Building check post in the air
IF no news is good news, then this news is already bad. The police have identified 84 websites, which carry sexually explicit contents involving Bangladeshi citizens. Since the police are friends of the people, they didn't rest on their laurels. They took it up with the next level and requested the home ministry to block those sites. You must be thinking the police have done a commendable job. I am thinking something else. Don Quixote has found his windmill.
Good news for everyone! If you aren't safe on the street, you will be safe on the Internet. You may lose the shirt on your back to muggers in an open space. But sit back and relax. Your modesty will be guarded in cyberspace.
So, don't worry if you don't have adequate protection in this country. You can get robbed. You can get raped. But hey, nobody will be allowed to touch your clothes on the Net.
For those who know, it's a comedy of errors. If anything, it shows lack of understanding of the network of networks. When websites are blocked, it doesn't work like a police cordon. Instead it works, as believers often say, a lot like fate. If one door is shut, ten fling open. This is why, when I read the news it struck me as strange.
First of all, how could the police find the slack to worry about the least of our problems, when they should be swamped with law and order nightmares? People regularly take off their clothes in their bedrooms and bathrooms. What's the big deal if few others do the same thing on the Internet? Nudity doesn't kill anyone.
Yes, there is always the possibility of abuse. It's happening on the porn sites of other nationalities. Faces are cut and pasted on nude bodies to create fake imageries of respectable women. Indian sites are regularly awash with doctored pictures of Bollywood stars. Recently, a website in Sri Lanka showed unpleasant images of the president's son.
But like I said, if one door closes, ten new ones are pushed. A simple search brings up 800,000 pages on the Internet. I am not sure how blocking of 84 websites is going to make any dent? On top of that, these sites can always come back under new addresses. It will become full-time job for a division of cyber cops to monitor them. Even that may not be an adequate way to manage the problem.
More bad news, if you wish to know. Most of the 84 websites are maintained from overseas locations. It means if they are blocked, then we won't see them from this country. But rest of the world will have access. The risk of abuse doesn't change.
What Bengal thinks today, Sri Lank thought yesterday. Sri Lanka's Inspector General of Police recommended a similar clamp down last July, which met with protests. He wanted the Telecommunication Regulatory Commission to suspend licenses of 12 websites, which were operating from inside the country and exhibiting nude photographs of Sri Lankan citizens.
May be this meeting of minds is just a coincidence. May be small countries are all alike. They are big on their vanity for matters of less importance. If you look at large countries, their perspective is altogether different. India isn't bothered about it. Neither is China, USA or the European nations.
By no means I am in favour of cyber nudity. But porn sites are but an extension of our lustful minds, a grazing ground for the peeping toms hiding inside us. It started with rock paintings of coitus drawn by the earliest men, and then moved to bas-reliefs of figurines having sex. Then came the frescoes, followed by painting on paper and culminated in photographs. Internet is but the latest form of that transformation in mind's relentless struggle to deny the gap between image and imagination.
Should we think of blocking anything, we should start with our minds. This is where it originates. This is where the little voyeur in each of us learns to become adventurous. And this is where exists the grievous twilight between passion and crime.
The switchover between them has been forever contentious. Rafaels' apprentice Julio Romano quarreled with Pope Clemens VII. In revenge, the artist painted an entire hall in the Vatican with porn frescoes. When removing the scandalous frescoes, some crafty painters made gravures of them. Gravures allowed making of as many copies as needed, and that was how pornography is believed to have spread in Europe.
The urge for sex behaves like the oppressed mass. Faced with repression it agitates. Happy when left alone. The time would have been well spent if the police had identified 84 notorious spots on our streets instead of going on wild goose chase for as many websites.
Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a columnist for The Daily Star.
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