Your Call Is Important To Us

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

It was one of those weeks when the bad news just wouldn’t stop. However, one major event weighed heavily on everyone’s mind and ended up overshadowing everything else. An event which-years from now-will be considered the final nail in the coffin of life as we currently know it. An event which will be remembered as the starting point of the sordid state our future lives will be in. We are now marching towards the sort of nightmarish existence that all of our favourite ‘dystopian lit’ authors warned us about. The die has been cast, all the ducks are in a row and tyranny is knocking on our doorsteps. But enough about the elevation of Narendra Modi as his party’s campaign chief.

Earlier this week, whistleblower Edward Snowden and journalist Glenn Greenwald-confirming a lot of people’s vague suspicions and breathing life into a thousand conspiracy theories-released documents which revealed how deep the tentacles of the secret intelligence agencies of the US government are embedded inside the global communication system. They ‘allegedly’ monitor every text, every email, every chat, every phone call, every tweet, every ‘like’ on Facebook, every to-do list, every post-it note, every game of scrabble and every entry in your journal. (Even the ones that come with a lock. All the government wants to know is why you would not want to share your most personal, darkest, and most revolting thoughts with the rest of the world. What are you, an enemy of the state?)

The only groups of people rejoicing this news are (a) lonely people who finally have someone who is listening to them all the time and (b) the sycophants of the surveillance state. The people belonging to the second group are always excusing the government’s violation of citizens’ privacy with “if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t be worried.” But then these people never practice what they preach and don’t make all their personal information available publicly. WHAT ARE THEY HIDING?

Monitoring every activity of every citizen does not make us safer; it makes us more vulnerable. You may think you’re doing nothing wrong right now, but what happens when the state decides that something you do every day is now illegal or equivalent to treason. For example, what if they made googling “UPA Government + Achievements” a punishable offence? (Though the joke would be on them because they don’t have any, unless you consider ‘giving Manmohan Singh an ulcer’ an achievement). Binayek Sen was jailed by the Chhattisgarh government for possessing reading materials that were considered ‘sympathetic’ to the naxalite cause. In Iran in 2009, the government arrested, jailed and tortured thousands of protestors belonging to the Green Movement on the basis of their internet activity and GPS data placing them at the scene of the protests.

No politician or bureaucrat goes around wearing a “lose your freedom now, ask me how” button. Allowing a government to put their citizens under surveillance without any oversight will never end well. All the information they possess can and will be used against you. Being able to keep tabs on every movement of their citizens is the wet dream of most governments. Once you start giving up your freedom, there is no limit to what can be taken away in the name of ‘national security.’

Even the Indian government is working on a central control system which will be able to monitor its citizen’s activities across all communication networks. People who can’t get their shit together to make a website strong enough to let more than one person book a train ticket at a time are going to keep track of all our personal information. It’s totally not going to be misused because if there is one thing government departments in India are known for, it’s their ability to keep important information secure! Somewhere outside the big government office in the sky, standing in a line waiting for lunch break to be over, a dozen RTI activists are nodding in agreement.

As the leaked documents show, the NSA doesn’t even have to go through the formality of seeking a court order to access anyone’s personal information. They don’t even have to ask or inform the service provider because they have direct access to their systems. And they can do that for people who they don’t even suspect of any wrongdoing.

This march, the NSA collected ninety seven billion pieces of evidence from computer networks worldwide, six billion of those gathered from India.

We’re all now citizens of the surveillance state. Being a terrorist until proven innocent is the new normal

Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

Goodbye Privacy; We Hardly Knew Ye

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Recently, internet overlord google announced that its going to allow a lucky few the privilege of paying fifteen hundred dollars to be able to get their hands on a pair of google glasses, as long as they write a fifty word essay - encapsulating their desperation for owning something no one else has - in fancy jargon. That’s because a new device isn’t “in demand” or “cutting edge” enough unless it’s creators treat potential customers like an abusive spouse treats their victim. You’ll never be good enough, y’hear? I don’t know what’s worse: that there are people willing to debase themselves to receive the momentary validation of owning the next big thing or that a fifty word paragraph is now considered an essay? Somewhere in hell, my third grade English teacher is shaking her head in horrid disapproval. (I assume that she’s in hell because she never returned any pen she ‘borrowed’ and dead because she’s not on Facebook). 

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about because you get all your tech news from that studious cousin who helped create your email account, google glasses are like normal glasses except they can do everything your smartphone can do. Like make calls, reply to instant messages and tweet sepia-toned pictures of your food. In a few years, all those douchebags who have loud conversations in public because they insist on wearing a bluetooth headset everywhere they go will be replaced by assholes shouting things at their glasses because the damn thing won’t understand their fake accent 

I bet everyone is looking forward to using another device which you can buy but not own because for you to be able to use it to its full potential you need to provide its manufacturer with your personal information. What other choice do we have, really? Not use a device? Pffft! Send an ‘inland letter’ instead of an email? Too slow! Learn to write on paper? Whatever, grandpa. If you can’t trust a huge corporation bent upon monetizing every moment of your existence then who can you trust?

Not wanting to be left behind, our governments are also coming up with new ways to keep tabs on the public. For example,  one of the world’s largest defence contractor in conjunction with the US government has developed a new software that can gather and analyze all the information about a target from every social networking website in a matter of minutes. The software is sophisticated enough to help its user(s) gather detailed information about the person they’re spying on. They can know who their target’s friends are, the places they frequent, photographic evidence which places them at a particular spot at a specific point of time and the amount of sugar they like in their coffee. But that’s okay, because they’re only going to make us safer, aren’t they? It’s not like they will misuse their access! When has anyone in government ever used their position for their personal benefit? You worry too much!

If we were living in an 80’s dystopian movie, this would be the point at which Arnold Schwarzenegger would finally discover what was really going on and would have to kill a large number of people and destroy a couple of big warehouses to save the world from the Orwellian hell it had wrought upon itself.

We teach our young not to talk to strangers on the street but don’t even think twice about giving up our personal information to someone on the internet. Networks get hacked; storage devices get lost and every embarrassing photograph is ‘two degrees’ away from being turned into a meme.

And google glasses make it easier to invade another person’s privacy. Now you don’t even need to tell anyone that your glasses are instantly broadcasting everything to the internet. Who needs permission when you can share pictures of that weird couple by the bar with ten thousand of your closest friends?

In the future, everyone will have their fifteen minutes of being mocked by the internet. One day you crash a party full off college kids and someone takes a picture of you trying to recapture the glory of your younger days by butt chugging a keg of beer and instantly uploads it to Facebook where a large number of websites pick it up and every low-life on the internet tries to make themselves famous at your expense.  By the next morning, you lose your job because you told your boss that you had to leave work early to visit your sick grandmother, your girlfriend breaks up with you because no one wants to associate with a global laughing stock and the police arrest you for lewd public behaviour while every sanctimonious anchor on teevee tut-tuts at your plight.

Now please excuse me as a large man with a pronounced Austrian accent who broke down my door just told me to get to the chopper.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Free Speech

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Most of the time, whenever someone talks about supporting free speech in this country, they always end up following it with a qualifier. “I’m all for free speech, but we need to have some restrictions!” Even the constitution does the same thing. You can have freedom of speech and expression, but within reasonable restrictions. And that’s where the problem begins, when we leave those ‘reasonable restrictions’ up for interpretation. With each successive generation, the ‘reasonable restrictions’ keep expanding while the space for free speech & expression keeps getting narrower. You can take a walk in this park and get some fresh air, as long as you also breathe in all the toxic smoke coming in from the factory next to it.

This has been a banner year for all the free speech restrictionists. Whether it involves preventing writers from speaking at literary festivals, or stopping artists from displaying their wares. They even managed to turn something as mundane as posting something on the internet into an act of civil disobedience. Free speech is one of those things which are defined by absolutes. Either speech is free or it’s restricted. When you add a qualifier, it’s an invitation for other people to do the same.

The Internet has been one of the biggest battlefields in the war on free speech. Recently, when a couple of young adults were arrested for posting harmless updates on Facebook, the Minister of Communication and ‘India’s nanny,’ Kapil Sibal, said that he was quite saddened by the misuse of the IT act. He was shocked that a law put in specifically to suppress dissent, was being used to suppress dissent. That’s like putting a ‘for rent’ sign outside your house and then wondering where all the prospective tenants came from. He didn’t start the fire, he just wrote a vague piece of legislation which could be widely interpreted and misused even by those who apply the law using the most stringent standards. When you don’t trust another party with the law you’ve made, then there is something wrong with your law. You don’t leave the door to the henhouse wide open and then get to pretend that you could never even imagine that the fox would go inside.

People like Dr. Eyebrows would like you to believe that the internet is one huge quagmire of filth from which they need to protect the innocent and the impressionable. They portray the internet as some huge lawless wasteland where anything goes; a wild, wild west where duels are fought by drowning your opponent in a quick stream of sarcasm and won by the first person to be compared with Hitler. They don’t use the internet themselves so they imagine it to be somewhat of a virtual Bangkok where temptation lurks in each corner.

What they conveniently miss is the Internet’s ability to correct itself. Most of the properties in this so called wasteland are owned by huge corporations whose interest resides in removing malicious content. Even Reddit, the ‘Uttar Pradesh’ of the internet, has removed content deemed inappropriate or malicious.

Of course our elected representatives are not big on discussions. They spend all their life shouting over each other, whether in Parliament or on teevee.

But what about us?

Free speech doesn’t just involve being able to say what you want. It also means being able to say what you want without being intimidated to take it back. It involves being able to write a book without being placed on the wrong side of an angry mob. Free speech means being able to question a national celebration of death without being questioned about your patriotism. It involves being able to have a character in your movie call a city by any name you want. Free speech means not throwing a tantrum on national teevee because someone on the internet was mean to you. It involves being able to hear things you don’t like, no matter how angry it makes you. Free speech means keeping all your ‘hurt sentiments’ to yourself.

I, for one, think that people need to be more tolerant of other’s opinions.

Hey, if you don’t believe me, ask all the people I blocked on twitter.

Then We Came To The End

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Looking through the small window of his cottage, as he saw the sun set, he couldn’t help but think of it as a metaphor for his own career. He turned to look at the Gandhi Topi on his dresser and sighed wistfully. A year ago at this time, he was the most popular man in the country. People couldn’t have enough of him! Everyone wanted to talk to him, touch him, seek his blessings, and name their children after him. Now they sneer at him when they pass him on the street. Last year, every self-important news anchor hung on his every word. They flew hundreds of miles and then waited for hours in the unforgiving heat without any of the creature comforts they were used to, just to interview him for ten minutes. Now they don’t even pick up his call. This country will rue the day they stopped supporting him. Until then, he will not let anyone know how heartbroken he really is. He will not let them have the satisfaction of knowing that these days, instead of surveying the village to find people to beat up, he spends his mornings curled up in the corner of his hut listening to Adele on his iPod and his nights curled up on his bed watching re-runs of Gilmore Girls, while binging on large gallons of ice-cream. Public display of emotion is an acceptable course of action only for women or people from weaker castes. Not for people of his stature.  

For a large part of last year, India was forced to pay attention to lessons on how to practice democracy from a tiny, Gollum-shaped tyrant - who lorded over his village like it was his personal fiefdom - called Anna Hazare. As he rode the Let’s Do Something Express to his first fast at Jantar Mantar, Hazare captured the nation’s imagination. If there is one thing India loves, its leaders who promise to bring about change without us having to lift a finger. You can clean up a mess without getting your hands dirty! Anybody who agrees with our totally unbiased assessment - that the main problem in this country is other people - is fit to lead us onto the light. Remember when our favourite mode of protest was sending people ‘get well soon’ cards because we saw some guy doing that in a movie? Yeah, good times! I bet our freedom fighters feel really stupid for sacrificing their lives when, instead of participating in a sustained, peaceful campaign spanning decades they could have driven the British out by simply liking the ‘Free India’ page on Facebook or sending abusive tweets to British leaders on Twitter. What a bunch of amateurs!

The Anna Hazare led anti-corruption movement reached its peak last August when for about two weeks everything in the country seemed to revolve around its leader. People were forced into ‘spontaneous’ protests of solidarity all over the country in which they took to the streets wearing official Anna-themed swag. No one appeared to be bothered by the fact that passing a law to create a bloated bureaucracy to keep a check on another bloated bureaucracy seemed a tad wasteful. Who has time for nuance when you’re promised that all you have to do to help eradicate corruption from the country is to spend a couple of days participating in a procession whose only task is to arbitrarily march to the nearest television camera while shouting slogans proclaiming the superiority of ‘Bharat Mata’ over other lesser countries who do not have the privilege to be born of such divine parentage. Some cities even saw people dressed as famous freedom fighters of yore proclaiming that this nation full of pure, incorruptible people being made to suffer because of a few dozen bad apples who also happen to be our elected representatives. Like most politicians being investigated by the CBI, the people of this country gave themselves a ‘clean chit.’

The government responded in the same way it reacts to every situation: doing something rash after the initial panic sets in, then denying that anything is wrong at all and that they were not responsible for any steps taken by the so called ‘independent agencies.’ Afterwards, as slow acceptance creeps in that a problem really exists, they go ahead and suddenly capitulate to the demands of whoever is holding them hostage. The opposition parties ceded their space to the crypto-fascist from Ralegan Siddhi and then tried to hijack the issue with such hilarious shamelessness that it made them even less relevant.    

However, with great popularity comes even greater scrutiny. A few days after his ascension as the India’s newest saviour, the country watched in horror as Hazare revealed himself to be less the ‘new Gandhi’ and more of ‘an embarrassing cranky old family member who always says inappropriate, bigoted things in front of dinner guests.’ As the country was exposed to Hazare’s gratuitous opinions - Childless women are barren! People who drink should be beaten up within an inch of their life! Vigilante justice is probably the best thing since sliced bread! – it began to fall out of love with him. Of course, the people around him knew exactly what sort of a person he was (them and everybody else with basic Google skills), but that didn’t stop them from fostering this fossil on all of us. Team Anna doesn’t want to stop corruption. They’re more interested in promoting themselves and selling their books and other official merchandise like Hazare’s patented beat-a-drunk genuine leather belt. Which is why now they’re launching their “political party,” which will tell you which candidates you should vote for in the next general election. It’ll be like Yelp, but even less useful.

As Hazare’s public image deteriorated, so did the attendance and popularity of his subsequent ‘road shows.’ They flopped more miserably than a Harman Baweja movie. His latest protest was such a non-event that Kiran Bedi took to twitter to literally beg celebrities and/or ‘senior’ television journalists to show up. The best they could get was Indian television’s laughs-a-lot-lady and her husband, Whatishisname. Shockingly, no one really wants to hitch a ride on a sinking ship.

As Hazare aimlessly walks around his small hut, he feels like a defeated man. Played like a piano by forces superior to him. Abandoned and desolate, constantly wearing a forlorn expression. Then, suddenly, he hears a knock on the door. He ignores it. What’s the point, anyway? But the persistent knocking continues. “Anna,” says the person behind the door, “I’m from Magazine X. And I have a few questions.”  He wipes the tears off his face and runs to the door. When he opens it, he sees nothing but an empty wasteland. Another hallucination! He’d been having a lot of them these days. Then, he walked outside into the darkness, letting it engulf him.

Don’t break my glass house, bro!

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Everybody’s favourite failed state and South Asia’s #1 source of terrorism and the sort of music which makes you want to rip your heart out, throw it in the air and shoot it with an AK-47 just to make yourself feel better, was having a ‘crisis of democracy’ again. Pakistan has had more crises of democracy than the number of dossiers the Indian government has sent them.

The Pakistani Supreme Court thought that the best way to preserve democracy was to kick it in the nuts and bloody it’s face with a sledgehammer. Prime Ministerial careers were dying faster than a North Korean rocket. Just like a superhero franchise losing popularity, Pakistan rebooted its government and appointed a new – allegedly corrupt – Prime Minister. What are the odds! If a guy who looks like Ratan Tata mated with Killer Khalsa cannot restore the trust of the people in democracy, I don’t know who can.

Speaking of failed states, Greece, the birthplace of democracy and toga parties, also got over it’s weird Nazi phase and elected a semi-coherent government. Since the new government is made of coalition partners diametrically opposed to each other, this bodes well for the Euro. Because if there is one thing coalition governments are good at, it’s taking tough, unpopular decisions.

Which brings us to Egypt. For the first time in modern history, Egypt has an almost-popularly elected President who is not beholden to the army. Since he belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, right wing nutjobs all over the world are wetting their pants in both fear and gleeful anticipation depending on their chosen theocracy of allegiance. Are you saying that a ruthless dictator supported by the United States who was lording over a middle eastern country with an iron hand and who – among other things suppressed religion, and was overthrown by a revolution led by young people – has been replaced by religious parties? If only history had given us some indication that this would happen!

People presume that just because they ‘liked’ that photo of all the people gathered in Tahir Square and re-tweeted actual revolutionaries, that they have a say in who Egypt elects as President. They don’t! It’s like we’re telling them, Hey Egypt, you can have a democratically elected President as long as we get to approve who it is! Even if the new government goes south very soon, having had even a small say in the policies of the government which lords over them is a big step. The old system is not going to give way so easily. And democracy is not something you get right from the get-go. You’re always striving to be better at it. Democracy is the ability to choose which road you want to pave with your good intentions while you lazily saunter towards hell.

Back home in India, we still continue to try different combinations even after sixty four years. Our current head of government is a man who started playing ‘statue’ when he was five years old and till this day ignores everyone who asks him to ‘stop.’ The last President of America did not know his way around a pretzel. Democracy in Pakistan has had more false starts than a Scooter manufactured in the 80’s. Even people in Greece behave like amateurs when you send them to the voting booth. 

Dictatorships are like the iPhone. They may look good and have a controlled environment nearing perfection, but the slave labour required to achieve such a state remains invisible. Democracy is like Android. It’s messy, it’s chaotic, and nobody who makes it agrees with each other and it’s always in need of improvement.

Electing religious parties to government is not all that bad. Many countries have had governments led by parties which have religion deeply embedded into their DNA. It’s not like these governments started killing members of other . . .  

Uh-oh.

Be afraid, Egypt.

Be very afraid.

No privacy please, we’re Indian

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

On a brave January morning in the fifty-fifth year of the last century, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Poschim Bongo witnessed a miracle that would change its future forever. The clouds parted, the birds lined up in the sky as if practicing for a parade and the guy who plays the background music during such occasions put on some Rabindra sangeet. The stork responsible for delivering Bengali babies punched in his card and began to start making his deliveries. When he reached his workstation, he saw that the first baby he was to deliver was giving a fiery speech to the other babies around her who were crying and peeing in appreciation. He tried to get the baby to stop talking so that he could get on with his day but the baby threatened to go on a cerelac-strike until the conditions in the baby producing machines were not improved. After 26 hours of hard negotiations, the stork was finally able to deliver the baby. While the Gods watched this journey live on GodTube, they all nodded in agreement that this baby was one day going to lead her people onto the light. Then they all went back to their day job playing supporting characters in Rajnikanth movies.

Flash-forward to 2012. The fiery baby has now turned into the chief minister of Poschim Bongo. You can recognize her thanks to her old-school tantrums. Some things never change! This week she committed the most egregious crime in the history of the world; she tried to punish someone for posting stuff to the internet. How dare she! Didn’t our politicians get the memo? You can lie, cheat, steal, rape, pilour our taxes, bend the rules for your own personal benefit, but don’t you dare try to take away our ability to make semi-amusing jokes about you or we’ll treat you the same way the United Nations Security Council treats rogue countries who repeatedly violate international law: send you a strongly worded letter requesting you to stop.

Governments in this country have always tried to censor its citizens under one lousy pretext or another. They passed a draconian act making themselves kings of the internet, even though they did not need a new law to stifle dissent. Whether it is through tax raids or humiliating enforcement directorate ‘interrogations’ or using their stooges in the media to brand someone ‘anti-national’ to negate their criticism, they love making examples of people who ‘cross the line’ so that others self-censor themselves. However, their old methods of censorship are useless on the internet. Even if they manage to get something removed from a particular website, it will pop-up at a dozen other websites. Just like you can’t keep an alcoholic away from his drink no matter how many ‘dry-days’ you announce, you cannot keep information hidden on the internet from those who seek it.

Since they can’t get rid of the content, they do the next best thing. Punish the person who posted or shared it. And like with everything else they don’t understand, they try to ban it. The commitment of our government and government departments to make things difficult for legitimate users of things never falters. Simplicity is for countries with a weak digestive system. Tough countries complicate everything beyond recognition. If you like it then you can’t put a ring on it. A few people have a drinking problem? Raise the permissible age limit to get a drink to a number so high that it only makes sense to a person too drunk on power. Some people are using paypal and other online payment services to cheat on their taxes? Ban paypal. Are service providers refusing to share information about every user citing privacy concerns? Threaten to terminate their services until they budge. Privacy in India is treated with the same contempt that is usually reserved for an uninvited dinner guest who likes to share details of his bowel moments while everybody else is eating.

And if they can’t find any real reason to censor something, then they can go back using their most faithful excuse. National security. Those two words are a pre-emptive strike against every question. Sorry buddy, we need access to all your emails, text messages, tweets, facebook status updates and details about every second you spend on the internet. What do you mean your privacy is important to you? National security, boss. What are you, some kind of communist? Or a terrorist supporting liberal hippie? Privacy is for important people whose drivers accidentally record them in compromising positions. Not for schmucks like you.

Now please excuse me while I politely deal with this nice police officer at my front door who wants to know why I was using ‘private browsing’ between 4 and 5 am last Friday.

See you next week.

I hope.

Constructing the Self — Social Media Style

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Ever since ‘deposed American President’ Al Gore “invented” it in the early 90s, the Internet and its early adopters have had an almost spousal relationship. From spending only an hour or two with each other every day in the beginning, to sleeping in separate rooms so as to give each other some ‘space.’ And thanks to the advent of social media, this married couple has been able to spice up its relationship through the magic of role-playing.

You can be a loser in real life, but you don’t have to play one on Facebook. It lets you showcase your life like you’ve always wanted other people to see it. Like a dystopian regime, you can simply edit out any unfortunate events that don’t fit the narrative that you have established for yourself and pretend that they never happened. Your life is simply one ginormous vacation spent making silly poses (ironically, of course!) in picturesque locations. You’re not currently stalking the object of your unrequited feelings; your relationship with them is ‘complicated.’ No, you never went to your friend’s bachelor party when you called in sick to work as you made sure your friends never ‘tagged’ you in any photograph. If you didn’t mention it on Facebook, then it probably never happened. Just because you use your real name, it doesn’t mean that anything about you has to be real.

And twitter is for exploring different parts of your personality. You’re not a jack of all trades; you’re an “exbert.”  As long as you don’t say what you really think. Because do you really want people to know that you really care about normal human things? Haha, you’re so naive! Human emotions are for people on Orkut!

When the car bomb outside the Israeli embassy went off, the detectives on twitter had already solved the case even before the Delhi Police could begin ignoring all the clues and the central government could briefly wake up from its slumber to ‘strongly condemn’ the perpetrators. The exberts on twitter KNEW who exploded the bomb! It was Iran! No, it was Israel! Who are you kidding, it was probably America! Nay, it was our arch-enemy and future ‘foreign hand hall of fame’ inductee, Pakistan. Or maybe it was Xenu, the overlord of scientology who finally came back to collect all our souls and bury them in another earth like planet so we could repeat the same mistakes on another celestial body trillions of years from now.

Later in the week, the twittersphere went from playing the protagonist of a Tom Clancy novel to pretending to be a cynical bastard. Everyone seemed to have finally discovered that Valentine’s day is a ploy by stuffed white teddy bears to infiltrate every house in the world so that they can learn our secrets and then threaten us into submission and slavery. People were more than eager to display their non-affiliation to a hallmark holiday. Unfortunately, it was all for nought as the only people talking about valentine’s day were the ones who had vowed, a day before, to stay away from all social media because they did not want to be overwhelmed by the sappy sentimentalism of the pro-valentines day movement  Twitter seemed to have been turned into a pageant with everyone vying for the title of ‘most ruthless takedown of love & relationships.’ The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Twitter is also for pretending to be someone ‘in the know.’ Take a widely circulated rumour, refer to it in ambiguous terms, mention a person or entity in power and viola, you are a bona fide insider! That is because people will believe anything about the object of their abject hatred.

When someone follows you or becomes your friend on a social networking website, they’re not really actually following you. They’re following the idea of you. The persona you have created online. The one which masks your sanctimony in mildly amusing jokes and links to a wide variety of interesting things. The persona which supports equality and outrages when someone somewhere says something inappropriate. The persona which says and does all the right things.

When you tweet with this false sense of security, your mask begins to slip and your tweets starts to reflect the real you. And you're oblivious to it, like the emperor is oblivious to his new clothes. People play along with your created image, praising your threads, when in fact, all they're doing is sniggering at the size of your dong.

The old king is dead; long live the new king

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

As most revolutionaries will confess, the hardest part in a revolution comes after you’ve actually gotten what you asked for. A large number of them turn into the very people they sought to displace. Perhaps, letting them make the same mistakes as their erstwhile oppressors is nature’s way of extracting comeuppance.

In its iconic 1984 Superbowl ad, Apple sought to challenge the staid dominance of the personal computing industry by ‘big brother’ IBM. It promised to bring colour to the stifling assembly line world of all grey. Apple won that shakeout and in a few years, went on to dominate the industry. When Apple became the oppressor, it was challenged by Microsoft. Like a nagging spouse, history repeated itself and Microsoft became the market leader by ushering in cheap personal computers which were easy to use and accessible to a large swath of the population. When Microsoft tried to use its dominance of the personal computing market to try to control the Internet, it was tossed out like yesterday’s newspaper by a small start-up called Google. Now, Google’s omnipresence on the web is being challenged by the Facebook juggernaut.

Right now, Google is that movie actress who is in that awkward phase between being too old to be the leading lady and being too young to play a mother, so she resorts to all sorts of ‘compromises’ like showing more skin whilst claiming that it’s an essential part of the script. So, when Google announced this week that it will finally stop pretending not to be evil and combine the terms & conditions across the various services the company provides to make it easier for itself to collect and sell user profiles to advertisers, s**t hit the fan. Everyone seemed to be disappointed in Google, like an Indian parent who just found out that his child is in love with a person from of a different religion. HOW COULD THEY DO THIS TO US, AFTER ALL THAT WE HAVE DONE FOR THEM?

Just like tyrannical governments who aim to stifle opposition in the guise of maintaining law & order, Google is using patronizing Orwellian terms to describe its new set of policies. Apparently, it’s making these hard decisions to make things easier for you. If I had a rupee for every time a ruthless corporate behemoth claimed to care about me, I’d have enough money to open a shady Swiss bank account.

Let’s face it. Despite our empty threats, we’re not going to stop using a popular web service just because the service provider is recording all our activities in a file, like an old school intelligence agency. We’re addicted to the instant gratification of the internet, and you’re going to take away this drug from our cold, dead hands. (Although, if you’re doing that, don’t forget to upload the video to You Tube. What? We wouldn’t be able to do it, we’d be dead!). The fact of the matter is that none of us really want to go back to a world in which we cannot instantly share our every thought with four thousand of our closest friends. Or drop the pretence of keeping in touch with racist relatives and classmates we don’t remember so that they don’t bother us in the real world. And how did we ever live without being able to share pictures of every moment of every vacation with strangers on the internet?

When someone is providing you a service for free, then you are the product they are selling. Databases get sold. Accounts get hacked. Companies get desperate. In hindsight, the Faustian bargain we made many years ago to provide tech companies with all our private information so that they could bombard us with targeted adds in lieu of being given limited access to hundreds of gigabytes of free space on the internet seems to be a tad unfair.

We love our privacy. Especially when it whizzes past us, waving goodbye with a lump in its throat and a tear in its eye.

I, for one, don’t trust anybody. Therefore, I store all my passwords in a file on my desktop called passwords.

What could go wrong?

Eyebrow Olympians & Clerics: The Net is No Country for Old Men

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Last month, when the news broke that telecom minister and eyebrow Olympics gold medallist Kapil Sibal was trying to censor the internet, the twittersphere rose up in unison and protested. It was as if a million Manmohan Singhs were trying to move a rock by sending it multiple strongly worded letters. After all, twitter is for tilting at windmills.

These wounds were re-opened this week when the Delhi High Court warned search and social networking companies that if they don’t comply with its diktats, the court would block them like they do in China. The Indian twittersphere was exasperated! Trying to make us more like China! Who do these old fogies think they are, N Ram? They don’t realize that if we wanted some unelected, arbitrary authority to determine the boundaries of acceptability, we would have supported Anna Hazare’s fledgling political outfit. Somebody switch on the rusty Dell 486 sitting politely at their desks and show them that the internet is like a Cormac McCarthy novel: it’s no country for old men.

While the Delhi High court wanted to turn us into China, vapid television anchors turned to twitter to lament our growing similarity to Pakistan. Finding such tenuous similarity between two countries is as easy as finding a son of a deposed Nigerian prince who just needs your bank account number to turn you into a bona fide millionaire. Allow me to demonstrate: We’re similar to Italy because both our countries have renowned economists who, as head of state, preside over an establishment prone to corruption. We’re like Britain because a large amount of both our populations yearn for the glory of the past. We’re like Australia because bigots in both countries are prone to using ethnic slurs to taunt tourists from less developed parts of the world. We’re like America because both of our countries are home to a large amount of illegal immigrants who have come from a smaller, poorer neighbouring country. We’re like Japan because both of our countries treat washed-out hollywood hangers-on as entertainment gods. We’re like Afghanistan because both our cricket teams are currently struggling to win a match overseas.

Speaking of being lazy, we discovered this week that boycotting harmless human garden gnome Salman Rushdie is still a thing! Hadn’t everyone secretly decided to move on from that battle? In fact, our last international nightmare involving Rushdie was when he took to twitter to complain about being blocked from making a Facebook page. Sure, Facebook is evil too, but it’s still slim pickings for the man who fought and won a war of attrition against Ayatollah Khomeini.

Rushdie was scheduled to speak at a couple of sessions during the Jaipur Literature Festival being held this week. So when the high-priests of the Darul Uloom heard about his visit, they called for the central government to cancel Rushdie’s visa, even though he doesn’t actually need one to visit India. But when have facts deterred a fundamentalist bent upon proving that his religion has the biggest penis? Also, why are these high priests channelling American movie studios and rehashing stuff from the 80’s?  

Of course, now that UP is having an election to determine its next top statue model, and the Congress is practically grovelling for votes in that state–like a starlet in Mumbai who promises a horny producer that she’ll do anything to get her big chance–it needed to do something to appease the crazy people. Thus, the Chief Minister of Rajasthan, Ashok Gehlot, made some noises about the people of Rajasthan not wanting Rushdie to visit the state and then claiming that his government would not be able to provide adequate security to Rushdie. Firstly, we didn’t realize that Gehlot is just like the character Jim Carrey portrayed in Bruce Almighty, and can hear the thoughts of every person living in his state. Secondly, if his government cannot provide security to one single person, then what is the point of his government?

Not that any central or state government is interested in defending free speech even during non-election time. Most of them start shitting bricks at the mere thought of someone taking offence to something.

If we can't offend people who think a book of short stories written thousands of years ago contains instructions on how to live life in the 21^st century, then the terrorists have won.

How Twitter changed my life!

On a fateful night two years ago I have absolutely no recollection of, I joined the “microblogging” site popularly referred to as Twitter. Little did I know that when I filled in that form with my details and clicked on “Create my Account”, my life would be changed forever.

Before I joined twitter, I was just like you. I foolishly thought that I had my life all figured out, thanks to the secret of life revealed to me in the book, The Secret. If all I had to do to make things happen was to WISH for them, I could do that all day long. So I quit my job and spent my days wishing for things. When after a few months nothing happened, I began to question my worldview. One particularly tough night, after spending hours wishing for a measly glass of Rum & Coke, I realized that the Universe wasn’t really listening to me. It was probably spending it’s time paying attention to some malnutritioned African kid and serving him MY rum & Coke. It dawned on me that the universe was a socialist with a bleeding heart and an NPR tote bag!

So it was up to me to look after myself. I bought a bootleg copy of The Fountainhead (free markets FTW!), and spent the next month reading it (have you seen the size of that damn book?).One day, the ghost of Ayn Rand appeared in my dreams and asked me to sign up for twitter. The ghost also asked me to lend it some money, because apparently, the shops in hell are a little expensive, being monopolistic enterprises and all. I realized that Ayn was testing me and refused to lend her ghost any money. In fact, I told Ayn’s ghost the same thing Ayn would tell a bearded 90 year old man who just lost his life savings in the stock market, “Get a job, whiskers!”.

Now, unbeknownst to me, Twitter was a treasure trove of wordly knowledge. It had the wisdom of Socrates, the catchiness of Confucius, the gimmickry of Yoda and the cultural relevance of Lady Gaga. So when my life changed for the better, I thought I had to share the secret with the rest of the world, as all enlightened beings are supposed to.

Here’s a gist of all the knowledge I was able to amass:

1. The art of listening: The first thing that surprised me about twitter was that in order for people to pretend to care about what I have to say, I had to accord them the same courtesy. Being a blowhard IRL (i.e. In Real Life for all you n00bs out there!), this was hard for me to understand at first. Did other people expect me to listen to them? Why would I listen to anyone when I already know what they want to say, based on how they look? Is this what being social was all about? I know that now, because of twitter. Another thing I learnt was that all I have to do to make people feel “special” is to feign interest in what they’re saying! Who’da thunk it?

2. The art of letting go: On twitter, once you write a tweet, you need to let it go.Though, be warned, It’s not that easy. In the beginning, when you see the vowels from your tweets being plucked out as harshly as a catholic priest plucks the virginity of a choir boy, all you would want to do is physically punch the culprit. You tire of the constant need to bang your head against the wall when you see someone appending a word to your tweet and totally changing it’s context. You also learn to not care about the dozens of people who will simply copy your tweets and tweet them as their own. Once you put something out there, it isn’t yours anymore. So let it go. Set it in the wild. And, if it loves you as much as you love it, it will come back to you in the form of a text message.

3. The art of sounding exotic: Thanks to twitter, I was able to learn how I can get people from other countries to pay attention to mundane events in my life like waking up or raindrops. All you have to do is romanticize everything, sprinkle a bit of melancholy, and voila before you can say “Jai Ho”, you have thousands of followers! For example, my room isn’t filthy, it’s “proof that I live a full life because each millimetre of dust contains millions of memories!” (Sadly, that doesn’t work on my Mom!). Similarly, politicians aren’t just corrupt, they “feed off the carcasses of hungry children, remaining oblivious to their plight, all the while trying to fill their insatiable greed and rotund bellies”. 

4. What women want: Earlier, all my knowledge about woman was gathered from the Mel Gibson movie, What Women Want. However, since recent events have revealed that Mel Gibson clearly has no idea about women (at least not the type of women I would like to attract), I had to turn to a new source of wisdom. And I found him on twitter. My new personal love guru, Chetan Bhagat, has made me see the light with his constant tips & tricks on how to impress women. It has not worked until now, and I have ten restraining orders against me. However, I’m pretty sure I’ll find the one one of these days. If the woman on twitter are any indication, I am almost certain that woman in general think more about sex than men. That’s because statistically,  if you’re a woman and you’re on twitter, you probably spend most of your time spewing more innuendo than an 80s British sitcom. Although, my guru tells me that the women on twitter aren’t the ones you take home to your parents. I wonder what he means by that?

5. How to support a cause: Before twitter, I was always in a flux whenever I wanted to do something for the world at large. You know, give back to the world and all that jazz. Now, whenever I hear about a cause that I think I can support, I always add a ribbon to my twitter profile picture (or as the cool kids call them, a twibbon!). Joining a facebook group is so 2007! In fact, thanks to twitter, I got Barack Obama elected as President, brought real democracy to Iran and helped cure breast cancer. That pretty much concludes my quota of “good deeds” for the rest of the decade. Santa better bring me loads of stuff this christmas!

6. Feeding your insanity: Whatever mental illness you suffer from, twitter can act as an enabler. If you are a masochist, you can follow “celebrities” on twitter and their banality will help mangle all your senses. This is even more painful than lying on a bed of nails. If you suffer from low self esteem, you can follow people who have poor language skills and a really delusional sense of self, which helps you feel a little bit saner about yourself. However, don’t feel that sane, you’re on twitter after all. I mean that as a good thing. In this Jersey Shore-ified world, being insane is a one-way ticket to popularity. Remember, all the insane people have the most followers.

7. Creating lazy content – Not only do the people on twitter like reading whatever’s on twitter. they are also really eager to read other people’s analysis about twitter. Even though almost every post/article on twitter says the same thing, people still like to read them and then retweet them, because this way they can pretend to laugh at themselves. Another reason why twitter posts are popular is because a post on twitter is the easiest thing to write. Start the post by making fun of a public figure you revile, throw in a few references to people tweeting about the food they eat, add some banal celebrities and rephrase what everyone else has said before along with some jokes. End the whole thing by adding a few meta references (because it’s important for the world to know that you can laugh at yourself too!) and your twitter post is ready.

The way we live now: The Internet in 2010

With every new internet application that becomes popular (Twitter! Facebook! Chatroulette!), there are millions of pixels written about the said phenomena. Almost all the “good” reporters write articles or do teevee news reports about how “<insert name of new web application>” is either ruining the internet and/or is a new revolutionary way to communicate with each other. (Except at Slate magazine of course, where I’m pretty sure that they’ve either written or are currently writing an article about how email is still the world’s most important “killer-app”).

Now, traditional journalists are not that fond of the internet as they claim to be. For them, the internet is sort of a bête noire. They may pretend to embrace it, but in most cases they simply come across as people devoid of any understanding of it whatsoever. Whenever they talk about the “new media” you can almost spot the froth coming out of their mouths. They can’t even know where to begin to understand the internet (to be fair, no one can. Maybe that is the beauty of the internet? OMG, we made an observation! And since it’s not on an old media platform, it probably doesn’t count!), but they bravely continue to talk about it. With embarrassing results.

The Internet in 2010: It knows everything. Just like that obnoxious kid in school.

Now here is the internet’s most common phenomena:

(a) Person A writes something and puts in on the internet.

(b) A large amount of people agree & disagree with Person A’s opinion

(c) Some snarky blogger links to Person A’s article/post and metaphorically tears it into pieces

(d) Person A writes post about how everyone who didn’t agree with them misunderstood them and/or the internet is full of mean and rude people.

The Internet in 2010: Just like your abusive ex-boyfriend. Nothing you do is ever going to be good enough.

Journalists' pride themselves in being the “first chroniclers” of history. However, nowadays, apparently, anybody with a computer and ability to type thinks “their opinion matters more than that of a journalist!” Silly idiots! How dare they think that? Thanks to the damn internet, the first chronicle of history will be by some stupid un-important person who doesn’t even have a teevee or dead-tree magazine gig and didn’t even go to some fancy journalism school.

Now, for a moment, imagine if you could read Cleopatra’s first person blog (Fuck like an Egyptian), how would you be able to figure out what she was saying? Would you have guessed that when she posted about her epic orgies with a Roman general named “Mark A”, she was referring to Roman general Mark Anthony? How would you be able to put two and two together, without the help of a journalist? How would you know that she was the first woman to ever get vajazzled?

And would Shakespeare have even bothered to write “Julius Caesar” if he found out that Caesar's death was caused by an harmless frat prank? Would there even be a “Caesar salad” if people thought that the man’s last words were “Don’t Ice me, bro”?

The Internet in 2010: Ruining history for future generations

The internet is a lot of things to lot of people. It even helps people create their own reality. Whether you want to still believe that the earth is flat, or that Paul is dead, there is an app for that. There is no universal truth anymore. Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs. And as it turns out, to their own facts. You don’t have to believe anything you don’t want to. And only on the internet can you have a second life, even if you don’t have a first one.

The Internet in 2010: Your own personal echo chamber

On the internet, opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one.

You may think that you’re smart, funny and insightful, but there is someone on the internet who is smarter, funnier and plenty more insightful than you will ever be. For every person who likes what you say, there are ten who think that you are full of crap.

The choice here is between speaking your mind or not saying anything at all.

If you think that anyone owes you respect because of whatever, well, just remember that on the internet no one gives a shit who you are.

To paraphrase some dude, The internet owes you nothing. It was here first.

The Internet in 2010: We’re all like a bunch of monkeys trapped in a cage. You can duck all you want, but one of these days you’re going to end up with shit on your face. The best you can do is to wipe it off and hope that no one figures out that the stench is coming from you.

While the rest of the world does something important, it's election season in England!

   From L to R: Peter Pan, Gandalf  the Grey and the Wizard of Oz

Everyone in England has got their knickers in a knot these days. No, not because some rogues in some far-off colony want their independence, like in the good old days, but because in three weeks they have to stop drinking for a bit and go to a bloody voting booth and caste their votes to elect one of those sorry arse politicians to the sodding parliament.

In three weeks, Britain might even have a shiny, new Prime Minister!

Now, they had a brilliant idea. To have a debate on teevee, with all the candidates, just like they do in America. Thankfully, they didn't take other ideas from American Democracy like having a two-year election for a four year term or choosing Vice-Presidential candidates through the reality show Project Running-mate.

The British debates were boring, compared to their American counterparts. Not one person winked or shouted "Drill, baby, drill" and apparently, they don't give a broken tooth about Joe the Plumber! And no one was offering a kilo of rice at 2 bucks a pop. 

Here are the top three contenders:

1. Gordon 'Big Ears' Brown

He is the current incumbent Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party. This is the first election the Labour is fighting under his leadership. The last three were fought with Tony Blair at the helm. Unfortunately for him, neither is he as charming nor can he lie as well as Blair. Analysts predict that he is going to lose badly, because the economy is shite and after thirteen years of Labour, the people want a change (Yeah, you're gonna be hearing this word a LOT. Better get used to it). He has a huge man-crush on President Barack Obama and wants to bone him very badly, as all British PM's are constitutionally mandated to have unrequited feelings for their American counterparts.  If he loses the election, he'll probably retire into some remote British village with his wife & kids and open up a bed & breakfast, since due to his insanely boring personality, he really can't make that much money on the lecture circuit. 

2. David 'David' Cameroon

He is the front-runner for this election, and current leader of the opposition. It is his election to lose. And since he has been acting like he already won the election since last year, he is probably going to come up short. He is a 'compassionate conservative', which means a conservative who does not say racist things in public. If he were writing this blog post, he would have thanked you for reading it. He would have also reminded you that he loves all minorities, even those poor, gross Lesbians who live down the street. He understands how difficult this economic recession has been for everyone, as he has had to fire his fourth butler too, which has made things very difficult at Cameroon manor. Thank the lord for his own personal fortune, otherwise he would have had to live like an immigrant. Which would have been an absolute travesty! Unthinkable, innit?

 3. Nick 'The Kidd' Clegg

As the leader of the Liberal-Democrats, he is the 'wild-card' in this whole shebang. Due to Gordon being such a fuck up, and David being, well, David, experts are predicting that Clegg might be instrumental in deciding who forms the next government, because the election results might yield a hung parliament. Nick is famous for always spewing facts at anyone who cares (or for that matter anyone who doesn't care). He is sort of a wanker. That is why no one in England wants to go drinking with him, as constantly hearing about how mass-marketed alcohol beverages are causing malnutrition in Somalia is a real bugger. I mean, for fucks sake, all a bloke wants to do after a hard day's work is sit in a pub, make some jokes about how the fat chick flirting with the bartender looks like Wayne Rooney and watch some bleeding Rugger on the telly, so shut your pie hole and pass the crisps.    

Anyways, after yesterday's debate, everyone and their grandmother thinks that Nick Glegg is going to be the Prime Minister, because not only is he supremely confident & speaks 'truth to power', all the grannies and single mums in England want to take him home and do things to him which you absolutely do not mention in polite society. Also, since he talked about hope & change, he is being billed as the next Obama because after Nov 4, 2008 every election has to have it's OWN Obama, otherwise no one will care. Thanks, Barry, for ruining all elections, forever. 

Gordon Brown got some good reviews too because he managed to get in a few zingers and was also endorsed by Dr. Who (aka The Doctor. Because I don't want to get hate mail from those people.)  and the only working person in the whole of England, Harry Potter's mom.

These three got another two debates before they finally go to the polls after which everyone in Britain can go back doing whatever they do, like spreading sex diseases through the bookface and then stabbing each other to death.

Ah, Blighty. What would we do without you?

(No don't answer that. It was supposed to be a rhetorical question.)

Lastly, if anyone manages to 'steal' this election, just remember, I AM NOT GOING TO CHANGE MY TWITTER DISPLAY PIC.

Right, ho!

 

[All pictures via Reuters]

Everyone is retarded, today!

India's #1 platonic comical duo Amar Singh and Jayapradha have been suspended from their party. While Amar has the sads, according to Jayapradha, she is neither 'happy' nor 'sad'. Well, she must want everyone to read her j-j-j-j-joker face. [The Hindu]

After a year and half of saying that there will be no dialogue with the Pakistani government, the Indian government has decided to re-start the dialogue with Pakistan. So that retarded 'Aman weds Aasha' campaign finally worked!1! [HT]

While the Indian and Pakistani diplomats exchange frozen mangoes, a tribe of dangerous dandruff-beard people wants to start Jehadin' again. They must be angry because they weren't included in the IPL, maybe?! [Indian Express]

Miserable old coot Bal Thackeray wants famous movie person Shah Rukh Khan to take his freedom of speech and move to twitter. Meanwhile, famous movie person Shah Rukh Khan just wants EVERYONE TO WATCH HIS GODDAMN MOVIE, in which he plays Shah Rukh Khan playing a retarded version of a person suffering from Asperger's syndrome. [HT]

Pakistan's ambassador to Saudi Arabia is a dick. Literally. [FP]

Obama is scheduled to meet the Dalai Lama later this month even though China has threatened to stop sending the US free Farmville goodies on Facebook if he goes ahead with the meeting. Obama is really eager to met the Dalai Lama because he rarely gets a chance to meet a fellow messiah. [The Guardian]

Director of Moulin Rouge & Australia, Baz Luhrman is currently touring India, for charitable purposes. He wants to make a movie with the Bachchans and AR Rahman. Ugh. Dude, that would be WORSE than a punch in the face, so why don't you just Baz away?. [The Hindu]

You're too poor for facebook

Hey, all of you living in the third world? Did you really buy all that crap about the world being a global village? Hah. Fooled you.

It turns out that we only love you if you sound like a good investment or when you someone makes movies about you which make us go "awwwwww".

As today's New York Times points out, the internet is just as democratic as Rwanda.

Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results.

Have you heard of the video sharing site called Veoh? Of course you haven't. How can you? In fact, they don't even want you to.

Last year, Veoh, a video-sharing site operated from San Diego, decided to block its service from users in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, citing the dim prospects of making money and the high cost of delivering video there.

“I believe in free, open communications,” Dmitry Shapiro, the company’s chief executive, said. “But these people are so hungry for this content. They sit and they watch and watch and watch. The problem is they are eating up bandwidth, and it’s very difficult to derive revenue from it.”

You bad, hungry people with your thirst for videos of cute dogs and frumpy looking reality TV stars. That's why Veoh gave you a big F.U.

Also, that's the same reason that you can't use Hulu.

And all those sex predators on the Indian edition of MySpace (by the way, that's like our version of Orkut. It's full of perverts and creeps and everyone wants to be your fraaaaand) are going to get a little downgraded.

MySpace — the News Corporation’s social network with 130 million members, about 45 percent of them overseas — is testing a feature for countries with slower Internet connections called Profile Lite. It is a stripped-down version of the site that is less expensive to display because it requires less bandwidth. MySpace says it may make Profile Lite the primary version for its members in India, where it has 760,000 users, although people there could click on a link to switch to the richer version of the site.

Uh-Oh.

Those of you who want to see You Tube videos of old segments of TV shows and funny lip synching Chinese kids, are still okay. As long as you don't mind waiting a few hours for a two minute video.

Tom Pickett, director of online sales and operations at YouTube, says the company still hews to its vision of bringing online video to the entire globe. In the last two years, it has pushed to create local versions of its site in countries like India, Brazil and Poland.

But Mr. Pickett also says that YouTube has slowed the creation of new international hubs and shifted its focus to making money. He says that does not rule out restricting bandwidth in certain countries as a way to control costs — essentially making YouTube a slower, lower-quality viewing experience in the developing world.

Facebook hates you too.

“We can decide, either on a country by country or user by user basis, to engineer the quality of the service for that cohort of users,” said Jonathan Heiliger, the executive who oversees Facebook’s computing infrastructure.

Facebook is in a particularly difficult predicament. Seventy percent of its 200 million members live outside the United States, many in regions that do not contribute much to Facebook’s bottom line. At the same time, the company faces the expensive prospect of storing 850 million photos and eight million videos uploaded to the site each month.

Heh.

Nothing personal, it's just business.

You know we love you and we'll be back as soon as we discover how to make money from you.

Is that okay?

Word.

p.s. Is this why you guys use Bittorrent? Figures.

I do share sometimes

The United States declares public health emergency because of outbreak of Swine Flu

Apparently, wall street bankers are safe. Because even the swine flu is less damaging.

Do you think there are people in the middle east right now who are saying to each other "You're going to America? Oh, no. You shouldn't go there. It's too dangerous!"

***

Makes you wonder who your real facebook friends are

A Swiss woman has lost her job after her employers spotted she was using the Facebook website when she had claimed to be too ill to use a computer.

What's even sadder, they used twitter to fire her.

***

Speaking of social networking, do you love twitter? Do you also love excel? Then we have just the thing for you. A tool which proves the fact that people who use it, are big tools themselves.

Ladies and gentleman, say halo to SpreadTweet. For those lonely nights in the office when you want to pretend to be working while you are secretly tweeting. Who knows, you might end up saving your job. Even if your girlfriend will eventually leave you and your pet dog will die. Still. You get to tweet! Wicked, no?

***

I think I'll take either of these as a gift for my birthday.

 

 

That's what I'm talking about!!

***

OMG, they are closing Geocities. Add another one to the "Stuff that really, really outlived their time and usefullness" list. Now where will all those ironic, hipster, webpages named using Linkin Park lyrics go?

***

Okay. Last one involving twitter. But this kinda scares me. A little.

***

There is a possibility that the United States government might prosecute those who authorised the alleged torture of prisoners. Quick Question, though. Can they also persecute my last boss? He was an idiot and he did torture the English language beyond recognition. And while they are at it, can they also torture the guy who came up with the idea of a reality "talent" show? Much appreciated. Thanks.

***

Sigh. I think I've finally lost it.

Indian politicians lack of tech-saviness bytes them in the modem

People all over India are simultaneously fuming over the attempts of political leaders who are trying to create an impression of being tech-savvy. It seems that the voters have no bandwidth for leaders who aren't Y2K-okay. Or for people who use words like "tech-savvy".

"It's like a slap on the face", said Ram Bharosay, a farmer in the Eastern state of Uttar Pradesh, while baking cakes of cow dung. "They're half-baked attempts at trying to sound relevant would have been funny if they weren't so tragic. And I should know about tragedy. My family lost me at the Kumbh mela. Although I was able to find them on facebook last year. It's so painful to hear that these politicians are just discovering the internet. C'mon. I even met my wife through the internet. Although, she looks nothing like the picture she posted on her eHarmony profile. In fact, I later found out that it was a picture of Meg Ryan. I feel so stupid when I think about it now."

"Meh", said 13 year old Anandi, mother of five, who in a few years will become the world's youngest Octo-Mom. "These old fuddy-duddy politicans are so not with it. Look at me, I catch up on my blog-reading and answer all my mails on my blackberry while I trek four miles everyday to fetch a pale of water. In fact, I'll sell the next daughter I have to get money for this cool new VAIO P mini laptop the girls at the river have been talking about. I would have sold one of the daughters I currently have, but someone needs to cook and clean and look after my two precious little boys. Since we can't afford insurance cover, giving birth to as many boys as I can is my best bet for old age. I mean, at least one of them will survive malaria and live to be a great-grandfather at forty."

"It's stuff like this which makes me want to go live in America", said 17 year old Enaraye, while sipping his Chai Latte. "These people just got started with blogging. And everybody knows that blogging is so 2004. Everyone is on twitter now. Who do these people think they are? Obama?". He would have said more but he was busy sending tweets to the fake Tina Fey profile hoping for a response.

When accused that they are copying Barack Obama's internet strategy, one of the chief architects of the IT team helping political parties formulate an online presence, Mr Anu Malik, said that "So what? No one can lay claim on an idea. Two people can have the same idea, can't they? In fact just yesterday I thought of this song ..." He then began singing a song which was suspiciously similar to Coldplay's Viva La Vida.

However, not everyone is impressed. One of the leaders of the left parties, Mr Iama Doosh, said that "all this facebook-ing and tweeting is a capitalist conspiracy to encourage people to stay in touch. Why do we need to stay in touch, exactly? I have not spoken a word to my wife since our wedding night fifty years ago and both of us are happy. Although, sometimes I do wonder why my son bears a striking resembalance to my wife's yoga teacher, and feel the urge to ask her a few questions. But I have a strict principle that one should not fix something which ain't broke. Just like our policy of non-alignment. Except of course, when it comes to China. Then all bets are off."

Other objections were also being raised. Mr Ver Gin, a prominent leader of the Ramanand Sagar Sena, said that "All this social networking etc. is against our culture. We will not tolerate all these loose women who are ..err... let loose by their parents so that they can visit these amoral websites. In fact, we are going to storm any cyber-cafe which dares to let women access the internet without being accompanied by a male relative. The only "networking" these women should be doing is with kitchen utensils."

Critcs also lament that the politicians attempt to reach out to younger, trying-to-be-hip voters is a farce. In response to a question, filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt said that "The lingua franca used by the self-anointed pioneers of modish culture is bewildering, perplexing, confounding and it contravenes and repudiates the small fabric which binds society together and annihilates national integration. I call for the end of such disengenious and rasputainesque attempts." We later found out that the question Mr Bhatt was asked was "Will you have fries with that?"

Weekend Update

A new movie has been released on the relationship between the Indian left parties and China. It's called How Harold gets Kumar to Fuck up his country.

ISRO is about to launch 10 satellites at one go. Apparently, the name of the project is Kareena Kapoor.

Harbhajan Singh slapped Srisanth in their recent IPL encounter. To get back at him, Srisanth superpoked him through facebook.

When asked about it, Bhaji said that after Srisanth approached him, he thought What would Amy Winehouse do?

A jealous Ponting asked Ishant Sharma to spank him like a little girl.

Jackie Chan recently visited India to release the music of Kamal Hasan's new movie. He was accompanied to the event by his groupie, pile-on friend Malika Sherawat. Before heading back home, he required surgery. Yes, he needed to have Malika's lips surgically removed from his ass.

The Delhi government has refused to disband the new Bus Corridor. In a statement, Chief Minister Shiela Dikshit said, it is our constitutional duty to provide as many road blocks as possible. If we don't fuck up things now, how will we promise to solve them in the next election?

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in a statement yesterday asked all political parties to refrain from politicizing the misery of the people. He then got back to reviewing the forthcoming book about his speeches, called Baloney & Bullshit.

43 year old Director Guillermo del Toro has been selected to direct the movie The Hobbit and it's sequel. He is moving to New Zealand for four years to sh0ot the movies. Yeah, Del Toro is a very famous director. In fact he is the only living director to have a movie made on his life. Yup. The movie was called The 40 year old virgin.

The president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, refuses to accept the result of the election he lost and is now going to hold another election.

When he heard about it, Al gore said Why didn't I think of that.

I'm not saying that Mugabe is rigging the election, but he just hired Jeb Bush as election commissioner.

The Dalai Lama said that he welcomed the talks with China, as long as they were serious. Apparently, he was angry at the email from the Chinese government which said Dude, we sooo need to talk.