Column

If ever I need a reminder about the power of human ingenuity, I get it every time I go browsing for iPhone apps. The keen minds that work in this area of human endeavour have put out countless cunning applications for just about every requirement of iPhone users — and more than a few that cater to very specific niche markets.

For instance, there’s an app called iPoo that — I kid you not — is targeted at those who like to use their iPhones when they’re in the toilet. It lets you share intimate details of your alimentary activities — and gives you real-time information on the number of others who are similarly engaged, the volume of water being flushed, and the amount of methane gas being released. In the colourful language of the app designer, it is a “social community that brings together pooers from around the world.”

Yet, it strikes me as odd that, for all their ingenuity, no Indian app designer has yet come up with a digital tool that will help the growing number of Indian iPhone users make sense of the countless Indian corruption scandals we’re grappling with, and the scamsters and peripheral players involved. I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of it, but — diligent though I am — I get horribly knotted up in the unfathomable fine details.

Here, therefore, is my wish-list of four iPhone ‘killer apps’ that I’d like to see Indian designers deliver, for which I — and many others, I’m sure — would pay good money. (Okay, who am I kidding: I’ll download it if it’s for free.)
1.Radia Recordings Decoder

I tried listening to the avalanche of tapes of Niira Radia’s conversations with ministers, moneybags, mediapersons and minions, and I’m, of course, struck with wonderment about how a woman who spends so much of her time on the phone has time to do anything else.

But although I’ve heard enough of her conversations to have her ringtone ‘Pal, pal, pal’ play in my head even when I’m sleeping, I can’t honestly say I understand every little detail of what she’s up to. What I would like is a Radia Recordings Decoder app that will offer an executive summary of her conversations, flag the important ones (where someone important is being incriminated or, even better, bad-named), and filter out the useless ones where she’s dictating mind-numbingly tedious minutiae of telecom and gas policy.

2.Ministerial Price-tag
There are so many ministers and moneybags involved in the various scandals that it’s hard to get a sense of who is batting for whom — and how they’re being compensated for their efforts. One minister is clearly identified as “Mr Fifteen Per Cent”; another is cited as having secured his job owing to a businessman’s clout; and there are dark hints about others. But what’s missing, and would be useful, is a ‘rate card’ that specifies which minister is on which businessman’s payroll, and what the going rate for such ministerial exertions are. I rather suspect that such important information may not be furnished under the Right to Information Act.

3. Number-humaniser
In the late 1980s, when the Rs64 crore Bofors arms scandal was raging, VP Singh (who was expelled from the Congress and subsequently became prime minister) campaigned on an anti-corruption platform. To convey the scale of the scandal and ‘humanise’ the number, he would say in his campaign speeches that Rs64 crore was about the cost of constructing a dam, so in effect someone who had looted that amount was “walking around with a Bhakra Nangal dam in his pocket”.

Now that India is a shining economy, even corruption happens on a vastly bigger scale: in the 2G spectrum scandal, the loss to the exchequer is, by one estimate, Rs1.76 lakh crore — but that number conveys nothing other than that it has a lot of zeroes in it. We need an app that can ‘humanise the number’ with metaphors that everyone understands: for instance, how many 3-BHK apartments in Koramangala and how many gated-community villas in Whitefield you can buy with it, or alternatively, how many hundred lifetimes it might take you to make that kind of money.

4.Karunanidhi Family Tree
It’s impossible to get to the bottom of the scandal without figuring out the Mahabharata-esque family dynamics of the Karunanidhi family. An app that traces the multiply-married Karunanidhi’s family tree, and clearly lists out which son is aligned with which nephew or which daughter is hankering for which portfolio would be useful. Even if just the family members downloaded it, it would be a big hit.