A WhatsApp exchange. 

Other Person: And then he met with you know who…

Me: Who? 

Other Person: You know…

Me: No

Me: I don’t… 

Other Person: Achha, more when we meet… 

I am scared of opening my WhatsApp most days because it feels like a Harry Potter novel. I have nothing against Harry Potter novels, but I grew up before they came along and read “serious literature”, so the only one I got through — out of curiosity — is Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I remember liking The Philosopher’s Stone. But I wouldn’t like to be in it, especially without the magic. That’s what WhatsApp is nowadays. The Philosopher’s Stone without magic. 

Sometimes “you know who” is supplemented with all sorts of weird abbreviations, acronyms and nicknames. I have been guilty of the same myself. At times I have used such convoluted abbreviations, acronyms and nicknames that I forgot who I was referring to. It’s like playing Spy versus Spy where you are “Spy” and you are also “Spy”. It’s like being Alan Turing with amnesia. 

I have begun to think surveillance should be treated like junk food. You know it will kill you but if you can’t help it, enjoy it. No, really. Think about this. All our lives so many of us have striven to “have a voice”, to “be heard”, and now the world is listening to us even though we haven’t asked them to. In the olden days, the life of a villager cut off from urbanity could have been compared to the proverbial frog in the well. But now, all he has to do is get a smartphone and even China hears him. 

Then, at times, I feel people set too great a store by the power of the state. In 2014, I was having drinks with some people in Khan Market (sigh, yes) and one of them said, “I don’t believe in the ideology but the mind. THE MIND.” She was swept up in a wave of such emotion that I feared she was going to have a heart attack. She was referring to the Hindutva wave that had swept Narendra Modi into power but one would think, listening to her, that we had finally been colonised by Artificial Intelligence. 

It’s not Artificial Intelligence. Yet. It’s people. They have feelings. They make mistakes. 

Sometimes this fear of the big brotherly state is disguised with ludicrous excuses. Take Congress leader Shashi Tharoor’s recent statement explaining why he will refrain from criticising the prime minister when he is abroad: “The prime minister deserves respect in foreign countries as he is a representative of our nation.” 

Tharoor reminds you of mothers who are wary of being stern with children who have run away from home lest they don’t return. 

The prime minister is not a truant. If he deserves respect in foreign countries he deserves respect at home. And if he deserves criticism at home then this doesn’t change while he is abroad. It’s not like we have a different prime minister to represent us abroad. If we did it would put the voters in quite a quandary. 

But the really ridiculous thing is the assumption in this statement that if we simply don’t criticise the prime minister while he’s abroad, the rest of the world will be fooled. Tharoor is a man of the world. He must surely be aware that a sizeable percentage of the world’s population lives in democratic societies. The robustness of a democracy — particularly in the US and Europe which the prime minister visits often — is gauged by how vocal critics of the government can be. Seldom have I seen an Opposition leader from any such country say to his party people and the public, “Pipe down, folks, the leader is doing important things elsewhere so keep it a little quiet, huh?” Why should we adopt this approach then? More to the point, what would all those democratic “foreign countries” that the prime minister is “representing” us in think if we did? 

But fear breeds ridiculousness. 

I recently met someone at a Delhi book launch who, in the middle of a perfectly normal conversation, said with a sense of inexplicable urgency, “One has to be careful. Look what they did to Chidambaram.” I still have no idea what he was trying to say. I jogged my memory trying to remember if I had anything to do with P Chidambaram. Besides hovering around him when I was reporting on the drug trade and wanted to hear what the then home minister was asking officials at a Narcotics Control Bureau meeting, a “hi, hello” at some event which I’m sure he forgot instantly, and a phone call asking for an interview which he denied citing paucity of time, I don’t particularly remember plotting cloak-and-dagger stuff with the man. 

So, I gave up trying to wind up the rusty clock of memory and looked deep into the eyes of the talker instead, hoping to find clues. 

“Do you know Chidambaram?”

“No, never met him.”

“Oh.”

“What on earth would I have to do with Chidambaram?”

“But then why do you have to be careful?”

All he said in reply to the bewildered expression on my face was, “You know…” 

No, I don’t know. I don’t know who. I don’t know what. I don’t know why I have to be careful. And I don’t know how to be careful. So that settles that. But I did find a clue in those deep dark eyes of his. 

I believe some of us are fearful because of a misplaced sense of self-importance. This reminds me of a boy I knew in college. He began to mingle with criminal elements, possibly to give vent to long-held childhood fantasies of being a gangster himself. Whenever we would travel in a car together and the car passed a cop, he would try to hide. 

Let me paint the scene for you. We shall call the boy “Babai”. The car passes a cop. No one else notices. But after a while his two friends in the front notice that Babai is missing. 

“Babai? Are you there?”

“Has he gone?”

“Who?”

“The cop!”

Babai would be discovered cowering on the car floor in the back. Hiding from a cop who wasn’t aware of his existence. 

I mean, I know the Bharatiya Janata Party has used holograms for elections, and while I have serious problems with their politics, the way people talk about Amit Shah nowadays you would expect him to walk out of a cupboard in your room every now and then.

How much time do you think he has on his hands? 

Kashmiris could be forgiven for thinking exactly this, however. Amit Shah is virtually walking out of everyone’s cupboard there. But most of the people reading this are unlikely to be Kashmiris, as surely as Caste Hindus are not Dalits. Try not to appropriate the horror that isn’t yours. 

But let’s imagine there is a real reason why you would expect this government to put you in jail, bending laws to their will. To quote from American politician Eugene V Debs’s anti-war speech of 1918, “I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in jail than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets.” 

When Gandhi wanted us to fight for freedom, his message was quite simple, at least for me, looking back from the cosy comfort of an independent India. It was this: You are, in effect, a vast continent of resourceful people being ruled by a handful of Englishmen. They cannot rule you without your consent. Refuse to give in where you disagree. You needn’t use violence for this. They will either get better at governing or leave. 

In effect, what he was saying was that to be independent you have to act independent. Or as the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa put it, “First be free; then ask for Freedom.” Or, if you prefer Che Guevara: “Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves.” 

Perhaps if we began to act like we were living in a democracy, we would one day realise that we are actually living in one. 

But there are less altruistic reasons for not minding jail, despite all the horrors it holds. I have a dearly held vision, so if you will indulge me. I often think that jail might be the only thing that will get me to lose weight. 

For, trust me dear reader, I have tried everything. The keto diet, intermittent fasting, intense workouts. Nothing has worked. I have a feeling jailtime will. Have you noticed how fit Gandhi and Nehru were right until the end? I am convinced it was all those years in prison. 

Of course, this does not hold true for everyone. Chidambaram, for instance, may not appreciate this benefit of jail time (there are, however, other benefits that I will come to in a bit). And, to be honest, this theory of mine didn’t seem to hold true for our right honourable Home Minister Amit Shah (who incidentally was jailed when Chidambaram was home minister; what a merry-go-round!). But then I think you will agree with me that this isn’t the first time Shah has beaten the odds. 

Think about it. State home minister. Resigned. In jail. Out of jail. Tadipaar. Wins Uttar Pradesh. Becomes BJP chief. Wins other states. Loses two states. Wins more states. Loses more states. Wins the national election. Union home minister. Revokes Articles 370 and 35A, putting an entire state under a security lockdown. Somewhere in all of this, there is a criminal case and a dead judge. It would be a misstatement to say Shah is a precipitator of Black Swan events (as Nassim Nicholas Taleb would have called them). Shah is a Black Swan himself. Little of what he has done in the past eight years would have been believable had he actually not done it. If someone wrote Shah’s biography for posterity, the writer would have to call it fiction for fear that, if he didn’t, later generations would treat it as mythology. 

But let us return to the benefits of prison. The experiential desires of everyone, not just writers, contain two vital strands. One, how do I meet new kinds of people? Prison satisfies this criteria fully. It is true that some of the encounters in jail are likely to be quite unsavoury, but they will probably still be better than much of what you have to endure while socialising in Indian metropolises like Delhi or Mumbai. Rajat Gupta told me earlier this year that while he wouldn’t wish such an ordeal on anyone, he wouldn’t have met some of the most fascinating people he has known had he not gone to prison. 

The second vital experiential impulse: how do I get away from it all? Rabindranath Tagore was known to retreat to the countryside and the hills. American writer Gore Vidal moved to a villa in Ravello, on the Italian Amalfi Coast, and wrote, “The squalor never ends once one gets involved with people for whom truth is no criterion. I should have known better. I stayed among them too long. I had now lit out for another country, in every sense. Life changed.” 

Prison, I think, will be cheaper than Ravello. I remember when I worked for Mumbai Mirror, well over a decade ago, a disgruntled reader sent an email addressed to the employees of the paper at large. It was emphatic in its brevity. “For long you have enjoyed the subsidised food in TOI canteens,” it read, referring to The Times of India group. “Now you will sample the free food of jail.” 

I am still not certain whether this gentleman had meant his prophecy to be a kindness or a threat. But perhaps that’s because I have never been a fan of TOI canteen food. 

As of now, however, the state apparatus seems inclined to only bear the recuperative expenses of VIDs. Very Important Dissidents. Unfortunate. It’ll take most of us a while to get there (though I do notice some lesser mortals slipping through the lines every now and then). 

One thing you hear a lot about nowadays is people who are on party or agency watchlists. I have had acquaintances tell me they are on some “list” or the other. In the beginning, I never knew whether to congratulate them or sympathise. There are, after all, shortlists for awards too. This confusion was compounded by the fact that most people announce very proudly that they are on a “list”, as if they have won an award. I had never been on any list and this annoyed me no end. Then, one day, a friend shared with me the happy news that both he and I were on a list. I was excited at first, but whenever you are made a part of something you become curious about what it is. 

So I asked him, “A list of what?”

“Dissenters,” he said. 

“Dissenters?”

“Yes. People who disagree with the ruling party.”

This made me think. The ruling party won approximately 38% of the vote in the last national election. If 62 per cent of the country’s population is going to be on this particular list, then my friend and I will probably be somewhere in the middle (and that’s being charitable). It will take them at least a few more terms in power before they even consider us, and by then there may be a decrease in their vote share and an increase in the number of dissenters, so we’ll keep on slipping down the roster. No real reason for excitement after all. 

What I’m trying to say is, be unafraid. After all the great people I have quoted thus far I must end, sadly, with Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” 

We cannot change this. It sums up the comedy that is our lives. But laugh a little, live a little. One thing that can go right is your sense of humour. It would be a tragedy to lose it.