I ACCOSTED him once again, this ‘activist’ friend of mine. But he seemed in a hurry, eyes down walking furiously presumably to his office. I had this sneaky suspicion that he was trying to avoid my gaze but he didn’t have the luck. I stood in front of him squarely and uttered a mellifluous “Hi!”

“Oh!” he remarked, “Going to work first and then at 2 p.m I am invited to talk on this most sensitive issue: ‘Democracy, Myth or Reality in India.”

“Yes very relevant,” I remarked. “Look how they are trying to gag the voices of public”, “How?” he asked quizzically.

“No, all that repression regarding Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, Orkut, Google, et al.”

“Absolutely right!” he exclaimed. “They don’t want any criticism. Why, I have ‘tweeted’ now thousand times, and I have no followers”

“That’s very sad,” I remarked.

“Shashi Tharoor has more than a thousand followers”.

“OK, that’s fine, but he hardly continued for a thousand days in office as Minister. It’s alright to have cyber crazy friends in the cyber world. But it’s not so easy to have a long following in the Real World. The real & the virtual are virtually misnomers,” this he concluded with a distinct note of triumph.

However I maintained that we should be cautious about what we write and say so that we don’t affront people’s sentiments and assail them personally.”

“That’s alright,” was his riposte. “But they are scared, you see”. He lowered his voice ominously.

“Corrupt, absolutely corrupt, infallibly corrupt, they want to choke the voices of incorruptibility. Look what happened in Tahrir Square. It was all because of Tweeting. Facebook launches myriad faces, voice of the faceless, homeless.

“Anyway,” he continued.

“Gosh it’s almost eleven. I have to rush”.

“All the best, deliver a firebrand speech on meritocracy, democracy and autocracy.”

“Oh thanks, but I just forgot whether they are calling me as a guest Speaker, Chief Guest, Guest of Honour or Special Guest!”

I promptly did the vanishing trick, leaving him to solve his latest conundrum.