go offline and fight!

i have been asked, by five friends and two complete strangers, to wear white in support of anna hazare. they have sent me this message via sms. i don’t have a problem with this, primarily because the colour white suits me. pink could have invited trouble on the dadar local.

i have also been asked to join 16,754 other people who ‘like’ anna hazare on facebook. he isn’t actually on facebook, what with being occupied with a fight against the central government, but a short biography from wikipedia is what’s prompting those 16,754 well-meaning folk to move a mouse towards the aforementioned ‘like’ icon.

there are also 17 facebook pages devoted to the lokpal bill. this includes a curiously named ‘dinesh demands lokpal bill’ page, presumably created by a certain dinesh who takes his own demands more seriously than most. each of these pages is, of course, ‘liked’ by a number of people.

at petitions.in, ‘the first and foremost location for hosting your online petition in india’, 125 people have signed a petition in support of the bill. the petition’s creators are aiming for 100,000 more to sign up.

much of these developments come from social media enthusiasts. these are people who act exactly like you and i do, except that they intersperse meals or sex with long hours on social networking sites. by 2015, i strongly believe every third indian will be a social media enthusiast. a seven-year-old in my building describes himself as one too, even though he thinks the internet has something to do with badminton. i choose not to correct him.

i suppose what i am trying to say — in the convoluted manner that has almost convinced my family to disown me — is that enthusiasm about anna hazare’s fight is commendable, provided it leads to something that can help him in ways that go beyond a ‘like’ icon. every step we take in india today points to a scam of some sort. i mean this literally, considering even the paver blocks that line many of our streets are overpriced and often replaced for no apparent reason.

armchair activism is all very well when the issues at stake aren’t of decisive importance. hazare’s fight has the potential to change the lives of our children. stop ‘liking’; start doing something instead.

i am happy about the fact that my pointless suggestion on twitter, that his fast may well be a slick marketing campaign by khadi bhandar, has earned me more abuse than usual. i am not well-liked on twitter, at the moment.