A Loss of Privacy

I recently got a mailer from my bank in a nice sleek envelope. Inside it was an invitation. An interesting kind of invitation. It invited me to register my phone for the “Do not call” option to guard against tele marketing calls, which the mailer said was a “facility” being extended by my bank. The letter explicitly said that only the phone that I registered on the form would be inoculated against attacks from tele marketers; any other phone that I might possess could be and possibly would be used by the Bank to offer their products , almost none of which I would ever use.

However I am amazed at the vocabulary of the mailer I received which assumes that intrusion into my private space is the bank’s right and my personal privacy is a privilege. In normal parlance it is like saying that kicking the door open and walking into my home is the norm and if I actually want some one to ring the bell and then wait for me to answer it , then I should fill up forms and let people know. When you put it this away, one can only be aghast at the low levels of sensitivity that we have in society today and the courtesy breach that has occurred along the way. One could be in funeral or lying on a sick bed or be in some other difficult situation and there is a brash, uncouth voice on the phone selling you some pre approved loan or an offer to transfer your credit card balance. These kinds of callers seem to take no cognizance of the fact that a typical client if he needed any of their products, would not be sitting and waiting passively for some phone call, they would walk over to the bank and obtain information in far more exhaustive detail than a phone call can provide.

Earlier, some weeks ago the British Television channel, ITV went ahead and aired an extremely controversial documentary about the crash which killed Diana, Princess of Wales despite pleas from her sons to refrain as the film contained extremely disturbing pictures. One showed Diana receiving oxygen from a French doctor as she lies dying, although her face is obscured. Other pictures include the wrecked Mercedes and a view through the back of an ambulance in which the Princess was treated. Although after massive public outcry, the film was some what edited, Diana: The Witnesses in the Tunnel was still aired. The Princes' private secretary Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton publicly said that "It is their mother's last moments on earth and it's an invasion of her privacy. They are chipping away what little dignity there is in death" but no one cared. Business and TRP ratings were more important than privacy and dignity.

In India too, the media had gone overboard on several sensitive occasions. I remember when the late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan and a couple of years earlier, Dhirubhai Ambani lay dying , the television coverage was almost like a ball by ball commentary of who came , who went , who cried , who wept and who said what and all that trivia. I wonder how the mourners felt having a microphone thrust into their faces as they walked past grieving and mourning. A few weeks ago, major concerns were raised at the height of the Gujjar agitation in Rajasthan, the media, particularly the electronic media came under the scrutiny of the Supreme court the media a has a vital role to play and there should not be any occasion for a grievance that because of any irresponsible coverage by the media tension/violence has escalated and has led to destruction of property and/or loss of lives or causing of injuries.”

The burgeoning of telecom and media in recent years has certainly revolutionized our lives but these bugs and viruses that invaded our privacy and done so beyond the limits of all decorum have also multiplied. Just think of it – a decade or so ago, there was just one state operated telecom company and they brought out fat telephone directories every other year listing out not only every one’s telephone number but also their street address.

These directories were free available to any one and every one and yet hardly any one got junk mail or intrusive calls because of them. Unlisted phone numbers were few and far between and were mostly for the celebrities. Today with so many operators around and people switching operators at their whim and fancy, telephone directories are all but gone. And yet every one seems to have every one’s number and the tele marketers along with the data mining companies probably know more about ourselves, our debts, bank balance, the kind of credit card we have and how much we owe on them, the kinds of loans we need or might want and endless other things, which we ourselves might not be aware of. The thought is horrifying as much as the reality of the fact that today privacy is a privilege available but to a rare few even if we are no Princess Diana but just an
anonymous mass of population.

Playing Cards in an iPod Generation

As I move around the city of Delhi, I come across two kinds of people. In the seedy Nehru Place area of Delhi, where I have my office the lunch break sees every empty space occupied by groups of men squatting on newspapers. They are laughing and chatting among themselves as they play cards and exchange easy gossip in n atmosphere of easy and effortless camaraderie. The sight of people crowding out narrow aisles by squatting and idling away their time is by playing cards is not pleasant one, especially as the lunch breaks look rather extended at the expense of the stated working hours. Besides, I was brought up in a culture which considers playing cards an abomination and a hobby fit only for the dissolute... Besides, cards games were considered in my family, just a whisker’s leap away from the practically unforgivable sin of gambling. Although I don’t relish several things about card games and that is probably ingrained in me, I cannot but notice the fellowship and friendship that it generates and sustains.

In the evening, I meet an altogether group of people as I travel back home in my chartered bus. This is a different crowd and a wired crowd , in the sense that all or most of the passengers in the bus have a pair of wires sticking out of their ears which disappear some where into their clothes. No the passengers are not all wearing hearing aids or appliances; they are just immersed in their own private world , the wires discreetly disappearing into discreetly or indiscreetly kept mobile phones or music players. Most have mobile phones which have at least an FM Radio in built and many have an mp3 player built in too. Most of the affluent ones do not use chartered buses but a few who do flash their snazzy Apple iPods or Sony Mp3 walkmans or their garish Chinese imitations.

The difference between the people who I see in the afternoon and the ones I travel back with could not b starker. The first lot is mostly people, who are in their late forties or fifties. Most appear not to be gizmo savvy, and indeed if this crowd has mobile phones which are possible, they are obviously not hopelessly in love with it. No wires follow them around as they hunker down with their worn out playing cards on stair cases and aisles. Theirs is a parallel universe where companionship, friendship and camaraderie are every thing and the fulcrum around which their lives revolve. Even though card playing is not the healthiest of pastimes, it certainly provides human connectedness among people. The evening crowd is self immersed. Each one is tuned in – to the Radio Mirchi or the Radio City or their Himesh Reshammiya music track. It is a self contained, atomized universe devoid of any neighborly conversation.

The FM channels are all full of call in programs and the telephone lines seem to be chock full of callers wanting to hat up the anonymous Radio Jockeys but there is no conversation happening across people. The medium of diversion in the middle aged crowd of the afternoon is a cheap pack of cards; in the passengers of the evening bus, it is the ubiquitous mp3 player. Neither an addiction to a pack of cards nor an addiction to a radio channel can be termed healthy. But whereas cards seem to allow for bonding, comradeship and companionship to develop and flourish, the FM radios and the iPod develop isolationism , individualism and an atomization leading to an increasing culture of independence and of having little use or sensitivity to the other , to he neighbor whom I am called to love. A pack of cards or an iPod dangling from the neck – the jury is sill out on which is more damaging of the two.