Breaking Down News: Gabbar’s Day Out

But no, it was about a “Gabbar Singh Tax”. The source was ocularly perceivable to be Rahul Gandhi, who has developed a blaring, hectoring voice which doesn’t go well with his personality. Twitter immediately expanded on his GST creativity with a Gaurakshak Seva Tax, Gayab Salary Tax, and certain other taxes too low-life to print. The ruling party and its supporters returned fire, but quite ineffectually. Gabbar Singh had carried the day — days, actually. And unlike movies like Mersal, social media can’t be pruned of inconvenient dialogue.

Read | Arun Jaitley on GST being termed ‘Gabbar Singh Tax’: Those used to 2G, coal scam will have problems paying genuine tax

But there is life beyond Twitter — most of life, actually. In the press, the Gabbar Singh Tax won’t do as well as Rahul Gandhi’s debut hit, “suit-boot ka sarkar”, which was superbly fit to editorialise upon. Gabbar is too raffish. AIB doesn’t get half the column centimetres it deserves in print for a similar reason — the full form of the name is out of place on newspaper pages. In this acronym-crazed nation, the stylesheet insists that you always have to print the full form of an acronym at the first instance. In the case of AIB, this would invite lawsuits from the permanently peevish empire of hurt sentiments. Similarly, one doesn’t see Gabbar Singh Tax anyplace outside the entertainment section. Its natural habitat is social media.

Zimbabwe, where Arab Spring appears to be blooming anew, has the government doing battle with social media. BBC reports that with 46 per cent of the population online, people are using it to circumvent information controls. Social media has been used to organise a unique stay-at-home strike, and the government has retaliated by opening a ministry of cybersecurity. Activists have struck back with a spoof circular bearing the forged signature of the new minister, ordering all WhatsApp users to register with the ministry immediately, “by virtue of the cyber powers vested in me”.

Read | Rahul Gandhi goes full throttle against PM Modi, terms GST as ‘Gabbar Singh Tax’

Sreenivasan Jain and Manas Pratap Singh of NDTV have done a telephonic sting on an IT company, which they claim uses gamed hashtags in what it has termed “online reputation management” — the civil name for the dirty wars on social media. It is technically inconclusive because certain points have been denied and others ignored, but the circumstantial evidence NDTV has put together, and its explanation of how the troll economy is optimised with professional help, makes interesting reading.

But it’s pretty depressing if parties of all persuasions are forced to sink to the occasion. The Congress has suddenly rejuvenated its social media campaign to the extent that the BJP’s much better organised batallion has been forced to make a flanking movement. This means, depressingly enough, that the grand old party is being forced to add to its impressive repertoire, and learn dirty tricks that it did not know before. And there’s that new timbre in Rahul Gandhi’s voice. Maybe it works, but it’s sad if everyone has to stoop to conquer.

It wasn’t always this way. Consider Einstein’s notes scribbled for a courier delivery man in Tokyo almost a century ago, which went under the hammer in Israel. The second speaks of the supremacy of the will, which is perhaps a more powerful word in the original German than in English. But the first sang the praises of the modest life, which sounds downright weird in our times.

Meanwhile, 51 years after it was submitted, Properties of Expanding Universes, Stephen Hawking’s doctoral thesis, brought down Cambridge University’s repository website. The Guardian reported 60,000 download requests in the first 24 hours — think of it as the legitimate equivalent of a distributed denial of service attack, the most popular hacker stratagem to get websites to freeze over. The university had put the document online at midnight on Sunday to mark Open Access Week, but ironically people had to wait for days to get access.

Why midnight, though? Why is everything being launched at midnight, from a PhD thesis to GST? Humans have a peculiar fascination for the everyday Janus-faced moment of the Babylonian calendar, though it is completely arbitrary and the universe doesn’t care about it at all.