India Uncut
This blog has moved to its own domain. Please visit IndiaUncut.com for the all-new India
Uncut and bookmark it. The new site has much more content and some new sections, and you can read about them here and here. You can subscribe to full RSS feeds of all the sections from here.
This blogspot site will no longer be updated, except in case of emergencies, if the main site suffers a prolonged outage. Thanks - Amit.
Saturday, April 02, 2005
A simple pipe-fitter
"Man charged for clicking woman's pics," reports Mid Day. Binoo Nair reports that a fellow called Bilal Ahmed was detained after a lady, "a journalist with a television channel, complained that he was clicking pictures of her while they were travelling in a Harbour Line train headed for CST." Ahmed claimed that he had clicked the picture accidently, and said, "I am a simple pipe-fitter with a wife and five kids. I have never been accused of such perversion by anybody."
Camera phones are fast becoming ubiquitous, of course, and it's quite legitimate for people to want to protect their provacy. But what is privacy? Supposing I am taking a picture of the street where I live, and there happen to be people in the wide-angle long-shot frame. Am I impinging on their privacy? How close to they have to be to me, and how big in my frame, for it to be an intrusion of their privacy? How is this defined, and who defines it? And within the kind of archaic legal system we have, can we ever realistically have evolved laws on such issues? The lady who complained was from a higher class than the pipe-fitter, and was presumably, and rightly, assertive. But what if the photographer had been a Page 3 celebrity and his subjects village women at a well? Or the pipe-fitter's wife? What then?
Camera phones are fast becoming ubiquitous, of course, and it's quite legitimate for people to want to protect their provacy. But what is privacy? Supposing I am taking a picture of the street where I live, and there happen to be people in the wide-angle long-shot frame. Am I impinging on their privacy? How close to they have to be to me, and how big in my frame, for it to be an intrusion of their privacy? How is this defined, and who defines it? And within the kind of archaic legal system we have, can we ever realistically have evolved laws on such issues? The lady who complained was from a higher class than the pipe-fitter, and was presumably, and rightly, assertive. But what if the photographer had been a Page 3 celebrity and his subjects village women at a well? Or the pipe-fitter's wife? What then?
