The Internet Personified: Ignore my face!

My many identities, online and off

Oct 24, 2024

In 2018, I did this piece for the Indian Quarterly. Reposting it here today because many of you may not have read it and it’s a good essay, about my digital and real life identities. Enjoy!

I was a blogger once.

“Blogger” that word that has been relegated to a time gone by along with “dial up” and “landline.” Recent technology that nevertheless talks of an age when we didn’t carry miniature computers around in our pockets, didn’t have the world at our fingertips, just waiting for us to ask a question. There are children born just ten years ago who don’t know why the Save icon looks like a floppy disk, why we extend our pinky and thumb fingers out of a closed fist and hold it to our ears to gesture “call me.” How remote our pasts look now, certainly the gap between old and new technology is wider than it was between ours and our parents. I got letters when I went to boarding school, I had to actually stockpile stamps. We had an old LP player, we had cassettes, we had CDs, and DVDs and LCDs, and all sorts of things that begged and pleaded with us to become the next best thing. Cleaning out my things at my mother’s house, I found my collection of tapes, all shelved in the little rack made just for them, and though I flirted with the idea of turning them into some kind of art installation—that creative person’s excuse for hoarding—I threw them all away in the end.

I was a blogger, rejecting the word “blogger,” it sounded too much like “plodder” and I wanted to be that quick brown fox that jumps over the lazy dog. I wanted to be a real writer, and I rejected my twice-weekly updates on my website as writing. That was just blogging, that was just for fun. The real business of writing required my real voice, someone I saw as a person who actually considered her words, as opposed to the lazy, slapdash way I chronicled my daily exploits on the internet. My real voice was also mostly saved for my fiction, there I felt, by slipping into different people’s heads, I could be myself more than I could with plain old me.

But when you write about yourself, and you are a fiction writer, something odd happens. You begin to invent even as you’re telling the truth. You smooth the rough edges off conversation, you leave off whole bits where nothing happens in order to get to the meat of the story. You make yourself smarter or dumber as the situation calls for. You are the Every Woman and your readers are meant to identify with the “you” character. It is your POV after all. This would make me a lousy journalist—I stuck to the truth in my stories, but I always wanted to fiddle with the quotes to put them out of context, yes, but in a way that would make it more exciting to read. I wanted a beginning, middle and end. I began to write like that on my blog, telling stories where nothing had actually happened in real life, but which I thought were exciting enough to write about if I pulled back at this point, stopped here, embellished a little here. There’s this bit in Hannah Gadsby’s now viral Nanette, her stand up special on Netflix where she says, "Punchlines need trauma, because punchlines need tension and tension feeds trauma. […] You learn from the part of the story you focus on." I told stories about meeting men and going to the gynaecologist, about my break ups and nights out, and I learnt, through the telling, how to omit, how to edit, how to build it up. In short: I learnt how to be a writer.

The word “brand” comes from the old English related to German, to burn. An identifying mark burned on livestock or criminals or slaves with a branding iron. The word began to rise upwards in usage around 1939 when it stayed steady till 1959, the years the Mad Men of Madison Avenue started turning advertising into a business, and between 1960 to now, it flowed upwards until it came to mean what it does today. An identity that means you or the product you’re selling. When that product is you again, you’re burning everything in sight with your stamp—your clothes, your cats, the view from outside your window, all slapped with your particular identifying mark. This belongs to me.

My friends call me Minna. They always have. I don’t know how the word spreads, but even when I introduce myself to someone at a party, I say, “Hi, I’m Meenakshi” and if they stick around, which they sometimes do, they’re calling me Minna within the month. I think of it as a password between other people and me. If they say, “Minna” they presume to know me well enough to nickname me. Indians are big on nicknames, even though unlike the Bengalis, people from the South, which is where my roots are from, don’t have a whole different word for nicknames versus your real ones. I used to say “pet name” before I got shy of saying it, you’re a pet, you’re a darling, you’re someone who needs a diminutive. When I was younger, I’d say, “How can people take you seriously if you’re called Minna?” but I’d always say it with a certain amount of anxiety, because I didn’t know what I’d do in a world where everyone said “Meenakshi” and it was always a relief when people said, “Oh, but you’re such a Minna.” Two names means, effectively, you have no names at all, which, when you’re trying to build up an identity is a schizophrenic place to be.

So when it came time to naming myself on the internet, I didn’t even think about choosing Meenakshi or Minna. I went with eM instead, like the letter “M” which I liked, because it was both the first letter of my names as well as the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, and I was born on the thirteenth. I felt kinship with M in a way I didn’t with my other names, I doodled Ms over the pad kept next to our landline and in the margins of my notebook. By the time I called myself eM, I had added devil horns, a tail and a halo over the letter in my doodles to indicate my contradictions. Plus eM was Me backwards, the reverse capitals a hint, even as I stayed anonymous for the first two years of my online life, I dropped enough breadcrumbs for anyone hunting to find me.

There are still bloggers today, a few have shiny professional websites, but most operate from accounts on social media websites. You take advantage of a company’s shiny design and UI and you build up your followers on that platform, until it’s hard to say who is benefiting more from whom. Are you selling Instagram or is Instagram selling you? They’ve changed their names too, they’ve moved from bloggers, always such an unattractive word, to social media influencer. They’re like consultants. You want them to influence—hence the name—people to buy what you’re asking them to sell. Most pretty young things will do it for the free handbag, the free lunch for a Zomato review, the free hotel stay for a few captions saying #blessed.

If you have enough followers, you can do sponsored posts as well—you’ll have a rate sheet that promises “deliverables” that dull corporate word, but one you have to weave in so that companies, dull and corporate themselves, will pay you to hang around in their shoes, sulk sexily as you hold up a camera, a phone, a vacuum cleaner even. No longer do they need to pay models and a photographer and hire a studio, they’ve got you and you’ve been building up your brand for just this moment.

I now use the internet under my own name. I’m not a social media influencer, my passions are too pedestrian to make big bucks off of—I love bargains, and street food and second hand books. Try becoming a Kardashian sister off that. But I notice that when I recommend something, my engagement goes way up.

(Engagement used to mean promising to marry someone and now it’s about how many people interact with you. From faithful to faithless, monogamy to “come on, everyone, talk to me at the same time!”)

For example: I am not a fashionista. What I know about designers and labels is confined to who the guest judge is on Project Runway that season. However, I know how to stand in front of a mirror, how to stick one leg out and one behind me (the baby giraffe), how to hold my mouth so it looks as though I’m very serious about what I’m doing (the duck face) how to place my arms on my hips, at angles, so it looks like I’m thinner than I am (the chicken wings). And I know how to write a caption—I think I know how to do that better than my actual posing, I’m not meant to be in front of a camera, my product isn’t my face but my mind, so I play down the anxious duck face of an ageing woman in her thirties with ironic captions. “Ignore my face,” I’ll say blithely, because everyone knows once you make fun of yourself, no one else can hurt you just as much. But when I post pictures of my clothes, I get messages, comments on my posts, and when I don’t for a while, people actually check in. “Can you post more pictures of your clothes?” they ask, and I am flattered but also slightly bemused that my travel pictures, all high HDR and pretty sunsets or my photos of what I’m reading—surely I’m a greater expert at books than clothes?—don’t get these kinds of requests.

What I imagine it’s like when you post a selfie. (*Venus Adorned By The Graces, Annibale Caracci)*

Speaking of looks, here are some of the things that have happened to me, a woman, when I interacted with the world as a no-longer anonymous blogger.

There was this one collective blog—as in, a lot of people contributed to it, mostly NRIs. They’d post articles and points of interest from India or concerning Indians to their audience. When I chose to reveal my entire name to the Telegraph in an article about my blog and sexuality in India, before my first book came out, that decision brought me far more publicity than I thought I’d ever get. Including the people who decided to look me up online, see my face on my Orkut, pre-Facebook profile, and who then began recording their disappointment in several comments. “Not that hot,” they opined, “Actually not great looking.” To their credit, a few people protested, but mostly it was a long roll call of “that’s the blogger we’ve all been thinking was all that?”

I was sort of anticipating this. After all, eM was a character I invented, like Spiderman, like Superman, my secret identity. I put on the costume, I fought the bad guys of patriarchy—okay, no, but I did have a good time telling people that life in India wasn’t all elephants and poverty and darkness, that we could be just as modern as everyone else, that the life I lived wasn’t that different from a life anywhere in any big city around the world.

Another story: I go out to dinner to a friend’s house. Around me are some people I know and some I don’t. One of the men asks me, “Are you that blogger lady?” “Yes,” I say, somewhat warily, because I am used to all sorts now. It has been approximately a year since that Telegraph article came out, about eight months since my first book was published to all sorts of criticism. “Wow, you’re really not as hot as I thought you’d be,” he said. My friends shut him down instantly, but I was speechless, unable to say anything. It was almost as though he was accusing me of cheating him of something. How dare I—someone “not as hot as he thought I’d be”—write these hot-sounding stories of my life?

I began to wonder if I was somehow getting away with something. Was my anonymity a veil, like a burqah, something I used to hide from the gazes of men? I didn’t—don’t—think I’m particularly ugly, by the way, before you start to feel sorry for me. I’m certainly not “roll up and look at the freak at the circus” hideous. I’m average looking, I guess I’d say. Someone has to be. Not stop and stare in the streets pretty. Not stop and stare in the streets ugly. I don’t stand out for my looks. Maybe that’s why when I became un-anonymous, a public person, I began to put up my picture everywhere. This is what you’re getting, Instagram/Twitter/Facebook followers. This is my face. This is my body. I’m exactly as hot or not as you think I am. I don’t want to be surprised again.

Emily Dickinson would have made a great Instagram poet. A great blogger, even. Who among us introverts has not thrilled to I’m Nobody/Who are you?/Are you—Nobody—too?/Then there’s a pair of us!

[EDITOR’S NOTE: What follows are some very dated 2018 references] Rupi Kaur tries it now, and is as successful as poor Emily was not. Kaur is extroverted, she recently hung out with Emma Watson and read from her poetry to screaming crowds at the Jaipur Literature Festival. She’s a star, not a nobody, and yet it seems that more people identify with her than they did with Emily’s nobody. Is that fair to say? Is it fair to compare two young poets, one a reclusive, shy person, the other so bold that she posted a photo of a period stain on the back of her pants on Instagram? Is it fair to say Kaur is more popular than Dickinson when both were a product of their times?

Here’s where I take my comparison and draw conclusions—we want our heroines to look like heroines. We no longer want to identify with the meek, the shy, the mouse-like girl in a corner spinning her tales. We want our women, the ones we follow obsessively, whose lives we dip in and out of, to be strong, confident, always polished, always fierce. We want this so much, we can’t understand why we turn when someone does too much of this: look at Taylor Swift. Once a media darling, now decried as “trying too hard.” We want our women to look fierce and yet vulnerable, we want the vulnerability to perform across our screens so we can say, “Look, if Beyonce can be sad about her husband cheating on her, so can I.” And yet we have less sympathy for the actually vulnerable—we don’t want “crazies,” we want polished women crying marble tears. We are so quick to form a mob, a Twitter riot, an Instagram backlash, we might as well be waving pitchforks over our head. There’s less anonymity now, why would you want to be famous under an assumed name when you could be famous under your own, but that means everyone is accountable. All. The. Time.

It’s a dangerous time to be political online—especially under your own name. I never talked much about politics, it was all background drama to how I lived my life. But nevertheless, the trolls found me, way before Hindutva became mainstream, before mobs were a scary, many-headed monster, and these forerunners to today’s right wing trolls told me things like, “You are a disgrace to Indian women.” Why? Because I smoked and drank and had sex and talked about it. Mostly they were upset by the smoking, it seemed to them the epitome of my Fuck You badge, they saw every drag as directed against them, every puff a spell to draw other “more Indian” women into my wicked den of vice.

There’s this Facebook page now, called Humans of Hindutva. It parodies the very popular (and very earnest) Humans of New York, where there’s a photo of a person and an uplifting story about their lives. Humans of Hindutva is anonymous, as anonymous as you can be in today’s reverse IP address search age, and it takes pictures of figures from the right wing government, especially PM Modi, and puts a sarcastic caption underneath it. For example, under a photo of Modi hugging Nawaz Sharif, there’s a bit that says, “Don’t worry, it’s only sedition when the opposition does it.” The creator(s) of the page have been threatened, shut down briefly in the December of 2017 when the death threats grew, and then restarted again quietly. In a message to the fans of the group before they deleted it, they said, “I have no desire to end up like Gauri Lankesh or Afrazul Khan.”

If I was anonymous today, I’d likely have to think several times about the politics of my decision. Choosing to hide your identity is no longer just putting on a mask so that people can’t Google you. It’s also being subject to questions all the time: why are you hiding? What’s under that cloak? What deep dark secret can’t you share? Ironically, the one thing that allowed me to share my innermost thoughts, my thinly veiled anonymity, is now the thing that serves as a barrier between me and other people. If they don’t know my name, my face, they don’t feel like they know me at all, no matter how much I talk about masturbation or heartbreak.

What I missed about my blog, and my blog’s heyday, was having a small community of people who were checked in to my life. Sometimes you get more intimacy from a stranger on the internet than your friends—no, let me rephrase that—sometimes your audience is listening to you more than your friends are. I liked Twitter, but I was competing with a lot of noise, every time I refresh it, there’s new stuff that people are saying. You can almost imagine them holding megaphones: “Hello! Listen to me! I have an important thing to say!” I liked Instagram, but I don’t always have beautiful photographs of my life. I liked Facebook, but it turned into just a list of people sharing pictures of their weddings or babies. No one goes to websites anymore, when’s the last time you typed “www” into the address bar?

I suppose I’m sort of intimate now with people I haven’t seen in years. I don’t think I ever will—my high school classmates have scattered like seeds around the world. Some of the people I’ve met, I literally never saw again, they died and I learnt of their death on Facebook, and mourned on Facebook, and recovered on Facebook. I have friends who live within a few kilometres of my house, and I don’t see them, but a friend abroad posts every day, and I know the minutae of her life. Another, who I’ve only met a few times, has a recurring cast of characters in her photos, and through those, I have learnt their names, I know all of them as intimately as a stranger on the internet can, as intimately, in fact, as my readers knew my friends (all pseudonymed appropriately) ten years ago. Am I closer to my friends who I meet once every two months for two hours or the ones I don’t see at all in real life, but under whose life updates I press “heart” for love, “thumbs up” for “like,” a round mouth, round eyed face for “wow, that’s excellent.” I don’t even need to use words anymore. Some of my friends rely on it as a way to keep tabs on lives. “Haven’t you moved to Goa?” several people asked, and I explained over and over again that we had just gone for a month, how does a month become “moved to?” and I realised eventually, that they weren’t reading into my omissions as much as I thought they were. They were making small talk, haven’t you moved to Goa, and not following my life with as much obsession as I thought they were. I leave things out when I post online, of course I do, I’m not on The Truman Show, my life broadcast to you 24/7, but no one cares anymore. They go for the surface, the one photo they saw that one time. No one cares and it’s liberating and heartbreaking at the same time.

But, as the blog died, and intimate “only belonging to you” audiences seemed like they were on the way out, a new trend appeared. This time it’s email newsletters, once just the domain of companies wanting to update you on their products, now it’s become a way to blog without blogging, a way to engage without trying to send people to another, external link, it’s so easy, it just appears in your inbox, and you just scroll through it. Or not. It’s admittedly a little more invasive, emails are the last bastion of being a private person on the internet, but it’s also the one place people will keep looking, even as they delete the rest of their social media accounts. I love my newsletter, I love my tiny following (less than 500, this from a person who had tens of thousands of hits every day) I love how it feels like I’m going back to the beginning, writing about my life in long form, instead of pithy little updates. I get a greater thrill out of new subscribers than new followers. And I’m under my own name at last.

The Internet: Personified

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