

Many of us have been working to have a curated KarunaVirus India website, which has 75+ stories of kindness from all across the country already live. It also supports hindi and other languages. In this backdrop, it was great to see Ferose's article on Livemint (with murmurs of the compassion bot!) (: Can positive news do the world a good turn?

Here's an excerpt ...

Every crisis brings out the best and the worst in human beings, maybe more of the latter. Unfortunately, the news cycle amplifies the negative news, an overdose of which leads to anxiety and depression. This intensifies when people are confined to their homes. The aftereffects of covid-19 on our mental health will remain way longer than the virus itself. Our basic instincts of hugging or kissing our loved ones, of shaking hands with strangers, will forever be altered. There’s a lot of negative energy on steroids going around—from television, social media and WhatsApp. The question is how do we break the cycle?

A few of us have been working on this challenge for years now, on a voluntary basis. We never thought it would take a virus for us to release our beta version to everyone, albeit abruptly, because we felt the need is right now. Karunavirus.org is a portal powered by the compassion bot (Note: Karuna is a Sanskrit word that could be translated as “compassionate action"—any action that is taken to diminish the suffering of others).

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For a start, we are experimenting with an entirely commercial-free operation. No ads, no solicitations, no promotions. It’s for the sake of good. We feel this will increase trust with readers and create a stronger feedback loop for a generative community. Moreover, we are piloting some technological innovations. In particular, a compassion bot. A machine-learning enabled algorithm that will learn the nuances of compassion, beyond sympathy and empathy. Initially, it will scour the web for good news, but we anticipate numerous further applications for it.
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To conclude, I feel happy to be part of this small attempt to ‘help’, as one of our friends nicely articulated recently.