And for Amar Singh, a tip: Next time use carrier pigeons

This is why I cannot for the life of me understand why Amar Singh is so jumpy over the prospect of his private conversations being given a public airing. On the contrary, the fact that somebody, somewhere, somehow actually thought it worth their while to take all the trouble to pay someone to record what most people casually reveal in the course of a mobile conversation, can only mean that Amar Singh has truly made it to the top echelons of the Kingdom of Indraprastha.

I mean, it is not everybody who is called upon to provide soundbites for the greater common good. This is proof enough that Amar Singh’s loquacity is more than mere words: they are priceless pearls of wisdom that needed to be carefully garnered and kept in safe-keeping for posterity, so that future citizens could actually listen in and exclaim, ‘‘Ah, here speaks a true Indian!’’ I would suggest then, that instead of going around the country with a long face and his tale of woe, rather like Coleridge’s albatross-crossed mariner (or getting Mulayam Singh Yadav to fly around, addressing press conferences in his support), he would be far better off throwing another yet swinging party for the Ina, Meena, Geetas of Bollywood to mark—as Sir Vidia may have put it—this enigma of arrival.

In any case, Amar Singh should know better than most people that getting around in the country’s capital city is all about making the right connections, and tapping them (occasionally taping them) in the fullness of time. In fact, everybody taps everybody else. If you need to tap someone, somewhere to get a pass to a cricket match or an admission into a kindergarten, you need to tap a conversation or two to work the secret levers of power. Even as we wind our way through endless cocktail parties, wolfing down chicken tikkas and quaffing martinis with equal abandon, our antennas are at full mast for any information that can prove invaluable in steering us up the ladders of power and preferment. Our secret surveillance systems, ticking away under our tweeds or pashminas, are powered by our insatiable curiosity. Enormous amounts of data can be garnered at an average Delhi dinner, all of which we then promptly store in our hard disks and recover when the need arises.

Somewhere gliding above us all is Bada Bhaiyya, our very own Big Brother. The Constitution has granted us all the right to free speech and expression, true. But nowhere in that document does it say that the government of the day cannot make free use of free speech. Long before we were granted the right to information, Bada Bhaiyya had been exercising the right. So governments may come and governments may go, but Bada Bhaiyya is always around, watching and listening, in the supreme interests of the country. E Y Harburg even had a doggerel for the phenomenon: This we know from Watergate/ That almost any creep’ll/ Be glad to help the government/ Overthrow the people. Incidentally, in the US, they once had a clever title for state snooping. They called it TIA, or Total Information Awareness. In India they don’t do fancy labels, they just eavesdrop.

As for Amar Singh, next time he wants to say something private without attracting the attentions of The Republic of Snoopy Dog, I suggest that he stick to the old carrier pigeon route. Far more romantic, and less bothersome, than smoke signals!