“How many Saravanans do you have as contacts on your phone?” is hardly the first question you’d expect to be asked when you move back to your hometown after spending a decade living in other cities, but this is exactly what happened to me.
Having lived in Mumbai and Bengaluru for years, I had finally returned to Chennai, and my cred as a true-blue Chennai local was being mockingly challenged. And, apparently, one of the key indicators of this much-desired quality of Chennai-hardcoreness was the number of people named Saravanan on your contact list. And I have to agree. You cannot truly live in this for any length of time without accumulating a reasonable number of Saravanans of one kind or another.
So we all whipped out our phones and did a quick Saravanan count — it turned out that I had five, which, while not being the winning number (eight), was respectable enough. I immediately followed up with a forceful and eloquent line of reasoning by which I established that, had I never moved away from the city, I would easily have gained three or four more, which would have been enough to clinch the title. My friends had to grudgingly agree, and I silently thanked all my current Saravanans, my would-be Saravanans, and might-have-been Saravanans for their existence.
As a consolation prize, my Saravanan collection was acknowledged as being the most entertaining — since every single Saravanan in it was also clearly identified by his function. Boxing Saravanan, Art Saravanan, Driver Saravanan, Videogame Saravanan, and Owner Saravanan, you have to agree, seem like a particularly badass five-man Saravanan army who wouldn’t be out of place in the Saravanan version of Ocean’s Eleven or The A-Team.
This Saravanan soirée was followed by a keenly contested Karthik competition, in which I finished a respectable second, with a Karthik collection of six , and a Divya deathmatch, in which my four Divyas surrendered tamely to a friend’s formidable army of 13 separate Divyas.
Having such a handy heuristic for determining the validity of an individual’s credibility within a society may, at first glance, seem like a harmless party game. But I am keenly aware of the dangers if such a powerful idea falls into the wrong hands.
What if, for instance, a future authoritarian regime in India (unlike our current democratically elected Government, which would never dream of doing such a thing) started applying, say, The Ramesh index (the number of people named Ramesh in your phone contacts and social networks) to determine just how much of a truly Indian citizen you were? What if your tax rates were decided by the number of Poojas in your UPI transaction history? What if you would not be allowed to enter Delhi unless you knew at least seven people called Rahul?
And what of exceptions? What if your bank account could be frozen if you even had a single contact called Sankalesh Jimmy? Or imagine a situation where you became a prime suspect in an international sheep-snuggling investigation simply because you once texted someone called John Kennedy Jawahar? Could you be refused admission into an otherwise inclusive secret society of amateur necromancers just because you didn’t have either a David Asif Dhala or Ruth Bugatha Appala Haresh as a follower on Instagram?
These scenarios are what make me deeply uncomfortable with indices based on measuring the magnitude and frequency of Saravanans or Priyas or Vargheses in an individual’s social graphs, and the use of these metrics to determine an individual’s value within a society. To create a truly inclusive society where we all belong, we need to understand that we are all the same, regardless of how many Saravanans or Tariq Akbars or Ruth Mark Christians (formerly Ruth Bugatha Apalla Hareshes) we may be connected to. To paraphrase the inimitable Ajit Q Narayanan, “We are all Saravanan”.
The Chennai-based writer and game designer likes playing games with his writing.
