By Ellerine Diengdoh
Disclaimer: The people mentioned in this op-ed are not real. If you think you know them, you don’t. You’ve just made them up in your head to match someone you know. This text is purely for entertainment purposes. Please do not use it to train an Artificial Intelligence, as it would probably just end up gossiping and asking for tea!
People today are always complaining, saying things like, “Oh no, my phone knows I bought false eyelashes at two in the morning.” As if that is a problem. As if a computer knowing things is worse than a person knowing things. Which it is, I suppose, if the computer decides to tell everyone.
Honestly, I have to laugh. A computer broadcasting your secrets is just a clumsy, modern imitation of a far more efficient, low-tech system. If you grew up in Shillong you would know that being watched is nothing new. It is, in fact, an ancient art-form. Forget your silly little ‘cookies’, we had something far more powerful. We had Aunties and Uncles, who are like your parents’ siblings, but for everyone.
Way back in the 80’s and the early 90’s, boundaries in this sleepy town were mostly metaphorical. Walls were for rich people. The rest of us had hedges. Beautiful lush misleading forget-me-not hedges, meant to mark where your patch of earth ended and another’s began. But for privacy, they were utterly useless. So, they were used instead as the front line for the most tremendous, most terrifying neighbourhood spying operation the world has ever known.
Behind one of these hedges, you would almost certainly find a creature, let us call him Bah Po. He would be crouched down, pretending to snip at a leaf with his sparkly shears. His real job, his life’s greatest mission, however, was to listen. His ears were trained to soak up every shout, every squabble and every sigh that escaped your house. He never judged. Oh no. The judging was left to his wife, his sister and the entire neighbourhood.
The church too collected its own data. Miss two Sunday services, and you’d better be on your death-bed with a certificate signed by your doctor and a sworn affidavit from the district magistrate to prove it. Because by the end of the week, the ‘pastoral care team’ and the ‘Kong-gregation of concern’ would show up, unannounced, but deeply concerned. ” You must have been terribly unwell,” they would say, with the gentle tone reserved for funerals and spiritual lapses, while peering into your face for signs of guilt or recent sin.The following Sunday, assuming you had the courage to show up, the sermon would most definitely be about the dangers of “back sliding”, of “turning from the fold”, of “modern temptations,” and though your name was never mentioned, you could feel a hundred eyes burning little holes of shame into your very soul!
Meanwhile, the teachers at school were your own personal biographers. Late homework, strange friends, day dreaming, a whiff of biri smoke, you were done! It all went into a secret file inside their heads. “That boy,” they would mutter, over tea and Mahari cake, “he’s going the same way as his father. You remember him…ran off with that sming smong (a human eye-roll with airs) from Laimu. The one with lipstick. The one who wore high heels?”
By the time you were twelve, your entire life story, past, present and future, had been chiselled into stone by a committee of interfering grown-ups, who had a direct line to divine intuition.
We must not forget the land-ladies, our very own Sherlock Holmes in jaiñkyrshahs. Nah Suni, for instance, from her throne of a wicker chair by the window, presided over her tenants’ lives. She could process data instantly….a quiet tenant suddenly playing heavy metal music, meant a break-up. A studious boy suddenly gelling his hair, meant a new crush. She knew who came home late and who left early. Who changed their bedsheets too often, or not enough. She could read depression by the amount of dust that collected on your veranda, and a pay raise in the spring of your walk.
In Shillong, rumours didn’t spread, they bounced off walls and fences. You could pass a bowl of tungrymbai across a window and get the entire story ( complete with footnotes) of someone’s failed engagement, their problematic cousin in Mairang, and a mysterious visitor from Delhi, all this before the chutney cooled.
No one needed satellites, we had Kong Bih on her veranda. No one needed Wi-Fi, we had Bah Muni’s ears, which were so finely tuned, they could hear a secret being thought, seven localities away!
The most terrifying part about the human ear-web, is that they didn’t forget either. You could reinvent yourself in another state, or in another country, and even get a PhD in Theology, but if you came back, someone would still whisper, “Isn’t that the shameful girl who wore that really short skirt to the Good Friday service in 1989?”
So, when people complain about being watched online, when they speak of tracking software and who might know what you had for dinner, I find myself terribly amused. The machines may be cold and calculating, but they’re still blithering amateurs.
Bah Sil, once predicted the collapse of a marriage, because a woman in our locality got her hair done three times in one month. No one had heard the couple exchange an angry word, no one had heard a door slam, just a change in hair colour, and the man knew!
In the end, what’s the difference between a glowing screen tracking you, and a grandmother who, despite her arthritis, had a sixth sense for every single thing you weren’t supposed to be doing? We’ve always been data. You would blink, and someone would whisper about it. You bought second-hand clothes, and someone gasped. You smiled at the wrong person, and someone started drafting wedding invitations.
So, this whole modern surveillance state isn’t new. It’s just less charming than what we used to have. We’ve simply swapped the old spies, Kong Phlo and Bah Minot for Siri and Alexa. To be really honest, I miss the old lot. They may have been nosy, but at least they would show up at your door with food… well, sometimes.