Koffee with Kafka
In a Kafkaesque moment for Lakshmana the innocent techie was put under bars for defaming Shivaji. 'Shivaji who?' was the question he asked and pat came the reply 'Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj you bozo!'. ('I never met him! What is his email id? Is he available on orkut?'. 'Orkut ya thats what those chircut's said, you are under arrest').
The policewallahs tracked the ipaddress to his home tipped off by Lakshmana's Internet Service Provider (ISP) of defamation in orkut community. I can imagine these state sponsored goons come into action when political masters say 'shoo, get fetch him boy, aaaaah good boy' or 'go nab someone for me instead of a fetching newspaper today' Reading through the article at his point I thought they might be trying to find street address, pincode and all in the ipaddress let alone the cryptic 'crosses' and 'mains' popular in Namma-Bengaluroo so might have landed at the wrong place.
The gruesome ordeal Lakshmana K. had to go through was shrugged off by these cyber-illiterate cops through an irritating, irresponsible, condemnable comment: "We made a mistake, so what" that too coming from a senior police officer. Meaning "We had just put some guy behind bars for 50 days, look we played fair, it was just a random thing it would have been your next door neighbour or even you, you see. It is our duty to put people behind bars, there are so many of them, it is good to keep the cells engaged you know. A little bit of jail boosts your moral and our appraisal too"
Halfway through I made uncanny resemblance of Mr. Lakshmana K's plight to that of Joseph K protagonist of Franz Kafka's dark story 'The Trial'
Though we are becoming cyber-aware but the people sitting high a top don't know a thing about computers, probably checking emails thats it. It is this same ignorance and a systemic stupidity we had a blanket ban on all blogs throughout the country! ('Its for those IT kids to know, to do computers, God knows what do they do sitting in front of monitors, in our good old days the typewrite was enough')
The interesting part to look for is will the ISP concerned give a verbal/written apology in person or public or provide some compensation ('Probably an offer/scheme! Pay some insane amount of money and we won't tell them what and whom you did last summer') or just another automated kasht-mar care reply ('welcome to rambharose ISP service, press 1 to get behind bars, press 2 to contact your friendly neighborhood cop,')?
