Desi Train

Black Friday was now out in the theaters for over a week. There was joy, euphoria all around… the emails were flooding in. Calls for congratulations (why me? I had nothing to do with Black Friday). Black Friday had recovered it’s investment, thats the info I got. PFC’s month long aggressive promotion for Black Friday had succeeded on many fronts. Indian community groups were emailing me if we from PFC could meet them for casual, informal dinners to discuss the future of Indian cinema. Indie cinema… And while all this was going around … I sat there in my living room with a letter in my hand…

I had just been slapped on the face. There was, I clearly remember, a mixed feeling of anger and hurt. More of the pain. As if I had been stabbed in the back. I kept sitting there, trying to let it go… the anger was dissolving quickly, but letting go of the pain was still being a challenge. The letter in my hand was a legal notice from Mid-Day, the Bombay tabloid, who’s management was also the producer of Black Friday. The letter mentioned they taking legal action against PFC if I didn’t do something they had mentioned in the letter.

Yes, the very same Black Friday, which many on PFC had toiled endlessly to promote online. For absolutely nothing expected in return. Zero. Zilch. And we had done our best. And for all we did, we were served a legal notice by Midday - for not for what we did. But for - what we forgot to do. A commenter had left links to the entire movie of Black Friday on one of the movie’s posts. The link went directly to YouTube. Since I’m was the only one who edited comments at the point of time, I must have missed it. Midday didn’t. They wanted me to remove the links. A simple email would have helped… but somehow some pinhead at Midday thought that we were the big bad guys.

I called up Anurag. He was surprised and then asked me to remove the links and just send them a friendly letter apologizing for the incident. It was the smart thing to do. But I wanted to do something more. PFC and Midday had had a few clashes in the open. A couple of them, over other incidents. We were the bloggers - the bad boys on the internet. They the grandfathers of traditional print media and they didn’t know where exactly to place us in this whole journalism, blog, online, internet, open diary thingy. They like many others were confused, not having a clear understanding of this whole new rising medium of blogs. They were copying and pasting our articles, at time helping us in promoting PFC and it’s authors and sometimes stepping on our toes, rubbing it in our face.

Kartik would get angry. Sumeet would wanted to slap them. Striker couldn’t handle they copying PFC. But I would let it go. It was all good was my response. As long as they talked about us. It was good.

Just not this time. They had talked. But in a letter. And with a threat. And I wasn’t going to take it lying down.

After the call to Anurag. I was making battle plans, in my anger, though it was simmering down. After a few thought out strategies, I decided to partly go with Anurag’s advise. It was clear in my mind to delete “the comment” and I had no problems in taking the thorn of the clash - the comment - out of PFC. But I wanted to get back to Midday in a more than a “i’m sorry” email. I didn’t know how.

The answer to that came again through Kartik Krishnan, who had single handedly started the grass roots movement for PFC in Bombay, upon it’s inception. The number of times he’s covered my back, been my wingman, got down in the trenches and bloodied his hands for me… while many around me were merely all talk and content on being my “advisers”, here was one guy who would stand by me and take the punches and give them back in full force.

I’ve always been a loner. Never asked anyone for favors, even when I’ve been in a position to. But PFC was turning me in a different direction. I needed support. I needed help many times. I needed a team around me to help execute the hundred million responsibilities.

And that help came from unexpected quarters in this Midday incident. via Kartik Krishnan.

Lawrence Liam, would be a name I would never have given a second thought to, when Kartik asked me to open an author account to the name on PFC. You see, Kartik met Lawrence at IIT Powai, via, who else, but Anurag - who was there to give a speech at a seminar on what else but online copyright issues. Lawrence, a lawyer by profession, was about to be one of those at the helm for Creative Commons entry in India.

With all this data in my head, I called Kartik. Giving him a lowdown on what was going on and then spending a good five silent minutes listening to high volume barrage of abuses on Midday in Kartik’s faintly Mumbaiya, Punjabi, Tamilian mixed Hindi accent, I asked him to call Lawrence up and see if he could give us some advise besides “me just emailing Midday”.

Kartik’s SMS came in 30 minutes later, asking me to call Lawrence immediately.

I wasn’t expecting much. And those are the few times - those pure memorable moments - when you get more than you were expecting. I called Lawrence. He came straight to the point. Lets give it back to them. Right in the face. He point blank asked, how far was I ready to go. I said I simply wanted to make a statement. PFC will not take it lying down. He said lets cover the defense and launch an offense. He wanted to go all out and punch it in. I agreed.

PFC would first tell Midday’s legal department how stupid they were (in a very legal and nice way) to send this notice to PFC. And then PFC would ask Midday to remove or compensate PFC for all the copied items on Midday for which Midday had never given PFC any credit. Of course we didn’t need any compensation but wanted to put it in Midday’s face that someone somewhere in their team had made a massive blunder and fucked it up by sending us the legal notice.

Our reply to Midday was sent both by email and postal mail. I never heard from them ever again.

Lawrence did it sharp, quick and smoothly. And he didn’t charge a dime for this. Someday I hope I’ll be able to return this favor to the guy, who just did it for the love of cinema and for those he saw shared the same passion as him. I never think twice when I do things for nothing in return, simply for the joy of it. But it’s an irony that I’ve never understood why others would do the same, giving me all they can do, help me and expect nothing in return.

Lawrence’s quick action had seen this storm blow over. Everything intact. It was time to move on… It’s another matter that the entire movie of Black Friday, to which the commenter’s links pointed to, still remains on YouTube.

But looking back at the entire incident I forgot to notice another major event that happened around the same time… how could I fail to notice it… I was in the center of it all, and I didn’t even observe this huge massive wave… perhaps being caught up in the epicenter of it all I missed it…

… prophetically Anurag had mentioned what PFC would become, a month after he had started blogging on PFC. It was I think the night of October or November 2006… when Anurag had picked up the phone, called me up, chatted for a few minutes and then declared “PFC will become a movement”… I thought he was nuts. And I would be proved wrong… more on that tomorrow…

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Life Flava.
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