Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (37 page)

The Mobile
Wali-style clips were relatively innocent. Small-time entrepreneurs used the mobile phone—by now, an object of fascination, envy and dismay—to market short entertainment videos based on lively music, suggestive lyrics and saucy dances. Indian manufacturers of handsets, eager to eat into Nokia’s dominance, joined the mobile phone and the risque to advertise their phones. The Lava brand marketed its Lava 10 phone in 2010 with a television commercial in which a supermarket cashier gives customers their change in the form of teabags, a common solution to a shortage of small coins. Then a handsome young man, and his even more handsome Lava 10 mobile and its ‘sharp gun-metal edges’, come to the checkout. The winsome cashier abandons tea-bags as change and gives him a packet of condoms. Lava, the tag-line declared, ‘separates the men from the boys’.
¹⁹
In 2012, Chaze Mobile, manufacturers of ultra-cheap cell phones, hired Sunny Leone, a Canadian citizen of Indian origin and a leading actor in pornographic videos, as their ‘brand ambassador’ for a new range of multi-featured yet very cheap phones. Gambling on the notoriety of Sunny Leone, the company aimed ‘to position its product in an extremely cluttered low-end handsets market’.
²⁰
(See
Illus. 34
).

Pornography

The technology also made possible the easy and discreet delivery of pornography to more people for less cost than ever before. ‘Hard porn’ became widely available on second-generation mobile phones. According to a Banaras journalist, a locally made pornographic film could generate a profit of about Rs.100,000, first from CD/DVD distribution, which was then converted into mobile-phone format.
²¹
Films were shot in hotels and apartments. The actors came from the sex-work industry (mostly from neighbouring cities, rather than the locale in which the clip was likely to circulate) or from what was popularly known as ‘Music Orchestra Groups’.
²²
Salaries for actors ranged from Rs 10,000–15,000.
²³
The producers and directors were local, and the films were distributed in local markets. In Banaras, they could be found in the largest single commodity market—Daal Mandi—alongside an array of pirated goods (
Chapter 4
), or could be loaded onto a mobile phone from a download kiosk or transferred from the phone of a generous friend by Bluetooth technology. Because the technology was digital, quality did not deteriorate with copying.

Such easy
availability and high-quality colour were new. Until the 1980s, Indian printing technology and paper quality were antiquated and poor. At bus stands in north India in the 1960s and 1970s, a vendor might stealthily produce smudgy black-andwhite booklets, printed on newsprint and with pictures that only desperate youths found erotic. Indian pornography in those days required outstanding imaginative powers, because the print quality was to
Playboy
what boiled cabbage was to
sambar
. And to find even poor quality such as this required diligence. In 1974, the editor Vinod Mehta researched
Playboy
and
Penthouse
in Mumbai by renting copies ‘in dirty brown envelopes … The hire charges were by the hour’.
²⁴
Akshay Sawai of
Open Magazine
pronounced pornography to be a great leveller that found its natural ally in new technologies:

It just shows how technology, mainly the internet with its ever increasing download speed and easy access, has made all types of Indian males, irrespective of upbringing and age, regular and even compulsive seekers of pornographic thrills. Earlier generations of Indian men did not have such anonymous short cuts to smut. Poor guys only had magazines or video tapes, risky to buy and store. They lived in large families.
²⁵

Men recalled that pornography in their childhood had to be sampled discreetly: the police conducted raids and seized printed books from newspaper stalls.
²⁶
The booklets contained short stories with grainy, but sexually explicit, photographs. Much of it came from overseas; very little was in any Indian language. Another popular item was the ‘advice booklet’ which could be discreetly purchased in major railway stations and newspaper stalls.
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Pornographic films were aired in semi-secret cinema screenings in the form of ‘cut pieces’ or ‘bits’. Brief, sexually explicit segments were inserted into the middle of cheaply produced action and horror films, thus camouflaging them from authorities, who usually chose not to probe too deeply.
²⁸
In Banaras these films were still screened in 2011 in a small number of lower-grade cinemas that were going out of business because, an informant concluded, people preferred to view pornography privately, on their mobile phones. Mobiles had major advantages over DVDs. To view a DVD required equipment (a player and a television set), privacy (hard to come by in a joint family in cramped quarters) and regular electric supply. A mobile phone needed none of these. In this sense, the mobile phone was classless: it brought porn to the poor.

Downloading
services mushroomed to cater to the multitude of people who did not have computers. In Uttar Pradesh, Doron discovered that the flow of sacred images in the form of screensavers from one mobile phone to another was matched only by the dissemination of Bollywood stars, pro-wrestling champions and pornographic clips. Tiny downloading stations sprang up around Banaras. Many of the boatmen Doron knew loaded their phone’s memory card with images, songs and film-clips for a fee of Rs 30–50 per gigabyte of memory. The process took five or ten minutes. The files were often classified under labels such as ‘gods’, ‘heroes and heroines’, ‘audio’ and ‘video’. Once purchased from the downloader, these items could be freely exchanged by Bluetooth among one’s friends.

Doron struck up a conversation with a downloading-wala in Delhi’s Ghaffar Market who offered him a one-Gig package of material for Rs 80. He was then asked if he would like ‘blue films’ added to the images and music that were downloaded to his cell phone. A conversation ensued about foreign-versus-Indian ‘blue films’ (
videshi
or
deshi
?). Access to foreign pornography via the internet was easy, and the domestic industry appeared to have expanded to meet the demands of millions of new consumers. According to some informants, the dominance of south Indian pornography, previously the main Indian source, had waned.
²⁹
With the help of new media and webcam technology, pornographic clips were filmed all over India for the mobile phone and CD/DVD market. Production and distribution costs were minimal, and for the more professionally produced clips, the main expense was the actors’ fees. The ready availability of the technology also enabled malicious, secretive ways of cutting costs. Study of those methods led deeper into the dark side of the cell phone.
³⁰

The built-in camera
proved to be one of the most popular features of the mobile in India. Even in the 1990s, a visit to a photographic studio was a major event in the lives of poor and lower middle-class people, who would have been unlikely to own a camera. Black-and-white studio photos of solemn families in their best clothes were proudly displayed in huts, shanties and the cramped quarters of urban wage-earners. The camera-in-thephone changed that, and by 2010, large numbers of people carried a photo library of family, friends and important occasions on their mobile. The technology allowed images to be sent from one phone to another by Bluetooth or by MMS (multi-media messaging service). The phone-camera also made it possible to take pictures easily and quickly in situations where picture-taking was not possible before. Individuals could take pictures of themselves or others in compromising positions—drunk, naked or copulating. As photographic equipment became miniaturised, the pictures could be taken secretly, and then used for blackmail or for transmission to make money or to embarrass the subjects. This was by no means an Indian phenomenon. ‘Sexting’ passed into the English language as a term to describe the transmission, often by teenagers, of sexually explicit text or pictures of themselves or others.
³¹

Across the globe, multimedia phones generated sporadic panics over threats to the moral fabric of society.
³²
In India, the landmark event was the so-called Delhi Public School (DPS) scandal of 2004. A correspondent of the
Los Angeles Times
explained:

A 17-year-old student at the prestigious Delhi Public School used his cell phone to shoot a clip of what police discreetly called an intimate moment with a classmate. It ended up drawing peeks for just under $3 on
Baazee.com
, India’s biggest internet auction site …
³³

‘Now there’s sex and the cell phone’, wrote an Indian journalist proclaiming the start of a new era.
³⁴
The clip was distributed by MMS and found its way to downloading-walas who gratefully added it to their line-up of salacious material. The incident crystallised for many people the collision ‘between the country’s traditional values and modern technology’.
³⁵
It partly inspired two feature films,
Dev D
in 2008 and the profoundly disturbing
Love Sex aur Dhoka
[deceit] in 2010. Both films embedded the term ‘MMS’—multi-media message service—firmly in Indian languages.
³⁶

This was the first of many MMS scandals in which the filming was done secretly by cameras in mobile phones.
³⁷
Outrage followed. Schools and colleges tried to ban mobile phones, and authorities around the country responded to ‘the menace’ in various ways.
³⁸
‘Reports are trickling in from everywhere’, reported Siddharth Srivastava in 2005:

outside discos, pubs, bus-stops, pavements, colleges. Some policemen have been brazen enough to catch anybody with a cell phone, which is quite easy as there are more than 50 million users in India, and ask to be shown all files, hidden or not, even though this might be beyond the law itself.

Srivastava explained that the police were being especially zealous because of a recent incident. A technically skilled pornographer, somewhere in the world, had taken the face of a popular Indian starlet and transferred it to the body of a pornographic-video star, ‘uploaded it into a cell phone and in a blink the MMS was everywhere’. The outraged Indian actress rang everyone she knew to try to eradicate the clip and find the culprit—apparently with no success. ‘The market for MMS and porn CDs’, Srivastava concluded, ‘only seems to grow’.
³⁹

Six years later, with tens of millions more mobile subscribers, the scale of the homemade pornography industry had increased enormously. A scholar based in Bengalaru in south India wrote:

There is recognition of cyberspace as producing infinitely uncontrollable conditions of pornography, which can enable, very inexpensively, a huge part of the population to become pornographers in different roles—as produces, as performers, as consumers.
⁴⁰

What damage would such pervasiveness do to society? How was such widespread licentiousness to be dealt with? India grappled with these questions, just as other countries had. ‘The clean distinctions between communications media and broadcast media’ dissolved.
⁴¹
Nisha Susan, a journalist with
Tehelka
magazine, noted the vast expansion of opportunities and focused on what she called ‘India homemades’. The internet was ‘awash’ with them:

Two genres of Indian homemades are considered blue-chip. 1) Fake/ real sex tapes of Bollywood or political celebrities. 2) The ‘leaked’ tape from an educational institution. IIT, JNU, Noida B-School—these labels are instant narratives for viewers to hang their fantasies on.

‘The phone
camera’, she concluded, ‘is this decade’s sex tweak’.
⁴²
The consequences of naiveté or nastiness could be dire. A couple in Kerala were reported to have committed suicide after clips of them kissing were posted on the internet and circulated via MMS. ‘Misuse of camera-enabled mobile phones’ was reported to be ‘on the rise’ in Kerala.
⁴³
In Mumbai, louts used a mobile phone to record a kidnap and rape, subsequently threatening the victim with the release of the clips via MMS if she approached the police.
⁴⁴
Sometimes the capture of such MMS clips served as evidence of crimes, as in the case of a gang-rape near Mumbai in 2011.
⁴⁵

Authorities tried to impose new regulations on content and to implement measures to prevent viewing and protect privacy. However, the immense popularity of mobile phones, and the proliferation of data, made attempts to monitor the traffic both expensive and fallible.
India Today
underlined the difficulties faced by monitors:

And now there are even porn applications. Imagine a ‘pocket’ girlfriend or boyfriend, who can strip, talk dirty, make sexual noises. ‘These are some of the “apps” that can be downloaded on smart-phones’, says Pranesh Prakash, programme manager with Bangalore-based think-tank Centre for Internet and Society. ‘App download data shows the popularity of sex-themed apps on smartphones, apart from the adults-only stores’, he says. Age restrictions for applications? Mostly a pop-up asking if one is over 17. With over 50 per cent of all Internet users in the country accessing the web via mobile phones already, as estimated by TRAI, smartphones are the future of anytime-anywhere porn.
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