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Stifled by the safety net
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We're all crying for tighter security, intelligence with a capital I. Problem is, there is no end to it
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The watchman of your friend's apartment stops you at the gate and makes you sign your name in the register. You smile as you do so. You joke about it with your friend and she says, yes, he lets all the wrong people in and checks the right ones.
The woman at the multiplex stops you at the entrance and makes you open your bag. Your smile slips a bit. She runs a metal detector over your body. Next you step through a beeping doorway. Are you going to catch a flight or watch a movie? All smiles have left your face by now.
Long, long ago the airport was the only public place where you had to undergo a security check. But the number of places that restrict entry has been slinking upwards quietly like a thief in the night. This is your life, your urban life, and someone is always telling your feet where not to go.
Private property, no trespassing. Military grounds, out of bounds. The road is yours if you're driving, the pavement yours if it exists. What's this, a park? It is bound by a railing and there is a lock on the wicket gate. Every commercial building has a guard who, while not actively blocking you (unless you're visibly poor), will not hesitate to throw you out should the need arise. Every office has a receptionist asking you to declare name and intent. Your library has a metal detector, there's CCTV in the department store, and "May I help you?" sounds more like "Don't loiter, just get out".
But these are barriers we take for granted. They've become part of the landscape. More and more barriers go up, and we hardly notice.
I hitched a ride once to see a friend's installation in an office in Electronics City. After a long drive and an hour-long appreciation of the sculpture, I needed to use the loo. An employee walked me towards a glass-fronted room where people worked at their computers. It all looked perfectly normal until she started punching in a code to open the door. I walked in, went to the loo, and walked back to the door to find myself trapped. A worker inside the room had to punch in the numbers that would release me.
An extreme measure, d'you think? It left me a bit rattled although, come to think of it, I should have accepted it as part of today's reality. This is our life, our urban life, and we routinely seal ourselves in. Whether we're eating, sleeping, working, travelling, or getting entertained, we only move from one closed box to another. Tightening security is a way of monitoring who gets into the box. When surveillance becomes too intensive we begin to squirm and say, hey, leave me alone, I'm not the one you're looking for. It's like the joke about the watchman who stops the right people and lets in the wrong ones. Only, it's no joke.
We're all crying for tighter security, intelligence with a capital I. Problem is, there is no end to it. And it can never be foolproof. A camera on every street corner and a policeman at every door will still not make us feel safe enough. It is strange how more security makes us feel more afraid.
If you really want to know what security is all about, though, you have to turn your eyes way up north. An 81-year-old seeking a permanent visa to stay with her son in the U.S. spent a year on a mountain of paperwork. She did everything short of a DNA test to prove her son was hers. The U.S. authorities scrutinised every track she had made on this planet since birth. One of the countless proofs she had to furnish was a xerox of the page in her school's register where her headmistress had entered her name (in the 1930s, mind you), attested by the current principal. The police had to verify every single address she had lived in (which luckily encompassed only two cities) and send their reports directly to the consulate.
In contrast, let me tell you what happened on the morning after the Mumbai train blasts. An artist friend was approaching Indiranagar from Koramangala in an auto. Since this was also the morning that the infamous Airport Road flyover was to be inaugurated by the chief minister, my friend decided to sneak a preview. He stopped the auto. As he walked past the barricade in search of a suitable vantage, a policeman came running up to him. "Press," said my friend glibly, gesturing to his shoulder bag. The cop let him go. He took in the view from the top and sauntered down.
"If only the cop had looked inside my bag," he told me later, "I'd have been in prison for sure." Among the few articles in the bag was a large stone. He had picked it up from the banks of the Cauvery and it had vein-like formations on it, like the fossilised imprint of a leaf. Could have been mistaken for plastic explosive, he laughed.
At least we can laugh about it now. In the future it might be no laughing matter. And that's what I'm afraid of.
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Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Hyderabad
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