Someone bought me

 

Just now I received a call on my mobile phone. It was in chaste Hindi. I roughly translate the same here for you.

Caller: Namaskar Mahoday (sir) I am XYZ Dwivedi calling from Allahabad

I: Yes, what is it regarding?

Caller: You know a lot is happening in the commodity market

I: Let it happen, why Should I be bothered?

Caller: I have an opportunity for you

I: Who told you I trade on the commodity market?

Caller: Your number has been purchased along with our data!

I: Sorry I am not interested

Caller:  Fine sir (Call ends)

I thanked the heavens. What would I have done if he had said “Mahoday, I have purchased your number and I have an ownership over you”?

Years back when I joined a company in Mumbai from a remote town of south India, I was handed a neat envelope with a SIM card. I happily used it for years and that number became my identity in Mumbai. From Gas connection to Bank account to local grocer, everyone identified me with that ten-digit number. Sort of a “Kaidi” number in Indian prisons. Years later, to my surprise, I was told to surrender that number when I decided to move on. But even after a decade, it has not been erased completely from my “personal profiles” of many stakeholders in spite of my repeated requests.

That day I decided to buy a new SIM, a personal number in addition to the official SIMs handed over to me by my subsequent employers. Alas, today I am shocked to hear that the same number has been “purchased” by an unknown person from the holy city of Allahabad, the city of the Kumbh Mela, which I longed to visit but not been able to do till date.  

I remembered a story of the righteous king Harichandra in Hindi taught to us in school. The story goes like this. King Harichandra donated all his wealth and kingdom to the sage Vishwamitra. When the sage asks for Dakshina (Honorarium) along with the donation, the king sells his wife to a Brahmin. The Brahmin while taking away the queen (as slave), asks her son also to follow him with a comment “When the cow is bought, the calf follows her”

Though I have never read the fine print while signing up for social media accounts and other apps, it is a fact that those companies have access to all my personal data including the contacts, fotos and all my behavioural traits.

One day, I was sitting in front of my son’s class teacher in the mid-term “open house”, I received a message from a coaching centre offering 50% discount on fees for the subject in which my son scored below average marks. Cannot be mere coincidence. I am aware that not only by personal data but my movements too, are being tracked.

I am really scared every time my door bell rings. Who knows if someone appears at my door and ask me to follow him applying the logic from “Harichandra” story? “Mahoday, when your data is purchased, you automatically follow!”  

Picture Source : DNA India, Internet