[Reader-list] UID Project Propaganda Money

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear AK Malik,

Thank you for your mail.

I think this fifty crore is peanuts. The money apportioned to spread a
notion identity can be trapped by a twelve digit number is going to go
up. You just wait and watch. All lies need an army of howlers to make
it appear like truth. I am sure UIDAI will hire the best in business.
People who for generations have made us believe in the transformative
powers of a soap will be used to unleash a virulent charm. You just
wait and watch. UID number will appear magical to all of us now. The
magic of the state will have a new coating. You just wait and watch.

Any national identity card helps make a state appears like an ideal.
The appearance of a messy business of governance goes away to a neat
and clean image. Click. Click of a mouse. That's the ideal which UID
is pushing for. We would know who is who on the click of a mouse. We
would know how many of them exists on the click of a mouse. We would
know what to do with them on the click of a mouse. Click. Click of a
mouse that's the ideal which UID is pushing for.

The ideal of a state will be as follows. Neat and clean computer
screens. Uniform humming of servers. Air conditioned environments. And
soft voices with which they will speak to each other. The officious
tone with which they will address members of public not as human
beings but as numbers. A plastic card will represent the new ideal. It
will all depend on a Click. Click of a mouse. Just like the big dam
represented the ideal of the state back then.

Against this ideal is the dust which floats across the idea of India.
Just take a walk. Take a walk along any nearest two mile radius. Meet
and greet every one who lives there. Do a survey. Do a census. Your
own personal census. See how many of us have documents to prove who we
are. I am sure you will find atleast a hundred people who do not have
any papers. I am sure there will be many of us who would just gawk at
you for mentioning the word -paper-. The act of gawking would increase
with the amount of distance you traverse from the center. The heart of
India, just like any other heart is dark. It bloody. It is messy. Once
there, one can only hear the sound of silence. The rhythmic beats of
an endless cycle of life. Life is only made up of here and now. At
some spaces there are simply no elsewhere. It's like any other heart.
Systole and diastole. That is its identity. And the pause in between.
The void. The deep unknown. Which makes it fuzzy.

Mr. Nilekani is a dreamer. He dreams. That's for sure. He dreams ideal
dreams. Click. Click of a mouse. Maybe that's what on his mind. I
wonder how he will capture the heart of India. He says that he will do
it. He will do it just like they introduce people at a bank. A person
will vouch for another person's identity. And so on. Till the network
of castes will allow the harvesters of identity to collect a billion
marks. A nation will split itself inside out to reveal who we are. No
wonder they are doing a caste census along side. You just wait and
watch. Click. Click of a mouse. That's the ideal they are pushing for.

Mr. Nilekani is a dreamer. He says that he will do it. He will do it
just like they introduce people at a bank. A person will vouch for
another person's identity. We are nation of millions of undocumented.
We would require lots of people to introduce ourselves to members of
Nilekani's party. People who will tell the engraver who we are. The
engraver will create an archive of impressions based on hearsay. Voice
will transform into bits of data. Data will transform into plastic.
And we will finally know that we are all Indians because now we will
have a plastic card, a shinning plastic card to prove who we are.

The new ideal of a state is the power to access the collective memory
of who we are. The magic is such that we don't want to bother even if
we know that it is based on an imperfect archive of hearsay's. Click.
Click of a mouse. That's the ideal they are pushing for. Don't they
know that dust of India awaits them.

Warm regards

Taha