By Robert Clements
Escaping the ED, IT and Police..!
Second to my love of writing is that of public speaking, and I was quite happy when the Madras Rotary, which is supposedly the oldest club in India, offered to fly me down to Chennai to address them. “What would you like to speak about?” they asked politely, and I promptly said, “Escaping the ED, IT and police!”
I knew that there would be some scratching of heads about such a strange subject but I also knew it would be a topic that would get everybody interested. Yes, how in the present circumstances do you get the Enforcement Directorate, the Income Tax and the midnight knock by policeman on your door, off your back?
“We hope there’s no politics involved,” cautioned the secretary over the phone.
“None at all!” I said, and I sure got them more flummoxed.
Needless to say, the auditorium at the 5- Star hotel was full! All eager to know what the ‘escape formula’ was all about.
‘A man driving a car,’ I started, ‘stopped at a signal and waited impatiently as the woman in the car in front didn’t start immediately when the signal turned green. He started screaming and beating his fist on the steering wheel! A policeman tapped on his windshield and told him to step out. “You can’t arrest me for shouting in my own car,” the man said as the cop asked for his license and registration and finally handed the papers back. The driver protested, “Why did you check my papers?”
The policeman replied, “I saw you screaming and beating your steering wheel, then I noticed the ‘Prayer Changes Things’ bumper sticker on your car, and I said to myself, that’s not his car, he must have stolen it!”
‘His behaviour did not reflect the sticker in his car!’ I told the audience.
I continued, as the crowd of top industrialists and businessmen wondered what I was getting at, ‘While reading Khushwant Singh’s “Collected Short Stories”, one story that left me pondering was, ‘The Bottom Pincher’. The writer beautifully describes a scene at a worship place where he sees ‘a thin tall gentleman, in his sixties, wearing a light blue suit, sola hat and thick post cataract glasses.’ The gentleman walks through the stream of beggars near the temple and drops a coin in the hand of every beggar.
The gentleman then proceeds to walk in the direction of Khushwant Singh’s office and Singh fascinated by the man’s charitable acts follows him and is shocked to see what the gentleman does next: He continues to dip in his right pocket and drops a coin into every outstretched hand but as he passes a group of three women bending over some article at a stall, his left hand purposely brushes one of them and pinches another!
And so, it went on. Right hand to give alms to the needy, left hand touching and pinching unguarded, unwary women! What a character!
Yes indeed, what a character!
But think again: Do you see some resemblance of yourselves in the gentleman mentioned or the man in the car?’
And that’s when I decided to tell them what I was getting at:
There are many of us who are screaming about the Enforcement Directorate being used against many in the opposition, and others who oppose the policies of the government. But what we don’t realize is that a mirror is being turned on to the part of ourselves that we think we have hidden behind closed doors. Our double lives are being exposed and a spotlight is being turned on, yes turned on the very activities we are trying to hide!
A few years ago, a senator in the US, waxed eloquent in the senate about something he didn’t like about the mobility provider Uber, based in San Francisco. The senator, I was told, was quietly shown a detailed list of his activities, in which he visited a woman’s house, how long he spent there, when he returned and how many times a week he went there. He was also told the lane of the woman he visited. All based on his travel records with the mobility provider.
He was thus silenced!
An article caught my attention in the Economic Times, and the caption of that article was “Data in 2025 – Huge, but not fully secure.” “Within the next few years,” the article said, “worldwide, data on people is going to swell to about 163 zettabytes. That is the amount of data they have on you and me. What also caught my attention was that it was not fully secure. That’s a startling amount of information about you and me that is in danger. Even now, when you think of the amount of personal information that is out there, it’s too difficult to even imagine it. It is also a bit scary to think that there is so much of who you are that is available so freely to people all around.
Now do you see how easily a government that allegedly has the best software in the world, Pegasus for one, is so easily able to overthrow an opposition government? Realize that like the poor MLAs and MPs, you also have no closed doors to hide, and that we now stand naked and totally exposed.
What do we do about it? Shout and scream that our privacy is being invaded even as we keep installing apps in our phone and laptop that tell the world what we do? I feel sorry for those who have the ED and other agencies breathing down their backs, but I believe that only good can come out of all this. That there is no way out when a searchlight beams on you except the light finds nothing questionable on you.
For that harsh beam of light not to find us naked and vulnerable, we and the victims of today’s scrutiny need to clothe ourselves with the ‘Six Pillars’, which are Integrity, Trustworthiness, Respect, Responsibility, Justice and Caring!
Only when we stop giving alms with one hand and pinch bottoms with the other will agencies like the ED, IT and police find nothing that they can implicate you and me with!’
It was a somber crowd that left the hall that day..!
The Author conducts an Online Writers Course. For more details send a thumbs-up to him on WhatsApp 9892572883.