After a
freak fire in 2011 reduced the cubbyholes trading in electronic goods inside a
Crawford Market shopping plaza to ashes, Junaid has gone alfresco.
He sits on a
stool by a chock-full street tinkering with mobile phones while three teenage
staffers hover around him. A laptop receives favorable treatment; it sits at
the center of the makeshift stall scattered with card readers. The imaginary
wall of hostility he carefully builds over several seconds crashes when he
realizes we are genuine customers. "This is not your regular movie...it
will cost you Rs 250 for 4 GB," he mutters, dodging eye contact. Some
bargaining later, he hurriedly transfers 200 short pornographic clips from the
laptop on to a memory card for Rs 150. Most are the fall-out of cross-country
MMS scandals, the flavor of the season. "Everyone does it, no one talks
about it. A raid means we lose our equipment and pay a hefty fine," he
says in staccato meter, handing us back the card. Seconds later, head down,
he's back to reviving a dead smartphone.
The rates
vary at a booth a few meters down. It's Rs 400 for 16GB - the same price as
that for loading your phone with the latest Bollywood and Hollywood films - of
a "collection" that includes foreign porn, and bestiality videos.
It's hardly
a secret that several of the city's cell phone repair shops and SIM card kiosks
that flaunt a computer, stock smut in secret folders marked by gibberish names.
"We get some women, too," one owner says. "They say, "Zara
woh waale movies daal dena." (Transfer
that movie as well)
Which brings
you to the rules of the mobile-porn-off-the-street universe.
A blunt
demand for a blue film clip will send shopkeepers into a shell. Some may even
express mock disgust at your request. Blame it on random raids by the State
Anti-Piracy Cell. Around South Mumbai's markets, for instance, code words 'Daal
gosht' or 'Pelampaal' put the Flashing-Loading-Repairing stall owners at ease.
But for tongue-tied first-timers, body language is the marker. A local cell
phone accessories distributor says, "The more desperate you look and
sound, the easier it is for you to pass off as a bona fide purchaser. If you
are well-dressed, they'll deny they stock it. There's no fixed rate. Sab grahak
dekhke poodi baandhte hain (We see the
customer and then sell package accordingly). Considering how it's a simple
copy-paste job, it's free money anyway."
Regular
customers frequently leave their phones with their trusted 'service' providers
for loading apps, games, the latest films, and porn too. It's a package deal.
"If you know how to ask for it, there's hardly a corner in Mumbai where
you can't buy pocket porn," says a shopkeeper from Mulund.
In fact,
pornography is not high on the authorities' agenda, says Vijay Mukhi, former
member of the High Court/State Government Committee on Pornography and Cyber
Laws. "Unless the Anti-Piracy Cell sends a dummy customer to lay a trap,
it's near impossible to prosecute the shopkeepers because watching porn is not
a crime; only producing, publishing or distributing it is," he clarifies.
Shafqat
Usmani, President of the Mobile Dealers Welfare Association of Mumbai, says,
the paltry 2.5 per cent margin on products makes the city's 50,000 mobile phone
retailers render additional services, including repairing. Is loading porn part
of the survival mechanism? "The low margin is no excuse to indulge in
disgusting activities," he says.
Hand-held
and hi-res
The cell
phone boom - both, cheap Chinese models that allow the not-so-privileged access
to technology and the arrival of high-res display screens that offer the
affluent a viewing experience superior to television - has worked towards
making porn consumption mainstream. Local train commuters will tell you of the
passenger on the corner seat watching smutty clips, as if it were an impassive
pastime. It's even found favor as a 'stress reliever'. "My friends and I
buy phone porn to watch whenever the workload at office gets out of hand,"
says a Mankhurd resident.
While
watching porn on laptops, either straight off the net or via DVDs, means you
could get busted by family and friends, the handheld experience - with a phone
password to boot - allows complete privacy.
What would
you like?
Depending on
which neighborhood market you access, the popular offering varies. In Kurla,
says a cell phone mechanic, foreign porn has no takers. "They (customers)
say everything happens too soon and easy. The demand is for morphed celebrity
sex videos, South Indian porn and of course, MMS clips." Some of these are
what the industry refers to as 'kaand' videos. They resemble MMS scandal clips
but are staged. It's the lure of these grainy, sloppily shot videos that landed
Karnataka BJP ministers Lakshman Savdi and CC Patil in a soup last February.
The two were caught watching a clip during assembly. Amid a storm of criticism,
they and Mangalore minister Krishna Palemar, who was accused of transferring
the video to Savdi's phone, resigned.
On
Ahmedabad's Relief Road, a row of kiosks that sport the 'Downloading' sign,
like the one run by Karimmuddin, offer hi-definition (HD) foreign porn to
affluent students who walk in with large-screen 3G phones demanding virus-free
content. It's Rs 100 for 2GB worth of mp4 clips of 720p resolution, and Rs 50
for 2GB worth low-quality clips, says 21-year-old Moin. Smaller, dirt cheap
deals are available too. A single HD clip at Rs 5.50, a low-res one for Rs 2,
and the 'lightest' clip for Rs 0.21 paise.
"My
customers are youngsters from middle and upper middle class families,"
says 30-year-old Rocky, a shop owner in Navrangpura, while catering to Vikas, a
collegian waiting for a Rs 100 download. "We are a group of six friends,
including girls. For Rs 100, I'm going away with more than 20 HD video
clips," he says straight-faced, adding that his group of friends, girls
included, get-together during the holidays for collective viewing. A
relationship of trust between regulars like Vikas and shopkeepers means he will
share a clip with the mobile store owner, in case he doesn't have it in stock.
It's a
business of 100 per cent profits, they admit, and raids are easy to dodge since
the police usually come looking for duplicate cell phones. They'd make half
their monthly earnings if they relied on selling SIM cards, mobile accessories
and software loading alone, says Ramesh, a 23-year-old staffer at a cell phone
shop in Odhav that gets walk-ins from rickshawallahs and college students.
The rise of
mobile porn has turned into a thorn in the flesh for pirated DVD sellers. Ajju,
who runs a CD/DVD stand near Panchwati Crossroads, remembers a time when
customers crowded him for 'tragda' or XXX CDs. "Older women would arrive
in cars, roll down the window and ask for adult movies. I'd notice how they'd
chuck the explicit cover and plonk the CD in an unsuspecting plastic bag."
Mobile porn has hit his profits, bringing it down by 20 per cent.
Southward
bound
Surprisingly,
in Bengaluru, the erotic DVD trend is experiencing freak survival. Two years
ago, the youth scoured Majestic and SP Road for downloaded porn. But with
affordable mobile phone data plans and pirated DVD sellers ratting on their
competitors, mobile repair shop owners have had to stick to doing just that -
fiddle with hardware.
It's the
tier II and III cities across India that are waking up to the potential of
porn-on-phone. Earlier this year, Mysore-based moral awareness group Rescue
conducted a survey across 964 junior college students from Mysore,
Chamarajanagar and Bengaluru. More than 75 per cent watched porn regularly, and
most watched six times more porn on their phones than on any other device, said
the findings.
Mangalore,
Belgaum, Dharwad and Mysore, all educational centres, support a thriving
porn-lending library system. A student from Moodabidri says, "Most hostel
students venture out to these shops once a week, and pay Rs 50 for a
porn-loaded memory card. They return it a week later in exchange for fresh
content."
Mangalore
leads the pack in the sleaze game. It's believed that the clip that got the
Karnataka ministers into trouble was called Fasila, and was a hit in Mangalore
and neighbouring Kasargod two years ago. Six years ago, a seven-minute MMS sex
clip was converted into a half-hour CD named Mangalooru Mungaru Male and sold
widely. In 2000, before mobiles became the rage they are now, sex CDs flew off
the shelves. The famous 40-minute clip, Mysore Mallige (known as MM CD) that
featured a girl from Puttur, was sold for as much as Rs 1,000.
A mobile
accessories shop owner in Puttur says the porn viewing audience has grown to
include blue collar workers, who aren't tech-savvy to figure their own Internet
downloads. "All they want is clarity of clips,' he says.
His
customers then, are not very different from 22-year-old Manoj Sah and his
19-year-old companion Pradeep Kumar, who admitted to investigators probing the
rape of a five-year-old girl in East Delhi last month, that they were drinking
and watching porn on their mobile phone before they lured the girl into Sah's
house with a chocolate.
While the
nation erupted in protest, the confession drew attention to the possible
fallout of easy access to pornographic content. The Delhi case isn't isolated.
In January, Mumbai cringed when 70-year-old Niyaz Raza was arrested in the
Govandi rape case involving a 13-year-old girl. His SIM was found loaded with
sex clips, including one where he had filmed the girl performing oral sex on
him.
Last month,
Indore advocate Kamlesh Vaswani filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court
seeking a change in Internet laws that would make watching pornography a
nonbailable offence. It estimates that the number of such clips accessible to
Indians is more than 200 million. The petition states: "The sexual content
that kids are accessing today is far more graphic, violent, brutal, deviant,
and destructive (than before), and has put the entire society in danger."
It also finds the increasing "severity and gravity" of these visuals
a concern, and accuses accessible pornography of "fuelling" most of
the offences committed against women and children.
So, more
than porn, it's the exposure of a larger audience to its extreme forms -
bondage, bestiality, even paedophila - that's spurred a debate. To sum up the
sentiment in the words of award-winning writer Robin Morgan: "Pornography
is the theory, rape is the practice."
There are enough
and more voices refuting Vaswani's claim. Pranesh Prakash is one of them. The
policy director with Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society, says,
"There is no data to establish a direct co-relation between porn and
sexual crimes. To be alarmed over the widespread availability of porn through
mobile phone loading alone is a classist reaction; those who are well-to-do
have had easy digital access anyway."
Way before
those accused of rape were introduced to porn, they were exposed to a culture
of misogyny that says women must be controlled, and their bodies are free to
loot.
