Guest Post by AKHIL KATYAL

On the internet you can never really begin from scratch, that is to say, you can never really begin from a desired point in space and time, erasing all the befores.

One of the most difficult conversations about the form of the internet is that descriptive metaphors that work for some other mediums do not work for it. Things do not, for instance, easily die on the internet or age gracefully. In a manner of speaking, shelves do not gather dust here. A 2004 video takes no longer to load than a 2014 video; it is not stored behind or below it. The desire to order space and time online runs against the grain of this form, in the sense that, knowledge is not arranged as sequence on the internet, it is arranged as infinite sets of adjacencies. 

These sets of adjacencies are attempted to be given shape by algorithms that make you reach where you want to reach. But despite them, the non-sequential nature of knowledge on the internet is evident from the fact that any keyword search would always allow you to look for that keyword in a variety of ways – each way an attempted but always incomplete ordering, whether by significance, language, region, time, domain, web page location, level of adult content, reading difficulty, file types or license types. However, these algorithms never fully master the adjacencies that they seek to make legible to us. And adjacencies – of different videos, articles, photographs, memes – do not make for calm political stories, they make for political drama.

Take Prime Minister hopeful Narendra Modi’s awkward walk-out of his Karan Thapar interview – almost every twenty days, this video  gets a new lease of life on the social media. Either, someone’s just discovered it, or someone’s found a new thing to say about it, or someone has plugged it into a discussion of a newer event. Every time this happens the Youtube video becomes a node of debate in that moment of its sharing, refusing to die out.

Modi has sat on the top of a sophisticated public relations campaign for the last decade or so in Gujarat. They pitch news items for him, conduct his google hangouts with Ajay Devgan or his kite-flying with Salman Khan, they think of different stage backdrops and different first paragraphs of his speech in the many states where he goes campaigning, they make it possible that his twitter followers never go without a regular dose of 140 characters of his opinions. What they seek is a carefully crafted political hagiography that sells him as an unstained man of growth and development, and since the BJP announcement of his PM candidature, as a resolute and spotless national leader who has exorcised all the ghosts of his past, foremost among them the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat.

 The form of the internet, however, is not as conducive to controlled narratives as his PR machinery would have it. I say the form of the internet, which is to mean, the way knowledge sits and moves on it, is not conducive to a political bildungsroman – an easy developmental narrative of the development man. Instead, what the internet always posits – whether its Narendra Modi or Barack Obama, Sarah Palin or Rahul Gandhi (no symmetry suggested) – is a picaresque political figure whose achievements and failures, triumphs and bloopers are all frontally available in no necessary order.

Every time the desired PR narrative appears as forming, solidifying – and there is an enormous manpower at work to make it so –  either the Karan Thapar video, or the Atal Bihari Vajpayee short lesson in Raj dharma to Modi while the cameras were still rolling in 2002 or the Babu Bajrangi tehelka tapes come in to upset this narrative. They come unevenly and make the narrative uneven.

Aam Aadmi Party’s 43 year old, now Amethi hopeful poet-politician Kumar Vishwas could have taken a leaf out of this discussion. His responses – both apologetic and defiant – in the aftermath of the new life that several of his Youtube videos and of newly uploaded edits of his older recordings gained recently, suggest an anxious relationship with the very form of the internet. The anxiety is precisely about the difficulty of the management of a desirable narrative within a form that invites but also resists such ordering. These videos were of the remarks about the darkness of skin of nurses from Kerala, on joking about the Muharram processions in Lucknow, on cracking quips around a Sardar and a Sikh place of worship that were uploaded and found thousands of hits after Vishwas’s visibility in the Anna campaign and then in run-up to Aam Aadmi Party’s government formation in Delhi.

In an interview Vishwas gave to Barkha Dutt after his candidature from Amethi became public, this specific anxiety about form – and the ability to master it – is articulated. Asked, slightly daftly by Barkha Dutt, if his running from Amethi is to guarantee media hype, Vishwas replied –

pehli baat to, ki mujhe media attention milegi, ye mere aalochak keh rahe hain, to main unki soochna ke liye bata doon, ki anna aandolan mein aane se pehle bhi main yuvaaon mein utna hi lokpriya tha, meri kavitaayein koi deewaana kehta hai utni hi download hoti theen, sabse jyada hit theen wo youtube par, jin kavitaaon ko kaat-kaat kar aajkal dushprachaar ka saadhan dono partiyaan banaye hui hain, isliye is prakaar ki lokpriyata leni…shayad unki samajh mein aati hogi…’

[First of all, if my critics are saying that I will get media attention, then let me inform them that even before coming in the Anna struggle, I was equally famous among the youth, my poems including Koi Deewana Kehta hai was downloaded as much, they were super hits on youtube, the same poems which are shredded into cut-pieces and made into a medium of disinformation about me by both the major national parties. This is why, the fact that I am doing this for media hype, is only their thinking…]

 Kumar Vishwas is an old hand as far as fashioning an image on the internet is concerned. He is intensely aware of his status as a bit of a Youtube star among a section of north India’s Hindi speaking young – in several public engagements he makes it a point to mention the multiple video downloads of readings or the fact that his recitations are ringtones on several of his fans’ cell phones. He dots the college circuits and Hindi kavi sammelans in north India and in countries outside India with a sizeable Hindi-speaking diaspora.

His official website – www.kumarvishwas.com – introduces him by saying that India’s ‘tech-savvy young generation values Dr Vishwas as their icon. This is evident from the fact, the bio says, that

on one side, where his online videos have been watched millions of times by young netizens, on the other hand his official page on a leading Social Networking website Facebook invites approximately 5 Million clicks a month.

He has changed, it says,

the Kavi-Sammelan format…from traditional set-up to a stylish state-of-the-art set-up, with accessories like Fancy Lightings, Spot-light, Music-support, Collar-mics and Projector-Screen displays…[His]signature couplet, ‘Koi Deewana kehta hai’, became the darling of the generation…[and t]oday, as a performer, Dr Kumar Vishvas maintains the busiest schedule among Singers, Poets, Stand-up Comedians and Rock performers.

Google Trends tells me that Kumar Vishwas as a keyword has seen a slow but steady growth since the middle of 2007, shooting up precipitously in late 2013, around the time AAP’s government formation in Delhi was imminent and also around the time the debates around his poetry videos heated up.

There is a story that Kumar Vishwas tells himself to wrap his head around the fact that his carefully constructed image of the poet-politician – elsewhere, he cites Atal Bihari Vajpayee as a precedent – was spinning out of control because of the very features of the medium which propelled it in the first place. This story is that his poems have been cut up into pieces and made into a channel for disinformation against him by both the major national political parties:

jin kavitaaon ko kaat-kaat kar aajkal dushprachaar ka saadhan dono partiyaan banaye hui hain

That the social media can throw up cut-pieces, desirable or uncalled for, and do this in a fragmentary manner is the feature of the very form of the internet in which knowledge is not available with either chronological piety or definitive spatial concern – in addition to the fact that the ownership of the social media is not in any ultimate hands, even as it can be and is shaped and censored by State agencies.

The knowledge does not add up cumulatively on the internet as much it is diffused into its bloodstream. The latter metaphor suggests that the infection stays. Vishwas found himself struggling to reconcile his new found political register and vocabulary with his earlier setting of the kavi sammelan where he claimed he had that difficult-to-define license to cross bounds with humor like he no longer seems to have. This crisis between these apparent poetic and political registers – now synchronous on YouTube – is precipitated necessarily by the very form on which it is unfolding.

Vishwas knows thing or two about this tortuous crisis. When asked about his erstwhile admiration for Narendra Modi, considering he had read several times in gatherings where Modi was guest of honour and had gushed about the chief-minister, Vishwas says:

bilkul, main aapko bata raha hoon, ek toh jhooth naheen bolna chahiye kyunki aap ek jhooth boliye use manage karne mein bahut waqt lagta hai…maine unnis saal kavi sammelanon mein padha, main duniya ke bees-tees mulko mein gaya, youtube mein laakhon ghanton ki recording padee hui hai, is andolan mein aane ke pehle ye saare neta mere prashansak the, saare mitr the, sab khush hote the, Koi deewana kehta hai, Pagli ladki, gem kehte the, hira kehte the, badhaiyaan dete the

[Yes, I am telling you, first of all one should not lie, because you tell a lie then it takes damn long just managing it, I have been reading in poetry gathering for nineteen odd years, I have been to twenty to thirty countries in the world, lakhs of hours of my recordings are lying on youtube, before I joined this struggle, all these ministers were my admirers, all were friends, they were happy, Koi deewana kehta hai, Pagli ladki, they called me a gem, a diamond, they used to congratulate me…]

He continues,

aur har karyakram mein koi mantri, mukhya mantri, mukhya-atithi hota hi hai, aise bahut kavi sammelan the jisme Narendra bhai mukhya athithi rahe aur main akela kavi hoon jisko sunne ke liye raat teen-teen chaar-chaar baje tak vo baithe, to agar aap kisi jagah gayein hain, wahan ek mukhya mantri baitha hua hai, to aap uski prashansa karenge, yahi to kahenge ki aap ache lokpriya neta hain, aur lokpriya hon, aur achha kaam karein, main aapko shubhkaamnaayein deta hoon, ham janamdin par sabko kehte hain ki bhagwaan aapko sau warsh ki aayoo de, ham sabhi se kehte hain’

[and in every programme, some minister, chief-minister is usually the chief-guest, so there were lots of poetry-gatherings in which Narendra bhai was the chief-guest and I was the only poet who he stayed till 3 to 4am at night to listen to, so if you go to some place, and the chief-minister is sitting there, then you will praise him, what else will you say other than that you are a good, popular politician, may you become more popular, may you do more good work, I give you my best wishes, we say it to everyone on their birthday that may God give you a long life, we say it to everyone…]

He goes on to say

tau unke janamdin ke pehle ya ek din pehle koi kavi sammelan ahemdabad mein tha, maine wahan bola, lekin yaad BJP ko bahut der se aaya, doo hajaar ka mera sammelan jisme sardaaron ke upar mere chutkule the, wo sikhon tak pahuchane ka yaad bahut der se aaya, lekin bade achhi noora-kushti hai, ki mera video edit karke chalaata to BJP ka handle hai, pick use Congress kar leti hai, phir doosri party badha deti hai, to mein teenon party se poochta hoon, ke mere kavi sammelanon mein boli gayee kavitaayen aapke chunaav ka mudda hain, ya koi aur mudda hai

[so on his birthday, or a day before, there was a poetry gathering in Ahemdabad, I spoke there, but this the BJP remembered a little too late, in 2000 in one of my gatherings where some of my jokes were made on Sardars, the task of bringing them to the Sikhs was remembered a little too late, but see this is a strange wrestling-match, the BJP handle edits my video and starts it, and the Congress picks it and takes it ahead, then another party forwards it, so I want to ask these parties, that is your political issue the poems that I read in my poetry gatherings, or is there any other issue…]

Vishwas is using chronological categories not suited to the form. He says sarcastically, ‘yaad bahut der se aaya’ [‘they remembered a little too late’]. But this is a not a matter of a delay. It is instead that the patterns of memory, of remembrance will be different for different forms. The absolute synchronicity of the internet – Vishwas’s phrase was ‘laakhon ghanton ke recording youtube par padee hai’ [‘lakhs of hours of my recordings are lying on youtube’] – this synchronicity, whereby all this time is lying bunched-up together, disallows an easy construction of the past of the political leader and his present. It is instead a mosaic of bits of information that accrue around the figure, each interrupting the other, each affecting the other.

In his recent interviews and apology videos, he has attempted to distance himself from the openly ‘sectarian’ and ‘communal’ factions, whether in ‘Muzaffarnagar…Gujarat or Godhra,’ and vows not to let any such leader become the prime minister of this country. Vishwas, as an AAP member wants to project a starting afresh, an act which is a difficult on the internet. One of the stories he is fond of is of his friendship with lawyer-activist AAP member Prashant Bhushan, in which he calls himself ‘thoda sa rastravadi soch ka aadmi’ [‘a man of somewhat nationalist ideology’] and Bhushan ‘thoda sa leftist soch ke’ [‘a man of somewhat leftist ideology]. Vishwas says that in the AAP fold he has as much ‘respect’ for Bhushan as he claims Bhushan has ‘affection’ for him, even if they disagree on some matters. The fact that he is keeping company with the likes of Bhushan and not of Modi, is part of Vishwas’s current and anxious self-projection.

That Vishwas wants to have it both ways is evident. He wants to project a political bildungsroman in which former mistakes are forgotten and newer possibilities with more political gravitas are realized – his persona as ‘a work in progress’ – but the form of the internet in which this is happening does not permit the structuring of the political individual as composed of a past fading out into a present looking forward to a future; instead it is a composite, messy figure with different events jostling for attention with every YouTube hit, retweet or click. It is indeed open to manipulation by vested groups even as it interrupts them.

This is why the form of the internet is where a very particular set of contemporary political anxieties are staged endlessly. Mastering this form also translates into mastering some of the equations in which political profits and losses are made today. The internet is a difficult, oceanic form, but these days Vishwas is in the habit of pleading to the ocean:

Ki ye hai, to sabke liye ho, ye zidd hamari hai,

‘Bas isi baat par duniya se jang jaari hai,

Main katra hokar bhi, tufaan se jang leta hoon,’

‘Mujhe bachana samundar ki zimmedaari hai

[If this is, then I insist it must be for everyone.

On this alone, I battle the whole world,

A speck of dust, I take on the storm (he writes of his fight with Rahul Gandhi in Amethi)

It is the duty of the ocean to save me.]

Vishwas wants to be saved by something that usually drowns. That might be a problem.