It’s been a tough week for Indians, what with petrol prices
skyrocketing and the Government initiating a crackdown on torrent websites. The
way I see it, there couldn’t be a harder hitting combination of restrictions –
can’t get out of the house because petrol is so expensive, and can’t sit at
home because you can’t download movies or TV shows anymore. Added to horrible
weather, power cuts and KKR getting into the IPL final and you’ve got yourself
a disaster of a summer. No offence to KKR, of course, but they do have the
worst dressed cheerleaders and we all know how that can dampen the best of
sporting contests.
Coming back to more important issues, petrol prices have
risen by seven rupees a liter, prompting a lot of text message forwards and
political complaints. Simply put, the people are SMS-ing while Mamta Banerjee
is PMS-ing. Many of her rants blame the Government for being shrewd and unable
to manage the economy, especially since crude oil prices have fallen. What she
fails to ignore is that the value of the rupee against the dollar has fallen
almost exactly proportionately to the rise in petrol prices. Either way, the
Congress was seen rethinking the whole UPA alliance, saying ‘aise dost hain toh
dushman ki kya zaroorat hai?’ Completely justified, since Mamta Didi has been constantly
running her mouth about the Congress’s failure to rule efficiently. Basically,
the Congress is KKR and Mamta Bannerjee is Saurav Ganguly. Or the Congress
could be the Indian National Cricket Team and Mamta Bannerjee is Saurav Ganguly.
Or, the Congress could be Pune’s IPL team and Mamta Bannerjee’s remains on the ‘Saurav
Ganguly’ position in the ‘World’s Worst Comparisons’ list.
The other big story today is about the blocking of several
torrent and video sharing websites. There’s been wide scale protest by the
youth (more SMS forwards) who call the move a censorship on their freedom (the
following clause about them encouraging piracy and causing million dollar
losses to production houses has been omitted from their statement) and are
trying to find ways of circumventing this ban. Personally, I started
downloading movies and TV shows off the internet 5 years ago and it’s only now
that the whole downloading system has become a mass phenomenon that censorship
was felt necessary. So far, India enjoyed the position of being the largest
population in the world to enjoy uncensored internet (isn’t that what democracy
means?) and hence the ban was a long time coming, especially since most people
believed the Government incapable of banning a website. In the long run,
banning websites may seem inconsequential as compared to the several scams and
unsolved criminal cases that have come to be associated with the UPA’s
political reign. However, in the Government’s view, it is making an honest
attempt to plug a million dollar loss to the private sector. What it doesn’t understand
is that more often than not, people download movies because they’re not sure if
they want to pay to watch these movies in a theatre. The probability of all the
money ‘lost’ by production houses because of illegal downloads being converted
into sales for them is highly unlikely. Of course, by this logic, the
production houses weren’t losing any sales in the first place. Something to
think about?
Of course, the mantra to feeling happier about these first
world problems is feeling thankful that we are still fortunate enough to have
adequate food and water. To all those for whom this is not enough satisfaction,
a well phrased Google search will return results as to how you can still access
blocked websites, just as easy as a well phrased Google search will tell you how
to make a bomb. More power to the Internet, seems like there truly is no plan.
