[Reader-list] On Shahrukh, shenakhti and scans!

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear All

As we all know how on the eve of the 62nd Independence day of India,
Shahrukh Khan, a bollywood star of some consequence, was detained at
the Newark airport. The reason being, his name popped up on their
computer screens. Apparently the surname -KHAN- is seen with
categorically suspicious eyes in the US.  Had the worthy emigration
officials taken the help of google, they would have been surprised to
find that Shahrukh's name pops up 5,230,000 times.

Much has been made about the story, but Shahrukh's episode, his brush
with the bureaucratic mechanism governing the information society
needs to be looked into carefully.

Recounting his almost Kafkaesque experience, Shahrukh talks about, at
a press conference which he called at his home in Bombay,  how he was
shuttled from room to room, with emigration officials coming over now
and then pestering him to tell them the name of one person in the US
who could identify him as Shahrukh Khan.

More so there seems to be a problem with the centralized data base as
Shahrukh's retina and fingerprint scans taken at the US embassy in
Bombay did not seem to have matched with the information provided at
the emigration counter in Newark. Shahrukh got through the ordeal
after making a few phone calls to his friends at the Indian consulate
office. However, it is important to note that when Shahrukh was
leaving the airport he was not asked to submit his retina and
fingerprints again, to verify bureaucratically as per the procedure,
whether he was indeed the one who he claimed to be. The sole reason
for which he was detained in the first place. No one knows why this
lapse was allowed, no one knows why this lapse took place in the first
place. Perhaps no one will ever know.

It was indeed amusing to see how the so called security super
structure of the information society the world over functions. Is it
not in exceptional cases like a Ajmal Kasab or a Shahrukh Khan that we
can perhaps get a glimpse of a norm of the state of things to follow
with UIDC and MNIC? These states of exception must be carefully
analyzed and viewed with a magnifying glass for I am sure no would
like to be in a position to find that one's own fingerprint and retina
scans, believed to be the most concrete proof of one's individual
identity are forgotten in the haphazard archives of alphanumeric
debris, created, maintained and managed by a completely faceless,
completely opaque network of operators.

Please watch this press conference while keeping in mind that this
could happen to any one. Shahrukh in a rare instance of
non-narcissistic utterances repeatedly stresses that -I am a nobody-
when it comes to the structure of the State, - I am like everyone- he
maybe referring to the alphanumeric codes or he maybe appealing to all
of us to seriously look into this unfolding drama botched up shenakhti
procedures of an overwhelming information society.

The url to Shahrukh's press conference is here-

http://www.ndtv.com/news/videos/video_player.php?id=1147061

Warm regards

Taha