Modi in #Top10Criminals list: Quirks of a Google search
That Twitter trends set the day's agenda is a truth universally acknowledged in our digitised world. But when Twitter trends and hashtags begin replacing history wholesale, concerns reflect on intelligentsia's puckered brows. Except, that it doesn't fully happen, and the process of rewriting history continues as technologies and internet platforms battle to carve out ever new and all engulfing algorithms of revisionism. At the same time, like a double-edged sword, these very technologies leave crumbs to retrace the path and sometimes lead you to a time before all memory was wiped out.
Today, Twitter has been abuzz with a certain Google search result called #Top10Criminals, which, astonishingly enough, includes Prime Minister Narendra Modi's name in the said list. The compilation also showcases names such as Al Capone, Osama Bin Laden, Dawood Ibrahim, Hafiz Saeed, Joaquin Guzman, George W Bush, OJ Simpson, among others. Outrage, as well as screened winks and electronic nudges, have been choking social media all day, as are "clean-chit" flashing indignation, hurt-pride fury, as well as other species of mass manufactured anger at the mention of our dear leader with the scum of the world.
Perhaps, Republicans in the "red states" of the United States of America are equally upset with Google for featuring George Bush in the list, even though US President Barack Obama might have sent a secret congratulatory text to Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO and current executive chairman.
As Schmidt puts it, "The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had." Apparently, the internet "remembers" everything, even when it's wiped clean, either physically, or through political turnarounds. Then there's the "deep web", which is untraceable even to the likes of NSA and other behemoths of institutional surveillance. What escapes them, stays online, hidden from public gaze, but brandished around by those who dare not forget.
That PM Modi's name came up in a random Google search on "criminals" is, therefore, a figment of the past making an entry out of turn. His "criminality" has been squashed in the highest court of law in this country; there's a judicial clean chit, a unanimous electoral mandate, and now, after one year in office, he's pretty much the system incarnate. He's the new normal in a country fast changing its complexion of various moot points. He's the face of India beyond the cusp.
But a Google search that trawls into the recent past, scavenges for memory locked in "keywords"; the glossed over meanings of erased meta titles on social media; the frenzied posts against the rapturous rhapsodies for Narendra Modi is a different being altogether. It does not understand nuances, but relies on algorithms factored in to pick up shades of interpretations. It's like that well-trained monkey tasked with typing out William Shakespeare's First Folio: there will be lexical blood.
Since Modi's command over all things Google-able is astronomical, since he comprehends the potential impact of a strategically designed meme more than any of his compatriots (pun intended), it's only a tad ironic that Google can extract a little "Howzzat" moment from someone who has colonised the internet giant so thoroughly. With more than 12 million followers on Twitter, Modi is the third-most followed world leader, and a Google gaffe may be a way of telling him that the internet iceberg can still make a miniscule scratch on, if not wreck, his ship.
The more we record, the more we forget. The more we tweet, the less we chirp. The "achche din" are here to absolve us all of any residual criminality. Google is guilty, for its memory is flawed. It doesn't forget what we have been asked to forget. It caches the past, even those eminently deletable ones.
Modi should click a selfie with Google to tame the beast once and for all. Or not.