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 But in this digital era, the closet or cupboard has been replaced by our smartphones and laptops.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!

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Two Deaths and Twitter Hashtag Jousts

The blood spattered platform of a Chennai suburban railway station and a grainy footage of a backpacker captured by a CCTV camera located outside the station made for a disturbing viewing on prime time television. It brought back the memories of a similarly spooky footage of a murderous attack on a woman in an ATM kiosk in Bangalore few years ago. And for the record that guy is still on the loose.

In case of Chennai killing, even before the police could pick up the pieces or one could say 'preliminary investigation', the Twitterati was out there with long knives tipped with hashtags and their 140-character barrage only reflected their prejudices, fears and anxieties, with not even an iota of truth. Looks like the rumour mills of yesteryears have logged on to information superhighway and overrun social media platforms such as Twitter and WhatsApp. 

Of the two schools of thought that enjoyed high bandwidth, the first one was that the killer was a Muslim and most likely of an ISIS kind. They reasoned that such cruelty can be done only by those brainwashed by Baghdadi and his minions. They maintained that police and media already knew it but were maintaining a criminal silence over the issue.

A different shade of the similar opinion was that it was the handiwork of love jihad guys. They opined that the victim had refused to fall for their guiles and hence the murder happened. The bottomline was that the killer was from 'other' community and all are preying on Hindu girls, especially the upper caste (higher genetics) ones.

Both the theories gained lots of traction in the social media with celebrities like singer Abhijeet and Tamil actor Y G Mahendran too joining the bandwagon. The former even got into a below the belt hashtag joust with a woman journalist and even has a police case against him. 

The other dominant school of thought has to do more with cultural conditioning than politics. The deeply rooted patriarchy and a haseena maan jayegi mindset have left their thinking totally warped. A girl's consent hardly matters and her 'no' is yes.

With this sense of well entrenched entitlement many wrote that the girl must have 'spoiled' his life by rejecting him or she 'asked for it'. For such guys even stalking or threatening their object of desire is absolutely kosher - a belief that gets reinforced in our films, irrespective of language. And Tamil box office has made a huge fortune out of films related to stalking.

Around eight days after Swathi killing there was a road accident in Chennai, caused by a drunk woman Aishwarya Wilton and it was god send for the troll crowd. She was driving a high end Audi car in top speed and mowed down a pedestrian. Drunk woman from upper crust of the society causing an accident, and the victim a poor daily wage earner - was quite a heady mix for them.

Immediately they started linking it with Swathi murder, saying if the photo of the killer of a 'rich' girl can be splashed on newspapers, Aishwarya's photo should also be shown and paraded in front of TV cameras. They accused media and police of double standards saying female accused were being treated with kid gloves and called for 'level playing field'.

Aishwarya's crime is serious and calls for strict punishment according to law (though I have some scepticism considering how Salman Khan hit-and-run case turned out). But to equate it with a pre-meditated cold blooded murder is taking things a bit too far. The underlying unsettling factor for the troll crowd is the changing social mores of women partying and getting drunk!

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Charge of The Selfie Brigade

Narcissism used to be a private affair (very mirror centric) or had a very limited reach until the troika of internet, smartphone and social media came along. Now if you go to a restaurant, pizza joint or take a stroll in a park, a beach you will come across someone taking selfies or a video on his or her longish smartphone or tab, all vital fodder for social networking sites, who in turn seem to rule our lives. Meanwhile 'selfie' has mutated to terms like 'groupfie' and 'belfie', but the strong underpinnings of narcissism remain.

The tyranny of film rolls had restricted photography for special occasions like marriage or a visit to a tourist spot. But memory chips changed the rules of the game as it eliminated the frequent need to shop for film rolls. So all you need is flip the view on your phone, put the best smile forward, position your thumb over the button and click. Whether it is a new dress, a tattoo, shoes or newly-acquired six pack ... everything is kosher for camera and it follows you like a shadow. It has also caught the fancy of our netas.

Even those who are sick or had met with accidents post their pictures in full medical regalia of fracture cast and bandages to evoke a flurry of 'likes' and 'get well soon' messages. In short it has now supplanted diary, minus  its privacy, in recording one's life in kilo, mega and terra bytes with tools like Photoshop to create a picture perfect world. The more intrepid ones even go for cosmetic surgery to enhance their looks.

One notable fallout is that it has become cool to attend school/college alumni meeting and it no longer evokes thin attendance it used to. Earlier only 'teachers' pets' and those living close to the institution cared to attend and it used to happen only in upscale public schools or high profile colleges. But now it has trickled down even to schools and colleges with pedestrian pedigree.

During their student days they may have loathed attending classes and writing copious notes, but now they try to squeeze in their portly frames on those ancient school benches to be 'framed' for posterity. Some even make peace with teachers with whom they never saw eye to eye during student days - all for the sake of Facebook or Instagram.

For many the obsession with online life has now eclipsed the offline ones. Even the day-to-day mood swings depend upon comments their posts and selfies draw on Facebook or Instagram. Cyber bullying has become more potent as online reputations have become more important than the offline ones. And so is flattery with the most common remark being, "Oh you look the same, not changed a wee bit", which make lie detectors gasp in disbelief.

Picture courtesy: Reddit (George Harrison selfie)

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ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, A Watered Down View

I first came to know about it through one of my school mates, now based in US, with whom the only interaction I had in past three decades was to accept his Facebook friend's request. He had posted a video of him on Facebook undergoing this bizarre ritual of getting drenched in cold water. That was my first brush with 'ALS ice bucket challenge' and it did take some time for me to bother what ALS stood for. Initially I mistook it for some reality show, going by the fun, frolic and narcissism the participants were exuding and the way it was going viral with every celeb, Page 3 wannabe and 'like'-starved Facebookers willingly getting splashed with ice cold water and flaunting how hot they looked.

After Googling I came to know that ALS was a grim affair - it stood for Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as motor neurone disease - a crippling ailment that affects the neurological system, with no known cause or cure leading to paralysis and a very miserable end. Those afflicted with the disease rarely live beyond five years, one notable exception being famous British scientist Stephen Hawking, who was diagnosed with ALS when he was 21 and has now crossed 70. The other ALS afflicted notable figure that comes to my mind is former chief of army staff General Krishnaswami Sundarji, but he could survive only a couple of years after being diagnosed with the disease.

I had a rather nodding acquaintance with a person who was quite literally 'felled' by this ailment. I first met him at a hospital. He had come to visit my father, who was convalescing after a heart attack. He seemed happy and boisterous type and tried to assure me that my father will be fine and not to hesitate to call him if there was any need. Later I came to know he was the latest tenant in the house close to mine.

His name was Thomas, a middle aged man with two teenage sons and like most Malayalees had spent best part of his working years in Gulf. He was quite energetic and was always seen going around in his red TVS Suzuki bike. On seeing me he often used to stop by and enquire about my father's condition. Through neighbourhood grapevine I came to know that he was a small time financier.

Later on during those brief encounters on the road I noticed that his manner of speaking had changed and he had difficulty pronouncing certain sounds, especially vowels. Quite often I had to make a guess about what he was talking about. I thought something had gone wrong with his vocal cords, though never bothered to check out what his ailment was.

A couple of months later he and his bike were not to be seen and it took me some time to realise that he was not stepping out of his house altogether. Instead his house began witnessing a steady stream of visitors.

Out of concern I too went to his house and the sight left me shell shocked. Thomas was now confined to wheel chair and though he could recognise me, he could barely speak and tried to make hand gestures, again with little success as he could barely move them. It was then I first heard about motor neurone disease. As his wife explained to me about the seriousness of the disease, it left me too numbed to say anything. It also made me realise how much of nervous coordination and energy is needed even to do mindless gestures like scratching ones hair or nose. 

Some months later they shifted to a new place and I lost touch with them. But one day one of my neighbours told me that Thomas had passed away. I guess for him it must have been a welcome end to a long drawn suffering.

Coming back to ALS challenge, the current hoopla on social media is showing no sign of cooling off with bucket full of controversies. Matt Damon decided to use toilet water for the purpose (to highlight about scarcity of clean drinking water across the globe) and Obama ducked the bucket challenge, though he agreed to donate for ALS research. The fact that Corey Griffin, one of the pioneers of ALS challenge died in a road accident added a sympathy angle to the event.

Though some reports claim the drive has raised $100 million, many participants in Britain admitted that did not donate to an ALS charity after taking part in an ice bucket challenge. Many participants were not even aware what the event was all about. For them it was just another souvenir to be posted on their Facebook wall.

In India it has mutated to 'rice bucket challenge' with participants handing over a bowl of rice to a needy persons and posting pictures on Facebook. Looks like in this era of social media epidemic even the good old anna daanam has to be clothed in vanity.

Pic courtesy: Wikipedia

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