Orkut bubble about to burst, psyches on prowl

Kolkata, Sep 10: The Orkut honeymoon may be the in-thing today, but the nightmare is fast catching up with complaints of harrassment, sleaze and twisted psyche.

For three girls 'orkutting' has already turned a nightmare.

Talking to UNI, Deputy Commissioner Detective Department Gyanwant Singh said, '' The city police have probed at least three complaints the last of them from Bilaspur (Madhya Pradesh) where jilted lovers and spurned friends had turned to Orkut.com with vengeance, creating obscene profiles and lewd albums, making life a living hell for the victims.'' The three complaints, two of which were made by Kolkata-based girls and one from Madhya Pradesh, were received in a space of 90 days and in all three cases it has been found that their tormentors were known to them.

''They were let off with a stern warning. We explained to them that these acts were punishable both under the Information Technology Act and the Indian Penal Code. If slapped with cases, either their careers will be ruined or they might land up in jail.

They are young people who claimed to have done this in momentary madness,'' said Mr Singh.

For the victims, however, this hasn't been easy. A 23-year-old Bengali girl now doing her post graduation in Bilaspur (Madhya Pradesh) was quite depressed after her long relationship with her boyfriend fell apart. They had called off their engagement. While the girl was trying her best to come to terms with reality, this youth was plotting revenge.

And he did this by turning to Orkut. He created a completely new profile of the girl with all possible details and in a bid to buttress home the point he even put up obscene photographs in her album and wrote lewed innuendoes in her testimonials. The result was that the girl was flooded with obscene calls.

Saswati Chatterjee, an MBA student, says, ''I did not put up my photo on orkut as I had heard about the trouble girls are facing with their images being used for sleaze and porno stuff. It's best to stay out of such troubles.'' While girls are becoming more aware, some still leave phone numbers on their scraps.

Suhani Chaudhuri said, ''I didn't start with my photo after hearing all this.'' Mr Singh said, ''Most people don't realise that from the point they log on to net, to the time they enter data and send it, it's being logged. If only one cared to look in the address bar in the top, would they realise they are leaving behind a trail of everything they do. All we had to do is ask the service provider (in this case Google) for the details. They responded (in all these three cases) very fast.'' '' Now if you log on to Orkut, these cautionary notes flash constantly at the top of your screen. One can even report its misuse to the service provider directly,'' he said.

Mr Singh added that cyber-rooms are never safe. ''They are impersonal. People tend to do things in cyber world that they fail to do in the real life. As long as there is no personal information, it can't harm you.''

People who log on to such chatrooms are not aware that their IP addresses are being recorded and they can eventually be tracked down no matter where they are and how remote or difficult the hub is, Singh said adding there is no Cyber Law as such but the IPC has been moulded in such a manner to include the relevance of electronic documents that now they can come under any of the penal codes but mostly Sec 66 and 67.

''In most of the cases we have found that the grils are from upper middle class and come from good background and reputed institutions. Some complain, others don't in fear of negative publicity. But I just wonder how they do such acts of foolishness,'' he added.

This is not the end of the story. The who's who of the country are on orkut albeit by fake profiles. Name them and u've got them.

Starting with Sonia Gandhi, Dr Manmohan Singh to our very own Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. But the problem is they don't talk about issues in a sane manner. They are use everything from foul mouth to twisted thinking.

Brought to Mr Singh's notice, he got deeply involved in seeing these profiles and the mind of the top sleuth of the nation was working.

''I didn't know this. Let me see. I will look into this,'' he said in a matter-of-fact manner, but the eyes said it all.

If forged online identities, jilted lovers and spurned friends are soon becoming the biggest weapon for men to get back at the women with fake scraps, albums, sexual innuendoes and image morphying.But girls are no less.

They are putting up sleaze images in certain profiles and have kinky communities.

''If guys are not saints, girls are not divas either. They do their share of pranks on orkut and I'm saying this as I have seen several of them,'' said Debolina Mukherjee, a Mass Communication student.

Mr Singh said cyber crime spreads like this here as there is no intervention. ''In China there is monitoring of what to allow on net.

Some sort of a curtain should be brought down on such sites that tend to twist the social values and rot them from the core. That can be a solution to this in future.''

UNI