First World Problems

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.