Future Shock, Courtesy Covid-19

While the current coronavirus pandemic may have rekindled interest in dystopian movies related to virus outbreaks such as Pandemic and Contagion, thanks to Netflix and Amazon Prime, the society seems to be moving towards what Alvin Toffler had envisaged in his books Future Shock and Third Wave.

During my college days in the late 1980s I used to see these two books in every other book shop and with pavement sellers, but somehow futurism and science fiction were not my cup of tea, so I stayed away. From the random reading of reviews, I got to know that the books apparently talk of an information society and the rapid changes that will happen in the 'super-industrial' society, where technologies getting outdated in a short span of time will be a routine affair.

Toffler's famous quote - “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn,” began figuring in the 'Thought for today' sections of newspaper and magazines. Third Wave talks of the concept of telecommute and home becoming an office space, thanks to computer science.

Back then growing up in a tier-2 city all this sounded too much of a futuristic mumbo jumbo. The offices were still marching to the clickety-clack of the typewriters and employees had to sit neck-deep in a sea of paper and files. Electronic typewriters were seen with the same awe as present day i-Phone launches.

Talking of phones, they were of wired variety with an unwieldy dialler and a handset that used to rest on it. Its penetration was also minimal and getting a phone connection used to be like winning a lottery. Many used to mark PP along with their phone numbers, which meant Private Party or the nearest contact number, but not self-owned. The chances of getting that person on the line largely depended on the mood of the phone's owner.

Computers were seen only in science magazines and Hollywood films. Computer institutes like NIIT were in their early days of extending their footprint across the country. Those in the middle or fag end of their careers saw computers as an evil that will gobble up jobs.

Later the mobile phone-internet duo brought about tectonic shifts in how we work, communicate and every other facet of our lives. Toffler's prophecy looked plausible but it remained more of an exception than a rule. Only those doing freelance gigs worked from home on a permanent basis, but for others it was most often a consolation prize provided by the manager after rejecting the leave. Many bosses looked at work from home with suspicion and companies even had a monthly cap on it.

Covid-19 and the world's biggest lockdown in India changed it all. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but cruel necessity leaves you with a Hobson's choice. Everybody had to willy-nilly work from home. Managers who had so far looked down upon this practice as the first refuge of slackers were forced to list out its virtues. Even industries such as banks, insurance, newspaper publishing, who had never experimented with this practice, were forced into a sink or swim situation - often with mixed results.

Webinars, Zoom meetings, Slack messenger were the new trappings as the work shifted from office to 1 and 2 BHKs of employees, with dining or study table doubling up as home office.

 The early days were heady - no office commute, no need to worry about what to wear for office or whether it has been washed and ironed, shaving became optional, no last minute panic stricken checking of office bag before leaving home for mobile phone and laptop chargers, access cards, pedestal keys and spectacles.

Then the warts started becoming visible - back and neck pains started popping up as the home chairs were no substitute for ergonomically superior office chairs. Many had to make do with pain balms and pain killers as the lockdown ensured that no furniture shops were open, thereby ruling out the possibility of a better chair.


Clearing small doubts and quick questions that just needed a shout out to the colleague at the next pod, now requires laborious scribbling of messages and waiting for a response, which quite often comes with a time lag.

The country's perennial problem of erratic power supply rears its head time and again and sometimes the outages are so long drawn that even the power back-up gives up. 

Another bugbear is the patchy internet. With almost everyone working from home and students taking online classes, internet speed often winds down to a crawl. One needs to be mindful that the number of tabs open do not exceed 10. Otherwise the system hangs at crucial moments like when you are about to click the 'send' button of an important email or during those important calls.

Earlier, leaving for office and the commute back to home, however harrowing, marked a kind of dividing line between work and home. But now that line has blurred. One has to be mindful of the number of pressure cooker whistles while attend a Zoom call and those unwelcome tinkling of door bell while making an online presentation.

Now Google wants its employees to work from home for rest of the year and Twitter wants them to work from home forever! So it looks like this accidental global experiment, forced upon us by an invisible virus, and its serendipitous findings are here to stay. And it is too enticing a template for companies to cut office overhead costs.

In short, we are trying to build up a generation of employees who will see their colleagues through Zoom video, who will never see the insides of an office - the cafeteria banter, the office politics and the corner office intrigue, the raucous bullies, office romance and the associated gossip, visits to nearby shacks for chai-sutta... the list goes on. A really scary prospect!

However, all the waxing eloquent about the virtues of work from home cannot hide the fact that it is at best a privilege that only a section of white collar employees can enjoy. There is a vast segment out there where this mode won't be feasible - those employed in hospitals, police stations, fire stations, factories, transport, hotels, airlines, power plants, oil refineries, farms and many other sectors. They have no choice but to step out of their houses and contend with the risk of contracting the dreaded virus.

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Confessions of a bibliophile (of paperback kind)

Online retailers may have 'click-baited' book lovers and Kindle may have hooked them on to computer and smartphone screens, but I still find going to book stores (especially the second-hand ones) worth the effort.

Entering a book store with hardly any particular book in mind, and being surrounded by shelves and shelves of books. Spending time thinking which book to buy or to buy anything at all, or suddenly coming across a book which I have been thinking of buying all these days but couldn't lay my hands upon. These are some of the unexpected thrills that attract me to a bookshop.

While in Mumbai I often used to visit those pavement book shops near the good old Central Telegraph Office on Veer Nariman Road (I am told they no longer exist) and spend hours squatting in the hot afternoon sun and rummage through the piles and piles of Harold Robbins, James Hadley Chase, Mills and Boon and not to mention the pornucopia penned by 'anonymous' writers, to find an Ernest Hemingway, a George Orwell or Somerset Maugham.

Quite often they used to be cheaper than the popular bestsellers. They were also old books with off-white pages and some even playing hosts to silver fishes. 

Considering the modest demand I hardly ever came across any pirated xerox prints. I guess the booksellers used to feel relieved that finally, a taker has arrived' for a book that has been languishing with them for long.

I have spent many afternoons and evenings at these pavement book stores and one of the booksellers seemed to have taken note of my preferences. A couple of times as I was going through the drill of mining for my favorite book, he would hand over a well known classic and say 'Yeh sir aapke type ka kitaab hai'. In hindsight, I wish I had made efforts to know more about him, but his actions often used to leave me surprised and startled, as if someone was reading my mind.

Thanks to him I got a copy of Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar and quite a few other books. He seemed to know a thing or two about an Aldous Huxley, a Henry Miller or Sylvia Plath and other English writers.

Rest of them I doubt whether they could even read English (or angrezi as they would say). They were only concerned about the price listed on the back cover and were least bothered about what lay between the covers. 

These second-hand books will often have names of previous owners scrawled on the front page. Some even had the date on which they were bought and some were given off as a gift for birthday. Some had both the previous owner's name and library seal. Probably some families may have donated them to a library for want of space or death of a bibliophile family member.

Interestingly, I happened to pick up a worn-out copy of Dog Years by noted German novelist Gunter Grass. It had the seal of Naval Officers Institute Dehra Dun and the date of procurement was mentioned as May 28, 1973. On the next page, somebody using a sketch pen had scrawled 'presented by INS Sutlej'.

In some books, I even came across the good old local train ticket (made of thick cardboard those days), which probably were used as bookmarks.

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While in Chennai I once got the chance to visit the famous second-hand book shop on a pavement near Luz Church road run by one R.K. Alwar. There were piles of books housed under a tarpaulin cover. Alwar was present and since it was a hot afternoon he was wearing only a veshti and no shirt, and his flowing Tolstoy-type grey beard covered most of his torso.

His fame had traveled far and wide and his clientele included the intelligentsia of Chennai, ranging from Alladi Krishanswamy Aiyar to Cho Ramaswamy. It is said that when Chennai's municipal authorities tried to remove his shop there were public protests, something Mumbai ought to have done when booksellers from CTO were told to move. And when he died last December, city newspapers accorded him a rare privilege of running obituaries.

The obits had stated that he was not literate, but when I had gone there he spoke decent English and came across as someone who eats, drinks and sleeps books. When I saw a copy of the Discovery of India and made a weak attempt to haggle about the price he said, "This is a classic written by Jawaharlal Nehru, I cannot give at a lower price."

At that point, I missed those booksellers in Mumbai who had little idea of what lay between the covers of what they were selling, and hence open to some bargaining.

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Second-hand booksellers in Bangalore are a more empowered lot and thriving. Though there are places Avenue Road where they sell on the pavements, the two famous sellers Blossoms and Bookworm, which trace their origins from pavements, have now become gentrified.

They are located on the prime Church Street and housed in proper shops running into more than square 5,000 feet, with modern-day payment trappings such as credit card swiping machines and mobile wallet facility thrown in. 

These two book stores have in fact bucked the worldwide trend of brick and mortar book stores closing down across the globe due to falling readership and onslaught of e-commerce companies. They, in fact, moved to bigger premises to cater to their patrons.

The rows of metal shelves at Blossoms may remind you of government offices. The books arranged on them burst at the seams. Bookworm too had that old world crammed look when it was housed in an outlet on the Shringar Complex on MG Road. But now after moving to Church Street it has acquired a high-street supermarket look.

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#Me Too Maelstrom Mauls Many

Five years ago, when Tarun Tejpal, the editor of Tehelka magazine, was caught pants down for his testosterone fuelled antics with a young colleague and later faced the full glare of social media, I had thought that lucky were those editors and journalists who had carried out similar acts in the pre-internet and typewriter days.

Names of M.J. Akbar and some others (still not outed yet), who were part of press club folklore, came to my mind. During my student days in the late 80s and early 90s Akbar was a big name in journalism and his column ‘Byline' was something we all looked forward to in the now defunct Sunday magazine of Anand Bazar Patrika stable. I also happened to read his book Riot After Riot and a biography on Jawaharlal Nehru (Nehru: The Making of India). All this gave me an impression of him being a man of great erudition.

But later in a baffling fashion he chose politics and my respect for him went down a few notches, as I thought it was a great loss for journalism. However during my rookie sub-editor days in Mumbai I got to know that the prodigal was returning to journalism and starting a new paper Asian Age.

When the recruitment happened, the grapevine had it that only 'fast' girls were getting recruited and all key position were occupied by women with very little experience. My respect for him dived many more notches. However, still the general perception was that although he was a 'ladies’ man' he was 'good at his job'.

That was also the time India embraced economic liberalisation and newsrooms also witnessed drastic changes. The editor's age profile became much younger and there were more women joining the profession. The look and feel of newspapers also changed, thanks to better printing technology and headlines became catchier than matter of fact.

The presence of higher number of women and younger workforce was a mixed bag. On one hand it brought about greater gender sensitization (use of misogynist Hindi expletives came down) and the blooming of office romances. But some of the superiors, deeply entrenched in patriarchy, took advantage of the power they enjoyed to treat their junior women colleagues as a fair game. They used this by dangling carrots like dinner invites, junkets and out of turn promotions. Those days sexual harassment redress mechanisms were not even thought of.

Newspaper offices then were closed places and nothing spilled over to the public domain. A Tejpal type incident those days would have been swept under the carpet or settled with mere apology or a transfer.

Managements used to close ranks and observe an incestuous 'code of silence' so that the publications name is not sullied. Even rival newspapers too adhered to this code, keeping in mind the glass houses they all were in. In those pre-cellphone/internet days even gossips never used to travel beyond the confines of office canteens or press clubs.

Internet and social media changed the rules of the game as it now 'follows' us everywhere and now it has also proved that in addition to making contemporary events go 'viral', it can even exhume issues that happened two decades ago to haunt the perpetrators by 'calling out'.

In India #me too fire got noticed nearly an year after US. It has simmered for long and took its own sweet time to become vigorous enough to singe people's reputations. But once actor Tanushree Dutta lit the fire, it has been relentless like the French guillotine and many reputations fell by the wayside.

While some were quite obvious as they wore their playboy selves on their sleeves, but names like Vinod Dua, Jatin Das and others evoked shock and disbelief, as they were considered quite progressive and respectable.

It first started with the film industry and later spread to the English journalism, thanks to a journalist named Sandhya Menon. The first to get caught in its cross hairs was K.R. Sreenivas, the resident editor of a prominent daily, to be followed by some Kolkata and Delhi based journalists.

While their ex-colleagues were coming out with unsavoury details about their peccadilloes, I again wondered whether this #me too will address the elephant in the room or be rest content with having a tilt at bit players.

Finally, the much anticipated happened. Akbar got outed and as expected it opened a Pandora's box. And I must admit that despite being aware of his Casanova ways, the Tweets left me shell shocked. They were far more toxic than the above-mentioned press club gossip, which at the most made him appear as a flamboyant editor with a glad eye for women. 

As per the disclosures, he was a sexual predator on the loose, with no one to question or curb him and he got away with all this for decades. Journalist Saba Naqvi recalling her stint in the Telegraph and without naming Akbar summed him up very well, “He behaved like a village Thakur who set off to claim any young thing that caught his fancy."

Amid all this hoopla there are allegations of witch hunt and not adhering to the due process. While the former cannot be ruled out as a few innocent men may get pilloried for no fault of theirs, the latter point does not hold much water. 

In many disclosures the victims had stated that they had approached sexual harassment redress committees, but no action was taken. At the most the erring employees were transferred, which is just a change of scene for them. The infamous ordeal of Rina Mukherjee a journalist with The Statesman is a case in point. She was terminated for filing a sexual harassment complaint against her news coordinator and had to fight a long drawn legal battle spanning more than a decade.

It is a well known fact that at many media establishments sexual harassment redress committees are mere sinecures of little consequence. So far no media company has taken any drastic action like say Infosys took against Phaneesh Murthy in 2002, when he got embroiled in a sexual harassment case. 

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Rape, Protests and Whataboutery

Rape has once again ceased to be a statistic. In our country it happens once in a few years and in its wake brings in a widespread convulsive outrage, which spills on to the streets.

Keyboard warriors call for eye for an eye retribution and as a template cite methods used in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, whom they otherwise look down upon. Some end up betraying their latent patriarchy, while others, especially the political class, end up with their foot well entrenched in their mouths.

Last time it was the infamous December, 2012 Delhi gang-rape, often referred to as Nirbhaya case. As the incident happened in the national capital, it instantly caught the eye of national television. Egged on by saturation TV coverage and continuous buzz on social media, the outrage was instantaneous.

Delhi's wintry smog laden streets got filled with protesters and the government of the day had a tough time dealing with them. Footage of policemen using water cannons and canes to control the restive mob became a staple fare of almost all TV channels.

In Delhi even those who had never taken part in a protest in their lives got busy preparing placards and heading to protest venues. All this put the government of the day on back foot.

Newspapers were forced to report every rape case that came their way and that too provide a good display instead of relegating them to 'in brief' sections.

Dinner table conversations started veering over the topic and parents of teenage children had tough time answering queries like 'what is rape?' or how different it was from molestation!

The pontificating anchors pointed out the victim was just like us, called her 'India's daughter' and cautioned us that it could happen to any of us and they whipped up a sentiment of blood lust among the masses. The culprits happened to be from the fringes of society with no political or social clout, the very riff-raff detested by the middle class.

They were put immediately behind bars and going by the standards of Indian judiciary the trials were speedy enough. The government also formed the Justice Verma commission, which recommended many changes in laws related to sexual assaults.

Gradually the outrage died down and the daily rapes retreated to its realm of statistics and police record books.

...

The current outrage, in contrast, is a slow-burn one caused by gruesome rapes in Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir and Unnao in Uttar Pradesh, which acquired limelight months after the actual incident. In the interim period they remained on life support on social media through the posts filed by activists fighting the cases.

Both cases were different from the Delhi rape in one aspect - the alleged perpetrators were influential people with political and social clout.

Moreover since both places were located far away from the myopic TV cameras of our news channels they got little attention and the cases dragged on for months with the perpetrators almost succeeding in burying them.

In fact the clout enjoyed by the perpetrators at Kathua was so strong that there were street demonstrations in the district to defend them. They even unfurled the Tricolour and invoked religious symbols to defend the perpetrators. The accused included a temple priest and few police officers.

Even more appalling was the conduct of the lawyers who actively protested the filing of the chargesheet by the crime branch against the accused.

In Unnao rape case the accused happened to be a BJP MLA and hence the matter was in deep freeze from day one. The tipping point was reached when the Unnao rape victim's father died after being in police custody. Around the same time the contents of Kathua case chargesheet was published in a Delhi newspaper.

For national media this was its Rip Van Winkle awakening. TV channels could no longer remain in their cosy self-censored bubbles and ignore the protests breaking out in every corner of the country, mostly orchestrated through social media.

But having been embedded with the establishment for the past four years, they were not exactly comfortable in attacking it. Soon whataboutery crept in, where were these protesters when rapes happened in Assam, where is the money collected through social media campaign going.

One channel began an innuendo campaign against Deepika Singh, the valiant lawyer who has taken up the Kathua case against heavy odds, alleging that she was pocketing the money.

Moreover, the moment Prime Minister broke his silence expressing displeasure over such 'incidents', TV channel displayed the same kind of euphoria that a child shows after he gets back his favourite toy, which he had thought was lost forever.

For them it was a early ghar wapsi after a brief flirtation with anti-establishment hashtags.

Image courtesy: Facebook

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