Devangshu Datta: Living with watchers

The non-fiction oeuvre has recently been enriched by several city biographies. In its own way, each book is interesting. The list includes Grand Delusions: A Short Biography of Kolkata by Indrajit Hazra, Rana Dasgupta's Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First-Century Delhi and Amitava Kumar's A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna. Earlier, Suketu Mehta wrote Maximum City and the ur-urban biography would be City of Djinns, William Dalrymple's homage to early 1990s Delhi.

However, I know Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai well and the respective books on those cities do not reflect my personal experiences. This is not a value judgement; it is subjective.

"For any particular thing, ask what is it in itself? What is its nature?" If one applies Marcus Aurelius' matrix of classification to any city, the answers will differ for individuals. Cities are large, interactive multi-dimensional spaces, offering multi-layered experiences.

People seek out the experiences they need, and the ones they want. Some are defined by necessity. A nine-to-five office-goer operates in a very different environment from a mandi trader. Some things are defined by different modes of gratification. One person's taste runs to art galleries, another likes the zoo, and a third patronises multiplexes.

Some experiences are functions of geographical location and infrastructure - the weather, the public transport, the price of vegetables, power, water supply, public spaces, the crime. Even so, one can pay for a better quality of life. Somebody may buy a car and avoid public transport, or live in a gated colony with home delivery, power backup, security, borewell, and so on.

Most city dwellers access the same places again and again, and rarely interact with those bits of the city that do not concern them. Work, the home, commutes, preferred recreational spots - these vary from individual to individual. But a given person will rarely move outside his or her known spaces.

The Internet is virtual, but the analogy with physical city space holds in many ways. Every surfer's relationship with the Net is unique to the individual, reflecting the surfer's wants and needs.

The experience is again defined to some extent by infrastructure. But again, some of us can pay for faster connectivity, better machines and screens. Most surfers also tend to stay within the chakravyuha of a few sites they revisit, rarely wandering out to other places. The power user with 800 Mozilla tabs open at a time is a rare beast.

The analogy breaks down when it comes to the premiums people pay to upgrade the quality of experience. In a city, people pay premiums to improve their quality of life. On the Net, one might actually pay a premium by accepting a degraded surfing experience!

Most of the Internet is continuously monitored by multiple governments and private agencies. If you want a fast connection and you wish to participate in any normal online activity, you do so in the knowledge that your every action is an open book.

The surveillance is unobtrusive and the outcomes are not necessarily all bad. By data-mining surfing history, vendors curate the experience and lead surfers to things they like. The preferred types of music, videos and books are presented ; the purchases are one-click; real-life friends are unearthed by networking sites.

Avoiding surveillance is tough and means accepting an almost crippled surfing experience. Social media is out; free webmail is out; cookies must be rejected; scripting shut down; online transactions are taboo. Privacy fanatics must also accept the slowdowns common to much VPN usage and onion routing.

This is a Faustian bargain. Embrace surveillance, and have a fast, fun experience. Or evade surveillance and opt out of the many good things attached. Most of us go with the convenience. I guess I'm unusual in that I find this as creepy as using an excellently appointed public loo with CCTVs installed and pretending nobody looks at the feed. Not even when they hand you the hot towels and the scented toilet paper.