An Orwellian redux – 1984 meets 2024

I am not sure if Big Brother is watching you, but by now there is hardly anyone left with a mobile phone who has not received a call from an unknown number to which, if you absent-mindedly respond, a seductive, recorded voice will coo these magic words, ‘This is a call from the Telephone Regulatory Authority of India,’ TRAI to its friends. If you commit the cardinal error of pressing 2 for further information from TRAI, the disembodied voice will connect you to a live person masquerading as a member of the long arm of the law, who will then go on to level charges at you for  making obscene calls to six different numbers in Mumbai and that your mobile phone will be disconnected within two hours if you do not follow the instructions that you will now be receiving. Why they grant you this grace period of two hours is, as Winston Churchill put it, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. In any case, unsurprisingly your number remains active even after two hours, which is a dead giveaway, presaging something distinctly fishy. Based in Bangalore as I am, why I should go to the trouble of making obscene calls to unknown numbers in Mumbai, when I could do precisely the same thing from my residence to unsuspecting denizens in Bangalore, is a point that does not impress the caller. Not that I would even remotely consider such an atrocity. Perish the thought. ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,’ you mutter to yourself, if you know your Hamlet.

Those who are naïve enough to ‘follow the instructions’ will then be advised that they are under ‘digital arrest’ and will be tracked 24 x 7 and commanded to await further instructions. You are also ordered not to leave your residence till further notice and be available on video call whenever needed. Which involves the added nuisance of your having to look respectable from your torso upwards for the camera, and not like something the cat had brought in. That rules out lolling about at home in your night wear, hair in comfortable disarray. One’s home is one’s castle, after all. Or so we thought.

As if all that were not enough, apart from being accused of making heavy breathing sounds to unknown women, you could also be charged with planning terror attacks, raping underage victims, transferring millions to numbered Swiss bank accounts, and illegally smuggling contraband goods into the country. Rare species of exotic reptiles are also included in this category. Not that you can do it legally, of course, but the list of ‘charges’ is as long as your arm, enough to be getting along with. They like to throw in a bit of variety when they call, these telephonic fake merchants. One of these days we will also be accused of ‘thoughtcrime,’ a possibility envisaged by George Orwell in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Some smart phones alert you with a helpful ‘Suspected Spam’ or ‘Potential Fraud’ warning, enabling you to cut or block the line pronto, but these online geeks find ways of circumventing this obstacle, canny sons of Belial. If you ignore their calls altogether, they stay true to their assumed name and follow Robert the Bruce’s dictum to his troops (forgive the paraphrasing), ‘If at first you don’t succeed, TRAI, TRAI again.’

Once you have allowed yourself to be thus ensnared, a whole host of other headaches, and that is putting it mildly, will assail you. Incidentally, such a call can also come from a bank in which you hold an account or from a completely alien source of which you know next to nothing. The latest variant of this fakery is the caller from your fictitious courier service to inform you that an important document from FedEx is awaiting collection, details of which can be had if you press 3 or 9 whence you will be patched through to ‘our customer service representative.’ Why brand FedEx is the chosen one for this caper completely escapes me. Why not DHL or Blue Dart? Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and be hoist with our own petard. That is a matter for FedEx to unravel and for us to prick up our ears and sense the red flag when their name is mentioned. All I can say is pressing 3 or 9 is fraught with the same dangers associated with pressing 2. You have been warned.

 Welcome to the world of fake calls, now no longer something to be taken lightly but capable of inveigling you into a dark vortex of deep stress and anxiety. The crime these bozos are involved in is sinister and the wide-eyed victims are putty in their hands. You feel like a deer caught in the headlights. Furthermore, you will also have divested yourself of a great deal of money, before realisation dawns that you have been had – hook, line and sinker. As Bob Dylan said, you are ‘only a pawn in their game.’ Then you find yourself running to the nearest police station to register a formal complaint, after which you hare off to your family doctor to rid yourself of a severe case of migraine, dangerously elevated blood pressure and the onset of depression brought on by helplessness and hopelessness in attempting to deal with a situation only Kafka could have imagined.

Dear reader, you are well aware of this present-day scourge and should know enough to make absolutely certain that you DO NOT PRESS 2, or any other digit for that matter, when that idiot voice calmly asks you to do so. Even if you don’t take my word for it, the newspapers remind us almost every other day that this is a clear and present danger. What is it with so many of us that we flatly refuse to do anything our elders, or our better halves, tell us – mundane things like ‘have your bath before the water stops and switch the geyser off,’ ‘toast your bread slices before the electricity cuts off,’ ‘don’t forget to take your BP pills,’ or ‘make sure to release the car’s handbrake before driving off’  but are perfectly willing to follow to the ends of the earth instructions to ‘press 2’ from an unknown voice over our mobile phones? And I am not even getting into flights being delayed by calls threatening hoax bomb threats. The mind boggles.

What continues to puzzle me is why our guardians of the law, in their various avatars, have not yet been able to wrap their heads around this mobile telephonic curse. India now supposedly leads the way in the IT sphere and yet, we are not able to bring cyber-crime under control. I realise there are various hues of crime being committed in the cyber world, but when ordinary folk like you and me are daily wondering if we should respond to that number which we are unfamiliar with, in case we are unwittingly drawn into a conversation that leads to the rapid depletion of our bank balance, then it’s a bit thick. After all, that unknown number could also be from a long-lost friend or relative whose number you had not saved. We are in the heady realm of a Brechtian dilemma. While our lawmakers are still grappling with this problem, we can protect ourselves by just this simple expedient. At the cost of repeating myself, you can either take my advice and exercise extreme caution or go ahead and press 2,3 or 9 and the devil take the hindmost.