By Manash Pratim Gohain
Sibal sahab, how low will you stoop? If we are to believe (and I do believe), on December 5, 2011 the New York Times reported that you summoned Facebook authorities and showed them a morphed picture of Sonia Gandhi with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, which you alleged is in bad taste and unacceptable. Before proceeding further I want to say that most of us saw that hilarious post and had some lighter moments amidst the gloom of inflation, poverty, corruption, arrogance of power and what not.
Kapil sahab, retrospectively in interviews you pointed out your concern about how social media is a potent weapon against India's stability, security or secular fabric. But we all know what a failed advocacy it is 'o great lawyer’! Your action as a minister (have you ever realised the great responsibility you hold in a poor country like ours with starving souls in pain for just a handful of leftovers?) is a deep rooted sycophancy and how you failed to educate yourself despite holding enrolment numbers of hallowed campuses like the Harvard Law School and St Stephen's College. You have been anointed as the new ‘darwan’ (thank that I am not using the three letter word you are) of the 'Gandhi' family.
You were pained at the post which was unacceptable to you because it was on the Khan opps 'Gandhi' family. But you never let out even a whimper at Shashi Tharoor who called us 'cattle class'. That itself measured the yardstick of your class, the way you barked at the constituency which elected you to the chair.
By your conduct I assumed you are arrogant, sycophant, power hungry, manipulative and a cheat. But since December 5, I along with a few crore Indians, realised that you are an idiot too. Why? Because your alibi of damaging the ‘iconic’ image of the 'Gandhi family' and their sycophants and social media posing a threat to national security are nothing but cock and bull stories.
Suppose for once we agree that you are really concerned that the social media is a potent threat to the country. Kapil sahab, then allow me to demolish your feigned concern of social media threatening national security. Kasab never entered India with the help of Facebook and Twitter. The consolidation of fanatics to destroy Babri Masjid happened without Facebook and Twitter and the Gujarat riots and Samjhauta blasts as well. People consolidated and violated all rights without any social media's role and this section of consolidation which followed the political class blindly never was, is or will be a part of the educated social media and will continue to violate every human right, because of their ignorance and socio-economic disadvantage. And remember, it has always been the political class which led such violations.
In fact, since the social media became a vehicle of information and a platform for consolidation of social cause, things have been at their regimental best. Have we not been witnessed to how Anna's movement was peacefully synchronised across India? Despite arrests there were no flare ups. Things instead of going out of hand became better organised. Anna's hunger strike is a classic example of use of Facebook and Twitter to fight against corruption.
So Kapil sahab, is this not an attempt to block all ideas of social cause, to block all routes of information and discussion so that the educated mass cannot consolidate in a judicious opinion making process against the political class? Is this not an attempt to restore the image of the corrupt? Is this not an attempt stop your class being painted with the same brush?
Or is it because faced with uneasy online spread of the dirty game of unprofessional Indian politics and the shameless acts of the 'rulers of the country', the politicians fear the creation of opinion and the fallout hatred reflecting during the elections?
If these are the reasons for your attempt to plug the network, I am sorry to say that you are actually an idiot and way off target.
The political class has already being painted black and for that we don't need the social media. The abuses we hurl at your class don't need Facebook. The opinions we have generated are not based on Twitter. We have always been discussing them with our friends, neighbours, and the poor rickshaw puller in dirty sweat and at the tea stall or at the evening ‘adda’. The only difference is that today we are discussing and confessing our views on your clan with a larger group of friends on Facebook!
All we can deduce from your idiotic move is that we are not suppose to react, opine or shout back on the gross mischief of the politicians, their arrogance after the loot, their complete insensitivity towards a poor country like India where lakhs of babies are going hungry in their mother's dry bosom at the red lights. We are not supposed to feel and write an abusive Facebook status even when in some remote village farmers die en mass of poverty while lakhs of tonnes of grains rot.
Then let me assure you, all your attempts to curtail our freedom will be greeted with nothing less than shoes and chappals flying your way. And your anxiety is real that the online media and its remarkable omnipresence is threatening to become an alarm clock, reminding us every day the thousands of scams and the dirty games our politicians have been playing with us. The social media has the potential to be a classic tool to help us create public opinion. After all the government want us to forget 2G, CWG, Adarsh, and thousand other scams within next the 2 years before we proceed to exercise our franchise.
Historically there has been no instance where social media incited communal tension or riots. What the government fears is that social media should not incite people against movement like anti-corruption, or bring people together against tyrannical rule like what happened in Egypt or Libya. The filter process mooted in the name of cleaning up the social media from defaming Sonia Gandhi is actually the attempt by the political class to keep the voters from consolidating on issues on a more informed manner.
And which is why suddenly in Facebook the politicians are reading the future in advance, and Twitter has become a bitter pill.
Sibal sahab, how low will you stoop? If we are to believe (and I do believe), on December 5, 2011 the New York Times reported that you summoned Facebook authorities and showed them a morphed picture of Sonia Gandhi with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, which you alleged is in bad taste and unacceptable. Before proceeding further I want to say that most of us saw that hilarious post and had some lighter moments amidst the gloom of inflation, poverty, corruption, arrogance of power and what not.
Kapil sahab, retrospectively in interviews you pointed out your concern about how social media is a potent weapon against India's stability, security or secular fabric. But we all know what a failed advocacy it is 'o great lawyer’! Your action as a minister (have you ever realised the great responsibility you hold in a poor country like ours with starving souls in pain for just a handful of leftovers?) is a deep rooted sycophancy and how you failed to educate yourself despite holding enrolment numbers of hallowed campuses like the Harvard Law School and St Stephen's College. You have been anointed as the new ‘darwan’ (thank that I am not using the three letter word you are) of the 'Gandhi' family.
You were pained at the post which was unacceptable to you because it was on the Khan opps 'Gandhi' family. But you never let out even a whimper at Shashi Tharoor who called us 'cattle class'. That itself measured the yardstick of your class, the way you barked at the constituency which elected you to the chair.
By your conduct I assumed you are arrogant, sycophant, power hungry, manipulative and a cheat. But since December 5, I along with a few crore Indians, realised that you are an idiot too. Why? Because your alibi of damaging the ‘iconic’ image of the 'Gandhi family' and their sycophants and social media posing a threat to national security are nothing but cock and bull stories.
Suppose for once we agree that you are really concerned that the social media is a potent threat to the country. Kapil sahab, then allow me to demolish your feigned concern of social media threatening national security. Kasab never entered India with the help of Facebook and Twitter. The consolidation of fanatics to destroy Babri Masjid happened without Facebook and Twitter and the Gujarat riots and Samjhauta blasts as well. People consolidated and violated all rights without any social media's role and this section of consolidation which followed the political class blindly never was, is or will be a part of the educated social media and will continue to violate every human right, because of their ignorance and socio-economic disadvantage. And remember, it has always been the political class which led such violations.
In fact, since the social media became a vehicle of information and a platform for consolidation of social cause, things have been at their regimental best. Have we not been witnessed to how Anna's movement was peacefully synchronised across India? Despite arrests there were no flare ups. Things instead of going out of hand became better organised. Anna's hunger strike is a classic example of use of Facebook and Twitter to fight against corruption.
So Kapil sahab, is this not an attempt to block all ideas of social cause, to block all routes of information and discussion so that the educated mass cannot consolidate in a judicious opinion making process against the political class? Is this not an attempt to restore the image of the corrupt? Is this not an attempt stop your class being painted with the same brush?
Or is it because faced with uneasy online spread of the dirty game of unprofessional Indian politics and the shameless acts of the 'rulers of the country', the politicians fear the creation of opinion and the fallout hatred reflecting during the elections?
If these are the reasons for your attempt to plug the network, I am sorry to say that you are actually an idiot and way off target.
The political class has already being painted black and for that we don't need the social media. The abuses we hurl at your class don't need Facebook. The opinions we have generated are not based on Twitter. We have always been discussing them with our friends, neighbours, and the poor rickshaw puller in dirty sweat and at the tea stall or at the evening ‘adda’. The only difference is that today we are discussing and confessing our views on your clan with a larger group of friends on Facebook!
All we can deduce from your idiotic move is that we are not suppose to react, opine or shout back on the gross mischief of the politicians, their arrogance after the loot, their complete insensitivity towards a poor country like India where lakhs of babies are going hungry in their mother's dry bosom at the red lights. We are not supposed to feel and write an abusive Facebook status even when in some remote village farmers die en mass of poverty while lakhs of tonnes of grains rot.
Then let me assure you, all your attempts to curtail our freedom will be greeted with nothing less than shoes and chappals flying your way. And your anxiety is real that the online media and its remarkable omnipresence is threatening to become an alarm clock, reminding us every day the thousands of scams and the dirty games our politicians have been playing with us. The social media has the potential to be a classic tool to help us create public opinion. After all the government want us to forget 2G, CWG, Adarsh, and thousand other scams within next the 2 years before we proceed to exercise our franchise.
Historically there has been no instance where social media incited communal tension or riots. What the government fears is that social media should not incite people against movement like anti-corruption, or bring people together against tyrannical rule like what happened in Egypt or Libya. The filter process mooted in the name of cleaning up the social media from defaming Sonia Gandhi is actually the attempt by the political class to keep the voters from consolidating on issues on a more informed manner.
And which is why suddenly in Facebook the politicians are reading the future in advance, and Twitter has become a bitter pill.
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