:: Farrukh Dhondy

Say hello to your google stalkers

Farrukh Dhondy

"Set alight my flaming heart

Burn these memories away,

Tread the paths of no return —

Dil Jalta hai tho jalney dey"

From Distant Donkey Music by Bachchoo

Augest.01 : I went to a wedding in Scotland with a friend whose friend’s son was being married. The wedding took place in a castle hotel to which we drove through the magnificent wooded mountains and glens.

The ceremony was a "humanist" affair with a young lady officiating and going through an invented ritual with vows and rings and candles, but without mentioning God or invoking his blessing. The guests must all have been brought up as Christians, Catholic or Scottish Presbyterian, but they all joined in and sang along to the pop songs that substituted for church hymns.

At the "wedding breakfast" that followed, at five in the evening, the guests were seated in a large hall around tables with each of our names marking the seating allocations.

I got to my place carrying my flute of champagne and was sat next to a lady whom I had made the acquaintance of on my left and an empty seat on my right. The man on my right arrived late. Reading the nameplate set before his crockery and cutlery on a neat white card I saw he was called Greg ___.

He was the last to join the table and we shook hands and I opened the small talk by declaring that I was a relative stranger and had been brought by a friend to the ball.

"Oh", he said, "I know all about you".

I was a bit puzzled.

"You’re a writer and a friend of so-and-so and you wrote a critical article about XYZ who then called you…"

He was smiling and went into a substantial amount of chit-chat about me. I had never met or heard of the man in my life and my surprise must have been evident because he owned up.

"I googled you before I came down", he said.

He must have looked at the seating plan of the dinner and for reasons best known to him, summoned up these random facts. Once he’d confessed, it was obvious and just a little embarrassing.

If I had done the same for him, I would have known that he was a consultant doctor at a famous Scottish hospital. I proceeded to find this out through the normal channels of conversation and questioning. His googling propensity had eliminated the need for the preliminary enquiries on his part. I vaguely and weakly resented the fact that he knew anything about me and had bothered to read through references which, in the ups and downs of the worlds of writing and journalism, may have been quite unflattering.

On the positive side, this intrusive instrument of curiosity contributed to cutting out the small talk. We didn’t discuss the weather or the wedding but got straight to talking about some articles I had written about Islamism and one I had written perhaps 10 years ago in the Wall Street Journal which he seemed to have read very carefully.

That he shared the views expressed in that article was lucky. Another occasion and another googler with different views could have led to a less pleasant encounter.

The Facebook generation is the first to put its private life on display. (I am not on Facebook, though I have been variously encouraged by my daughters and others to open such a page. My retort is that I am more likely to be on Facelift.) I have never googled my own name, but the wedding guest gave me a fair idea of the sort of things that have been said about me on the great wittering encyclopaedia of the ether. Some of them were manifestly untrue and some were legitimate opinion and unfettered conjecture.

The Net lends itself to being indiscriminately filled with unsolicited, unedited, unchecked and, perhaps, untrue facts. It also allows the expression of anonymous opinion.

All that’s not new. Printed matter, newspapers and the broadcast media, both radio and TV, have for ever been accused and have been variously guilty, of bias, distortion, bad taste, loose editing and vituperative reviewing. Neither is it possible to verify the identity of every commentator and contributor or letter-writer to the older media. What distinguishes the ethereal media is the freedom of entry which has turned anyone with access to a computer, a camera, a video camera, into a disseminator of unedited fact and opinion. And by individualising both it is at once the most democratic and the least reliable medium.

Newspapers, radio stations, TV channels and publishing houses emerge from particular cultures and are edited and filtered through the interests, characteristics, predilections and even the prejudices of these cultures. If you read the Daily Mail in England you get a slightly different picture of the world from the person who reads the Guardian. The BBC and Al-Jazeera have their own take on the world and resolutely defend their right to interpret it at will.

The ethereal media allow, to adapt Mao’s phrase, a million or an infinite number of flowers to bloom — not all fragrant.

Some years ago, on a trip to Mumbai, I was invited to a reunion of my old school mates. I went to the club where very many lads — now old men — whom I hadn’t seen or heard of or from for years were gathered. Most of them had been summoned by emails and Internet chatter. And most of them spent the time over drinks and food catching up with each other’s lives or reminiscing about school. As I joined in, it became evident that as a columnist and writer for long years I had put myself, my opinions, memories and even the progress of my life on display.

Some of my classmates were unabashedly vocal about things I may have written years previously. Some of them were sea captains, some were in the armed forces, some of them industrialists and businessmen. Their vocations may have entailed risk and hazard of financial sorts or even of life and limb in defence of the country. What they didn’t entail was exposure to the controversy of opinion. They didn’t entail the risk of being told that the personal and reminiscent obituary I had written and published of our late headmaster was a disgrace and deserved, in another place and circumstance, a good thrashing.