The truth and the whole truth

Why are you anonymous?

If you ask that question of anyone, you must have been born yesterday. And if you ask it of a blogger, you really need to get your head checked. Blogs are very personal. People don't want to tell their innermost thoughts to strangers unless they have no way of telling who they are. And as with any online experience, women on blogworld need to protect themselves. There have also been incidents of bloggers facing pressure from their employers for things they say on their blogs; for that reason, my friend the Artful Badger recently decided that on his transition from student to employee, he should make himself anonymous on Blogger.

There are plenty more reasons for being anonymous, but I'll stop here. But all this begs the question: why are there so many bloggers who are not anonymous? In particular, me? It's not that I don't say personal things on my blog. Far from it. Thinking on these lines, I suddenly realized that I've never been anonymous anywhere. Even my email id's read like firstname.lastname@blah.com, and my few online profiles inevitably have my full name and location on them. And I came to the conclusion that because I'm incapable of being a convincing dissembler, I decided not to try.

I must have read too many stories with morals when I was a kid. I tend to tell the truth and the whole truth at any point of time. Growing up taught me that I shouldn't, but old habits die hard. Flash back to incidents at school when I was just a kid....

- I'm playing cricket with my friends. I'm on the batting side, but fielding at the moment to make up for the small number of players. There's a runout appeal, which turns into a heated argument. Suddenly, the bowler gets a brainwave. "Let's ask SP! He never lies!" and they corner me. I sheepishly admit that it looked to me like he was out, and I was standing quite close by. The batsman involved in the appeal was a key player, and my captain takes me aside and tells me, "Dude. When such things happen, just say you don't know and you're not sure. Got it?"

- A class is on, and our teacher gives us some work to do, with strict instructions to be quiet. The guy sitting in the bench next to me gets into an animated discussion with someone else, and our teacher calls his name and asks him what's going on. He explains that he was just in the process of borrowing a pencil. When the class got over, I had a word with him. "How can you tell a barefaced lie like that to an elder?" God, I was such a self-righteous prig at that age. To the guy's credit, he didn't think any less of me for that, and in fact tried to keep my company more often in the hope that some of my influence rubbed off on him.

I grew up. But even now, in a casual conversation with a stranger, or even with myself on my blog, if I am to hide things I need to consciously expend some effort to consider every word before I say it, or I'll be quickly telling you every naked fact about my life. Er... like I'm doing now :). What is the point in being anonymous if I can't do a good job of it? So I don't.

On the down side, because I'm not anonymous myself, I don't respect other people's anonymity as much as I should. Only in the sense that I ask people who they are, or try to find out for myself. I mean, I know it's harmless, even if they don't. Well... Mostly Harmless, if I may quote Douglas Adams. Of course, the real crime is that this means I deliberately encroach upon the privacy of someone else, which is a fundamental right by any constitution. There was one incident when I googled out the full name of an online friend from stuff I knew about her, and then told her. Actually, I did something worse after that, which I'd rather not get into. She was livid for a while and actually deleted her blog for a few days. Fortunately, she forgave me completely over time and is a very good friend of mine today. That shows class, of a sort I can never hope to match.

There, I've said too much again. Somebody gag me!

Cheers,
Prashanth.