Manmohan’s Minions Make Martyrs of Morons

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

It’s that time of the month again, when the UPA government tries to cancel the country’s Internet connection. While trying to handle another national crisis, the UPA, – spoiler alert! – made its 43225428746543th historic blunder, cementing its status as India’s #1 comedy troupe.  Faced with a serious show of no-confidence in the government apparatus by thousands of citizens fleeing back to the North East, the government performed it’s favourite form of exercise: doing too little too late and using the opportunity to settle its own scores.

First they oppose you, then they arrest you and then you turn into a popular public figure. The UPA has made a career of turning molehills into mountains. They are more paranoid than a person tripping on LSD who thinks that he just saw a unicorn. After spending the whole of last year turning every political opponent into a public martyr, they are now focussing all their energies feeding the persecution complex of people on the Internet.

As of the time of writing this article, the government continued to block various websites and twitter accounts belonging to people unsympathetic to their cause. Most of these had nothing to do with the recent crisis. Of course, since it was the UPA, the block was easily circumvented. They are not some sinister genius hell bent on world domination but a bunch of incompetent nincompoops who are led by a man who has spoken less words than a monk meditating in an undiscovered Himalayan mountain for the past two hundred years. They cannot be relied upon to even do something wrong properly.

They tell us that India is under the most dangerous cyber attack since the founding of the republic and the best defence they can come up with is blocking twitter accounts of people whose views they don’t subscribe to? How can we expect them to preserve the ‘integrity & sovereignty’ of the country if they can’t take a couple of jokes from some guy on the Internet? How do they conduct diplomatic negotiations, by holding their breath until the other side acquiesces to their demands?

Almost all our ‘political parties’ are really just cults with political power. Their only purpose of existence is to keep their infallible prophet-in-chief happy. All’s well that ends with a smile on the face of the ‘high command.’ None of them are really adept at handling any sort of criticism. Nor do they care what the people really think about them. And they’re going to do anything to make sure you keep your opinions to yourself. If they can’t buy you, they’ll bully you. If they can’t bully you, they’ll give you things to be worried about. If they can’t distract you, they can always call you an anti-national seditionist. And if that also doesn’t work, they can simply make you go away. Permanently.

Political parties are not the only ones who would like people on the Internet to put a sock in it. Recently, even Sagarika Ghose, a human person with less functional grey cells than the Pillsbury Doughboy, called for censorship of ‘social media.’ She’s not the only one. Even her counterpart on NDTV, the one who pretends to be the greatest thing to happen to Indian journalism since Huen-Tsang - because she once went to an army outpost during a war and binged on the soldiers’ limited rations – isn't a big fan of people who don’t possess a fancy journalism degree and yet still insist on having opinions. Not that any of our ‘news anchors’ report the news anymore. All we get is the same bunch of people saying the same things to each other in the same passive aggressive manner. It’s not news unless it can be shown with scary music playing in the background. Hey people starving in villages without electricity, if you want people to pay attention to you, invade the Indo-Chinese border. Why leave the studio when you can keep talking and still say nothing all day long? People love to watch a condescending asshole talk down to them, don’t they?

Trying to censor the Internet is like trying to put humpty dumpty back together again. If all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t do it, then you can’t either, ‘esteemed’ members of the establishment. Being on the Internet is like being trapped with a bunch of monkeys 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 where the stench is coming from.

Fahrenheit 2012

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

The streets of the internet filled with rumours. The news went viral faster than a video of a cat bungee jumping over the Potomac River while lip-synching to that irritating Carly Rae Jepsen song. The internet service providers in India were on a blocking spree again. Their actions brought various opposite camps on twitter together in their disgust and paranoia. The message the twittersphere wanted to send to the powers-that-be was clear: Steal our tax money and generally wreck up things to make our life harder, but don’t you dare try to take away our right to download free stuff from the internet or we’re going to HULK SMASH our keyboard and protest against internet censorship by posting things on the internet. And the powers-that-be did what they always do whenever legitimate users of something complain that their rights are being infringed upon - ignore them.

One of the parties involved in this iteration of block-a-mole has used the internet very successfully to create a buzz around their movie through a viral video. Now the producers of that very movie have turned on the very people who made them famous. Though they are not the only ones to do that. A large number of corporate entities try to clamp down on the internet by claiming that their forthcoming big-budget movie is allegedly being pirated online. They think that the reason people don’t want to see their movies is because they are pirating it on the internet. Not because they make terrible movies that have no stories but are just scenes of things put together haphazardly based on a focus group of one. Even though most people will not see these movies even if you paid them money, but, yeah, let’s pretend that the internet is the problem.

They keep trying to fight the internet instead of embracing it. If you make it easy for users to access your content, they would not need to pirate it. Trying to block torrent sites on the internet is like sending a hundred year old tortoise to catch the energizer bunny. Not only were they not able to achieve what they set out to do, in their haste, the movie producers even had the ISPs block, websites which had nothing to do with piracy. For example, they blocked Pastebin, a website whose sole function is to allow users on the internet to share pasted text, and Vimeo, a website which mostly contains time lapse videos of the remaining five picturesque locations on earth and indie movies made with such an austere budget that even P. Sainath would approve. By blocking these websites, they are actually hurting the people who want to showcase legitimate content.

In the end all the parties involved in this orgy of ignorance and ineptitude passed the blame for this to one another. The government could proudly claim that after a long time, it was relieved to not be the one trying to trample on its citizens rights. All we did was make these arbitrary and vague rules which can be willingly exploited by anyone to censor things they don’t want you to see. Don’t blame us! The corporate entities which sought to block the websites simply shrugged in response. We just cynically used our corporate heft to censor things that might hurt our business. Who is going to stop us? You? Or those government institutions who are so deeply embedded inside our ass that they can taste what we had for lunch?  And the internet service providers - who used this opportunity to block popular torrent and video sites to preserve their precious bandwidth - not only acted like they did not understand the court order and instead of blocking specific URL’s, blocked complete websites, and as of the time of writing this column, they were still pretending that they didn’t really understand how to completely unblock them. Sorry, court order! Our hands are tied behind our backs, giving you the finger. Meanwhile, the regulators responsible for protecting the consumers were AWOL as usual. Wait, are you talking to us? Are we supposed to do something in such a situation? Let us think about that for a while and come back to you with a whitepaper in 3 to 5 years. Hope that helps!

The internet is a problem for a lot of powerful groups in this country. Various governments and government institutions are unable to fathom the freedom of expression the internet offers. It is hard for them to accept the existence of a medium of communication which they cannot bully, cajole, or bribe into submission. Most politicians do not view the internet as a tool which can empower their citizens; rather they think of the internet as just another part of the vast conspiracy to destroy them. Instead of embracing it at every level, they resist it like white blood cells resist an infection. Corporate India does not like the internet because they can’t buy off all internet users by sending them on junkets or paying their child’s school fees. And the entertainment industry does not like the internet because it is full of “h8trz” who are “hatin” on them all the time. How can you allow a place where celebrities are not treated with the love and respect they deserve to exist? Sounds spooky, like something out of the Twilight Zone. 

On the bright side, at least they let us armchair critics feel like martyrs.