Parents, state legislators, the courts and the police in India seem to be having a harrowing time with an elusive enemy. Blue Whale — an online ‘game’ that supposedly prods teenagers into undertaking a sequence of bizarre, dangerous tasks which include lacerating their skin and jumping off buildings — seems to be as ominous and mysterious as Moby Dick. For now, it even seems as fictional.
It is claimed that some boys who have lost their lives played this online but not a single police investigation in either Kerala or in Maharashtra has conclusively linked the game with their deaths. While everyone from Microsoft to Facebook has been instructed by the government to “disable” links to Blue Whale, there is no clarity on where these are, who its creators are, and how this game is run.
Unlike a flu virus running amok, catching an online link to ‘Blue Whale’ isn’t easy. That’s why it is not clear if the government, in its mission to ‘ban’ Blue Whale, will invoke some of its trusty armoury in the Information Technology Act — akin to the purge on pornography — to clear search term combinations of “blue”, “whale” “game” “death” and “suicide.” Why something as amorphous as Blue Whale has so quickly captured a chunk of public murmur (it’s already an Amul cartoon) has less to do with the nature of the game and more with our unease of adjusting to an exponentially hyper-connected world.
Turning the mirror on us
Mundane objects circulating and systematically killing those who come in contact with them is a favourite trope of fiction. From the glowing briefcase of Pulp Fiction to the killer video cassette of the Ring, few things are more terrifying than the ubiquitous becoming sinister. While video games, Internet chat rooms and now, virtual-reality headsets, have over the decades been blamed by befuddled parents as the body snatchers who have turned their outdoorsy children into inmates of an alternate-reality prison, it’s the vast difference between our dependence on communication devices and how little we ‘understand’ the inner workings of these objects such as mobile phones, websites, apps, Internet protocol that makes them objects of terror.
A few decades ago, parents could ban prurient books, music and movies because as a rule of thumb anything with sexual innuendo or graphic violence could be recognised and categorised as such and locked away. Now the dilemma that adults face is that they are as hooked to mobile phones as their children. The relative addictiveness of Candy Crush vis-à-vis Snapchat can no longer be easily classified and therefore condemned.
That human beings, young or old, are primed towards irrational thrill-seeking is a biological fact. Wise people, with doctorates in medicine, continue to smoke despite incontrovertible evidence of the toxic effects of tobacco. Pilgrims and trekkers sign up, on faith, to trudge on swaying bridges and brave inhuman weather to visit homes of mythical gods and for views from mountain peaks that can be bought with a plane ticket.
A case for investigation
There have yet been no government diktats to ban bungee jumping, adventure rides and wildlife safaris, all of which carry the small possibility of ensuring certain death. It’s in fact the delicate balance between danger and safety that makes them alluring unlike the online game which, if you don’t move from your seat, can never kill you. The young and old — again by the fact of being primates — are irrevocably drawn to being part of group hierarchies and their attendant peer pressure. On an average, we as a species only differ in the kind and not degree of activities that we choose to obsess over. Why, for instance, should a devotion to prime numbers and weekend long binge watching be considered noble and tolerable but a quest to the point of sleep- and food-deprivation to complete Civilizations be considered ‘unhealthy?’ These priorities essentially boil down to cultural quirks. Inducing anyone to commit suicide — online or offline — is an act that merits criminal investigation and must be viewed by authorities from the lens of trafficking and stalking rather than viewing the Internet as a uniquely potent cauldron of evil.
Cetology has it that whales have been beaching for a variety of reasons for millions of years. This could be due to algal poisoning, disorientation by sonar, the tendency of some species to unquestionably follow a “leader” and, sometimes, an awry instinct to swim closer to shores when they get older and weaker and less confident of staying in the deep. It’s news when pods of whales get stranded en masse on beaches but the overwhelming majority of whales die silently in the oceans. Blue whales included.
jacob.koshy@thehindu.co.in
