I was, therefore, taken by a recent feud over Instagram pages. There’s a storytelling platform called ‘Humans of Bombay‘. It is an Indian photoblog about people in Mumbai, and these stories are shared via social media pages.
Now these good folks were unhappy with another Instagram page called ‘People of India’ because the latter copied and pasted posts made by ‘Humans of Bombay’. A copyright violation was alleged. On October 11, the Delhi High Court restrained ‘Humans of Bombay’ and ‘People of India’ from copying each other’s work.
Now, the rascal in me would have gone to court and said that I am not bound by this copyright because technically, people of India are also humans of Bombay. But clearly, this is not a world of rascals.
In this non-rascal world, another Instagram page waded in. The ultimate humans page, the source of it all, the Brahma or Gangotri of the idea, ‘Humans of New York’. And its founder, sitting up in the Amarnath of Insta pages, Brandon Stanton, said to these lowly tributaries of the plains that before ‘Humans of Bombay’ could criticise other people, they should look at themselves.
Apparently, ‘Humans of Bombay’ had done too much monetising for ‘Humans of New York’ to bear, the latter’s core idea being an altruistic documentation of the stories of city dwellers, not a chargeable venture. ‘Humans of Bombay’ was thrown by this unexpected attack from an unexpected quarter. It’s like seeking justice in god’s name, only to be scolded by god saying, ‘Not in my name!’ Two ideas fascinate me here. One has to do with intellectual theft, the other with intellectual profit. Intellectual theft is very much a part of our artistic DNA, and whether ‘People of India’ stole from ‘Humans of Bombay’ or not, the idea of stealing is not really frowned upon or prosecuted in this neck of the woods.Without theft, we wouldn’t have had half of Bollywood’s songs or screenplays or aggregation companies. One Bollywood composer stole the tune of the Israeli national anthem and passed it off as a patriotic Indian song. He’s now a judge on many reality shows telling people authenticity matters. The great Bappi Lahiri, accused of stealing many tunes, won a court case in the US against rap mogul Dr Dre for stealing his tune. And won.
Many people, while praising the sheer audacity of this, pointed out that Lahiri used many Western tunes as ‘inspiration’, to which his supporters said his thefts were a different matter. And he was seeking justice for what was his.
Intellectual profit is something that will explain why Indian thinking is far more lucrative than Western thinking, even if not creatively ingenuous. The idea of art for art’s sake makes no sense to us except to, maybe, a handful of Bengalis and Malayalis. To Americans, a ‘Humans of New York’ may have a story to tell, which may be interesting for the world to know — irrespective of the price of it.
To a ‘Humans of Bombay’, if there’s a human with a story a tell, it must have a price. It explains why we speak of films in crores of revenue, a book in terms of how much advance an author got, or social media influencers, in terms of how much they charge. Content is irrelevant to us. There’s only artistic success if there’s financial success.
Stanton said he makes no money from ‘Humans of New York’. He does so to have the freedom to tell the stories he wants to. He makes money from talks, books and other sources. In the West, that would be artistic success. In India, he’d be considered a fool.
