Gigabyte Skeletons

Lucky is the man who does not have skeletons in his closet, so goes the saying. But in this digital era, the closet or cupboard has been replaced by our smartphones and laptops. These gadgets now hold so many vital and crucial records of our lives that if they land in the wrong hands, our future could be in jeopardy.

In the last decade or two, mobile phone usage has become so pervasive that it has scaled all class, gender, and age barriers. Our lives have become so dependent on our phones that they have now become an extension of ourselves. 

With each upgrade and new features, these devices have progressively entwined themselves with our private and official lives.

In the early 2000s, we had the feature phones that could carry our contact lists, call logs, text messages, and maybe a few games. They could not access the internet, or download apps, photos, or videos. As for images, it could only provide a few limited emoticons that could be used along with text messages. 

Those were the early days and mobile phones were a prized possession with even incoming calls and messages getting charged. People saw this as a new mode of communication that helped them stay in touch while on the move but used it very sparingly and followed some cheat codes to beat high prices. 

The traditional landline phones continued to hold sway as they offered cheaper calls and the only threat mobile phones posed then was to wristwatches and timepieces as they displayed time with greater accuracy and offered a more versatile alarm facility.

Once the charges for incoming calls and messages were abolished, mobile phone sales and usage grew by leaps and bounds. Many one-handset households turned into multi-handset ones and soon families began pondering whether a landline was needed at all. 

Along came camera phones. Many wondered why a camera was needed on a phone, which is meant to communicate. But all naysayers were proved wrong, and what these camera phones spawned was something no one had foreseen – selfie culture.

Now no age group, social strata, or ethnicity is free from this narcissistic affliction; and hardly any occasion or place is considered not kosher for a selfie. Whether this narcissism was inherent among the people or fanned by camera phones and social media is open to debate. Now we have reached such a stage where prominent handset brands are offering ‘selfie-camera’ as their unique selling proposition!

The advent of smartphones was a game changer. They made people unlearn the usage of keypads and master the art of tapping, sliding, and typing words on flat screens. Smartphones offered a seamless link to the internet and the facility to download apps completely changed our personal and work lives.

The features they offered were a direct hit on personal computers and laptops and boosted the use of mobile internet. It has changed the way we socialize, handle finances, shop, travel, and access news and entertainment. Smartphones are the first thing we look at after waking up and the last thing before crashing at night.

Hence they have now become a rich repository of your personal photos and videos, data concerning your health parameters, banking and digital payments apps, and authenticator gateways to access your office’s protected networks. 

Losing a smartphone is nothing short of a calamity, irrespective of the passcodes and other safety nets you may have activated to safeguard your personal and official data. Even moving data from an old smartphone to a new one is as challenging as moving houses!

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes

Offended Indian: A Snapshot

Demography: A rapidly increasing population with a steady stream of new converts cutting across religious, caste and class divides. Truly an all inclusive tent with proverbial strange bedfellows; of permutation and combinations that will leave the sharpest statisticians and sociologists bewildered. Good economic muscle and the wherewithal to deploy thugs and lawyers depending on the situation.
 
Features
 
Physical: Fine thin skin, can give Dhaka muslin a complex - make it feel as if it were a glorified sand paper. But as a downside it contains numerous invisible antennae always waiting to be ruffled by minutest external stimuli, be it a TV show, festival, book or a film.
 
Chemical: Highly combustible with very low kindling temperature. At the first level emits boundless energy to troll opponents; at next be prepared for physical attacks and even social ostracism. They are vigorous practitioners of ban mantra and their levels of rabidity extend beyond infinity.
 
Fantasies: As it happens to be an inclusive tent, they are very heterogeneous. Some may like to see Salman Rushdie's name only on tombstone with all his books buried alongside, while others may aspire to have M F Husain paintings used as a substitute for firewood. Some feel movie PK was the worst thing to happen since Alam Ara introduced us to motion pictures, while for others Viswaroopam evokes similar emotion. Some see red in the transgression of our exalted Khap compliant parampara and sanskriti and feel defending them is a divine right.
 
For all these people keeping away from the so called 'offending' book, painting or not watching a film is not an option. Because they firmly believe that it is the offended who will ultimately inherit the earth.

Also Read: Bangalore Beat

Culture And Anarchy

Recently I came across a news item that writers in Myanmar are trying to relearn the habits of free thought and testing the boundaries of free speech. Long spells under military rule meant journalists, writers, artists and others associated with cultural field had to undergo various levels of censorship to conform to what the regime thought was appropriate.
 
But before they cast away those conformist skins for the brave new world, it won't be a bad idea to share them with Indian writers and artists who seem to be staring at an increasingly intolerant society.

While for some learning these skills may be a tough grind as they have been under the corroding influence of democracy for more than six decades, but for organisations like say Tamil film industry or Hindi commercial film industry (who are either at the beck and call of Thackerays or Dawood Ibrahim) the learning curve to reach those levels of conformism may be a cakewalk, as they are almost there by default. Moreover the fact that the Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf has a good following in India will only be an added plus.

Another major challenge may be Indian conditions - they are different and hence the training may require some improvisations. In Myanmar the artistes have to contend with the jackboot of military junta and nothing else, but here they have to grapple with state, non-state, religious and corporate forces and that too with  many axes to grind.

Salman Rushdie recently put it very succinctly. He said that "because the writers, painters, filmmakers, artists don't have armies. We don't have the boys to put on streets to defend our film, novel or painting. So it's not hard to attack." He then went on to add that a "strange form of identity politics has developed in which people don't define themselves with things they love but by the things they hate. So to attack a book about the Ramayana, book about Shivaji or painting about Saraswati... these things are easy to do. That somehow galvanize the sense of identity of these extremist forces." 

And he should know, after all death threats and fatwas have shadowed him for decades.
Also Read: Bangalore Beat