What I'm doing this Sunday on M.G. road.

Ever since I finished my exams, I've been in a rage to do all the things I've denied myself for the past year and a half. That's how I find myself looking forward to going to the protest against India's central monitoring system, CMS or ICMS as it is generally known, to be held in Bangalore this Sunday.

As if it wasn't bad enough that I'm still cyber stalked by my ex(s), the Government wants to do it too! Well, to you and to me and everybody else, I think this should be very worrying.

It's quite sneaky how they've slowly been trying to start monitoring our e-mails, texts, calls, and even the holy internet with almost no hint of it being discussed in parliament or even most of the media. I wish this was being discussed as frantically as corruption in IPL, but that's another post.

My reading makes me arrive at the conclusion that there are going to be at least two huge ways in which my life is going to be impacted by this move. Firstly, a very unreliable, corrupt and non-transparent entity is arming itself with a tool that allows it to read through all of my private information with absolutely no accountability and very vague or no ideas about how it is going to regulate it's own folk from misusing this immense information. I am also suspicious cause I've heard so little about this from the government. The stealth with which they've been trying to roll out the system makes me doubtful of their intentions. Second, my dear, holy internet is not going to be the same. Remember what happened to the girls in Mumbai, who put up a very innocuous post on Bal Thackeray's death about the total lock down of the city? I think there's every reason to believe that this censorship is primarily going to be to restrict any criticism of public figures. This old report and many others on the hindu suggest that the government has increasingly requested for removal of content that it did not find convenient to itself. I hate any attempts at restricting what I read, I couldn't choose where to read my history from during school, but I want to retain the unequivocal right to choose what I am exposed to during my adulthood.

Living in India for the powerless, invisible majority, has always felt like living under intense pressure of constricting, contracting and stifling yourself so that the bigger, more powerful people do not notice you enough to want to delete you or choke you altogether for their gains. They simply can't be trusted and this feels like just another way of pushing us further into our dark, desperate corners.

#stopicms