The lost faces of Facebook

Lost Facebook newsfeeds are dominated by happiness. There’s the forced humour of internet memes, adorable photos of felines, and giddy marriage announcements. But as you scroll down, something different catches your eye; a photo of a missing child. These photos are generic: large, doleful eyes and round cheeks. Next to the photo, some cellphone numbers and a plea: Please share. Sometimes there is painstaking detail — she was wearing a red kurta, he has a mole on his left hand, she ran away. Please share.

‘FACEBOOK-WALAS ARE VERY HELPFUL’
Through coincidence, or perhaps a greater failure of policing in small-town India than in metros, missing children notices on Facebook mostly come from smaller towns.

Ranjan Gupta, 24, lives with his 21-year-old wife in a town just outside Kolkata. He works in a dhaba he hopes to own one day. “The owner is old and he’s very fond of me,” he says. Ranjan also has a Facebook profile that he accesses through a secondhand PC given to him by an uncle. He doesn’t do much with it since he activated his account in 2009. But when Ranjan’s kid brother, Mohit, ran away from home two months ago, he turned to Facebook for help.

“The police said they couldn’t do anything,” remembers Ranjan. “They just told us to look near Howrah station, where a lot of runaway boys end up.” Two weeks after his disappearance, a bedraggled Mohit returned home, having spent the interim period working at a neighbourhood shop. Ranjan received over 400 phone calls in those two weeks. To this day, he continues to receive calls.

Why did he share the photo on Facebook? “Everybody is on it, that’s why,” he says knowledgably. “Ev-ery-body. I thought someone might spot him. These Facebook-walas are very helpful. Keep calling only. Some NGO-madam also called. I told her we found him and she didn’t believe me.”

Not all missing children situations are resolved with such ease, unfortunately. After waiting in vain for a status report from the Centre and some state governments on India’s missing children, the Supreme Court threatened to hand out a round of non-bailable warrants. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, approximately 60,000 children go missing every year, and this figure doesn’t include statistics from states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra.

‘I felt good that people cared’
Kurnool is a small town located 212km from Hyderabad. When I call its resident Ravi Ganesh, 32, to inquire about his missing brother whose photo he posted on Facebook, he interrupts — “Madamji we have found him. Many thanks and god bless.”
Ravi is an avid Facebooker. The tea-stall owner checks his profile at least thrice a day at a local cyber cafe which charges Rs10 for thirty minutes. He heard through friends that Facebook was a good place to “meet” people. “If their photos are good I add them,” he explains. Ravi’s 11-year-old brother had gone missing in the middle of February. “I went to the police station and filed a report, and as soon as I came back, I switched on Facebook (sic) and put his photo up,” he says. In one day, the photo was shared 76 times, and Ravi received 200 calls. “They kept saying, we have found him, we have found him, but none of them were my brother,” says Ravi.

Ravi’s brother was hiding on the abandoned side of Kurnool, being fed by a sympathetic truck-driver. “All the people who called were all in big cities like Delhi and Mumbai and Bangalore,” says Ravi. “How could they know where he was?” But he is still a big believer in the social network’s powers. “I felt very good that people cared. There is a lot of goodness on Facebook,” he says.

SOCIAL MEDIA CAN’T REPLACE COPS
Camille D’costa is a social worker affiliated with a Delhi college. She works with parents whose children have gone missing, and questions the role of Facebook as a mediator. “I love social media. But while we champion the role of Facebook in activism, we cannot allow it to replace the job our policemen, our state governments and our education system is supposed to be doing,” insists D’costa. “And besides, what is the recall value? If you see a child’s photo on Facebook, will you notice the same child tapping on your car window a week later?”

In Gwalior, Amol Kukreja speaks of his two-year-old grandson Amrut who went missing at a gurudwara. “We looked everywhere, but we couldn’t find him,” he says. Kukreja’s son, an IT professional, posted a plea on Facebook the next day — a photo of a little boy with a shock of black hair, and an accompanying message with four cellphone numbers. Even as Facebookers made over 100 calls, Amrut’s kidnapper called a day later.

After twists and turns worthy of a Bollywood potboiler, a combination of personal ingenuity by the child’s parents and police work, the two-year-old was finally retrieved.

But the calls from Facebook continued to pour in. “They tried, god bless them, but our Amrut was with a kidnapper,” said Kukreja, his voice cracking. “If people are sitting online, so far away, they can only help so much, no?”
@apoorva_dutt