Over the moon

Uday Jhala and Karuna Ezara Parikh

At the end of a long night and just before the break of dawn, Delhi-based filmmaker Uday Jhala noticed all his friends pointing at a beautiful moon. That kick-started an inside joke between them and chiefly between him and Mumbai-based model and actor Karuna Ezara Parikh, until it dawned on the duo that this could become something more.

Then, on February 8, after a casual conversation, Parikh and Jhala started pointingatthemoon, an Instagram account that encourages netizens to click pictures of them, literally, pointing at the moon. And what may seem funny at the surface is, in fact, an appeal to time-strapped city slickers to take a moment and enjoy the simpler things in life. "We'd be sharing pictures among each other and wondered if others would be interested in it, too. So, we made an account out of curiosity and weirdly enough, we got over 100 followers overnight. People don't take the time out to do the little things anymore, so we thought it would be a sweet and positive thing to do," Parikh explains. Now that people are expressing interest, the duo is looking at using the account in more meaningful ways. For example, their post today is going to be someone pointing at the Delhi sky, where the moon is cloaked in a film of pollution - a comment on the city's neglected air quality.

A post from the Instagram page, pointingatthemoon

Which brings us to the role seemingly insignificant parties on social media can play in raising awareness. Elaborating on that, Jhala tells us, "It's really inspiring the way in which platforms like Instagram can connect people. Some people assume that social media is pointless and only for things like selfies, but one has to explain to them that incredibly moving stories also emerge from there."

Well, it's too soon to predict the handle's future, even for its kind founders, but all we can say at this moment is that we are truly over the moon

Log on to: instagram.com/pointingatthemoon/

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