The new Almighty

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“How many roads must a man walk down
Before he wears out his shoes?
How many seas must a white dove sail
Fuelled by a single bottle of booze?”
From Bachchoo ke Sawaal

Feb.26 : I was, recently, interviewed on Indian TV. I was, am, in London and the programme required me to go to the Westminster Towers, a modern red-brick building on the Thames’ Albert Embankment below Lambeth Bridge, on the opposite side of the river from the forbidding, solid, old stone MI5 (police intelligence unit) building and overlooking the Houses of Parliament.
Once through security, the very polite young man shows the victim into a small cellular room on the ninth or eleventh floor and one is invited into the single chair in the room, wired up for sound and made to stare into the opaque screen of a camera. The young man disappears and glances cursorily at you through a glass screen beyond which is the mysterious or sinister-seeming machinery of the control room. One sits in perfect silence waiting for the voice of the host of the programme to come through from India.
One is aware that at the other end, in Delhi or Mumbai, or wherever, there is gaiety and consternation in a studio atmosphere with 72 beautiful researchers gliding in and out and throngs of the self-admiring opinionated on ranges of benches waiting to bite into the topic in hand. There is “entertainment” for the speakers and taxis and held doors.
Sitting in the isolation of the Westminster cell, one doesn’t see or hear any of this. What one imagines is that any moment a Parsi priest will come through the padded door of the soundproof cell, exhort you to commend your soul to Ahura Mazda and ask if you have any last wish before they throw the switch.
The point of this rigmarole (apart from adding local colour and confessing that the films I used to see in my boyhood featuring public executions by electric chair, gas chamber, hanging and guillotine, still haunt my dreams) is that each time I have been called upon to appear on Indian TV, one or the other of the distinguished participants in the debate has referred to the Almighty as a source of truth and information. No, I don’t mean Ahura Mazda, Jehovah, Bhraman, Allah or Tom Cruise — I mean our modern Almighty, the Universal Internet.
It would be no exaggeration to say that once upon a time the tribes of the world and the far-flung civilisations on the planet worshipped trees, stones, ancestors, thunder, nature, the seasons and most things that passed their way. Then came Zarathustra (Zardosht) who proclaimed there was only one God and only one source of truth in the Universe. It caused a lot of upheaval. His assertion and invention (discovery or revelation, if you are a believer) arguably gave rise to or encouraged the growth of monotheism through Judaism, Christianity and later Islam.
And now a new revolution has invaded the earth with a thousand anonymous prophets (some of them even born in Bangalore) and it threatens to usurp the authority of the other sources of knowledge, such as books, newspapers, the radio and TV, which have long been accepted as near infallible by various civilisations through the ages.
This new Single Authority’s power arises from the fact that it requires no intervening saints. The communicant has a direct connection to dissemination, which is power, and the additional illusion that this direct access gives them the status of demi-Gods.
Newspapers, TV channels, the radio and books used to be subject to the filter of editorial control. Another mind, or several other minds, working within the conventions of traditions, orthodoxies and systems of value, mediated the thoughts, ideas, fictional creations, factual representations, as in news, and all other outpourings before they reached a readership or the viewers.
I approach the subject in this way because, having earned my living as a writer, journalist and screenplay supplier for most of my life, I take it as a fact of life that some sixteen-and-a-half-year-old jerk, or some antiquated frustrate who had the ambition to write him or herself but didn’t have the talent, or some producer, director or actor with an overblown ego would inevitably attempt to change the words I put on the page for reasons best known to themselves. It’s known as the process of “editing”. In the worst case, one’s words or one’s entire piece are subject to ridicule and rejection.
Not so with the Internet. Any twit can twitter — any bogbrush can blog. The Internet is the narcissistic fool’s paradise. Any collection of words counts as an “opinion”, any boring concatenation of personal rubbish counts as a column (ahem! — Ed.), any assertion becomes a “fact”.
Most of the googles of garbage that the self-important, unmediated or undeservedly vain plant on the Internet can be gracefully ignored — and is. There are people I know who delude themselves with the uncanny comfort of “having 4,000 friends” on Facebook. There are other idiots who think that the idle curiosity, sycophancy or deranged time-wasting of people who sit by the day clicking on to blogs and commenting on them constitutes a real audience for their unsaleable ramblings.
All human error, or human vanity of expression is there.
In two recent episodes of unedited opinionation in Britain, this tweeting and bleating has had political consequences. A Labour candidate for office in London commented on a Tory MP’s blog that the Queen was a parasite. It led to complaints to headquarters and the de-selection of the poor anti-Royalist.
Then a Labour MP called members of the Opposition Tory Party “scum-sucking pigs”. Now some of us do believe that the Queen is a parasite and that some Tories at least are indeed scum-sucking pigs, and would say so at dinner gatherings to our friends. The comment, even from the mouth of a member of Parliament, would pass without consequence.
The devil is in the disseminating medium. The world has mistaken the Internet for authority. It is a false God. Like Moses of old, I now deign to descend from the mountain and denounce it, warning all fools to use this golden calf, at best, as a decoration on their mantelpieces or to deposit it in their Icelandic bank vaults, but to worship it at the peril of their souls.
My nine commandments follow.

Farrukh Dhondy