Big Brother is watching you!

His eyes were constantly glued to the television set right across. I had heard that men usually pick up places in restaurants, shops where they can clearly see the scores of cricket matches, tennis matches and F1 races. I thought that may be he is busy looking at that. Well, I did check see the newspapers that day and didn't see any notifications about live cricket matches or anything interesting coming up.

After a long interview, I looked back. The television showed some random rooms, one after the other. A young man was combing his hair and He was busy looking at the actions. Another video showed a bed near huge boxes and a guy was drinking tea in a plastic cup. After around 20 locations, I turned my head and saw the remote control in His hand. He grinned at me and told me that these are the places where he stores all his goods. Fire crackers from Sivakasi. He called someone and said, why is that guy spending so much time on drinking tea and combing and I saw suddenly on the television that they started lifting the heavy fire crackers.

This was also the case with the next room, where I saw people pinching each other's elbows, Big Brother is watching you! The chain was huge and long. This shop had videos from 40 locations. Another shop's big brother was small scale manager and he had cameras at only 5 locations in the house/store house. I came to know that this has been the case since a long time, when the Gola Ranas and the Ghanchis decided that they weren't able to cope with the management of so many workers under them in Jari business. For the Gola Ranas, it was still easy because most of the workers were either relatives or known ones. Those who had huge Jari industry set ups, they had to bring in some element of Big Brother in them but the rest were fine. When the Ghanchis entered the Powerloom sector after 1965, once Ashok Mehta gave the permit of buying powerloom machineries to everyone. This not only created a boom in the textile sector, with the increase of machineries from one thousand to one lakh, but it also gave them ideas of replicating the vigilance machineries. Ghanchis were expert in copying any machinery, skill from anywhere. It is said that in 1974, in the expo in Japan, the factories were closed during the Ghanchi visit because they might copy everything if the factories were working and those factories would lose their monopoly.

It is unknown how the idea of video vigilance started in the Surti communities, but He said that he brought it first in Surat when He had to take care of both the medical store and the Fire Crackers. Replicating what goes on in the super stores was easy, put cameras and see what is going on. He says he started in the 1990's. How He made his style of video displays (the Ghanchi skill) and how that has added to the growing industries of Surat.

Kabir Mohanty says, "We are individually multiple."
Sometimes, Our multiplicity is individual.