Identity Crisis

I suffer from identity crisis quite frequently these days. Every year in November, I face the most acute crisis because I have to prove to my government that I am alive. Otherwise the princely monthly sum of Rs 1812 (about 21USD) that I get from my most magnanimous government [“Modi’s guarantee,” as Modiji himself shouts from the rooftop these days] as pension for having been a teacher for four decades will be terminated. ‘Life Certificate,’ the government calls it. It states that I am not dead yet as on the date when I go to any of those government machineries and give my thumb impression to prove that I am not dead so that I will get my pension. We don’t expect governments to be sensitive, of course. In fact, toilet seats are more sensitive than any government. [Prove me wrong, if you are part of any government. My personal conviction is that government is the biggest looter in any country.]

Oh, ah, that sounds seditious. In my country, it can even mean my arrest. I live in the country that claims to be the Viswa guru [world’s teacher]. It is perhaps the only country in the world today that is a democracy without any opposition because all opposition is either suspended or imprisoned. The world should indeed learn how that sort of a system works. We have a prime minister who is very popular though he suspends or imprisons all opposition. How does he manage to do that? Well, that’s what I am learning still. [When I learn that I will write a book that will outdo Machiavelli’s Prince and Chanakya’s Arthashastra.]

In the meanwhile, every now and then I get messages from different offices that my KYC [Know Your Client] is not completed. So I click on the link provided in each message and give my Aadhar number. Those who are not familiar with India’s Aadhar need to recall the biblical verse of Mathew 16:26: ‘What good will it be for you to gain the whole world, yet lose your Aadhar number? What can anyone give in exchange?’ Well, I have paraphrased the verse a little. You are as good as dead in India if you are an Indian without Aadhar. That’s one of our PM’s guarantees.

What made me write this post, you may wonder. One of my banks sent me a message the other day asking me to furnish my KYC details. Nothing of those details has changed from the time I transferred my account from a Delhi branch to a Kerala branch in 2015. But India has changed a lot in that duration. So I click on the link given by the bank in the email message. It sends me from one webpage to another, each imposing on me the burden of an OTP and the copy of some document like PAN or EPIC or Passport or oh God! Aadhar is already there with them. And that Aadhar is linked with everything I own from cooking gas connection to my antivirus injection. How many proofs do they need for my existence, I wonder. What are they really trying to prove? My identity? My redundancy? Will my government ask me one day to provide an image of the brick I donated for the construction of the Ayodhya Temple?

[That reminds me: I have to address about 2000 school students tomorrow. And the theme will be: Redundancy of people in the emerging world. So let me stop this and start thinking of the speech.]