The young man boards the Delhi Metro train and spots the pretty girl in black. She smiles at him; he sidles up to her. They don't talk, but 'kinda touch each other' as commuters crowd around them. The young man gets down at his station and discovers that his Note 2 phone is missing. He calls his number, and hears the woman's wicked laugh.
A new Bollywood film starring Bipasha Basu? No, supposedly a true story publicly recounted by the young man who'd literally been taken for a ride. And the story — which was read and commented on by scores of people, mostly strangers — was his post on a Facebook page devoted to the 'confessions' of Delhi Metro commuters. 'Confess ur delhi metro mischief, adventure and experience. send in your confession anonymously and we will post it for you,' one of the Metro confession pages says.
It's confession time in India. Schools, colleges, local trains, coffee shops — and even apps and concepts — have their own confession pages on Facebook. Eve Teasing is a page for those being teased and teasing, IIT Crush Confessions is for those in love, and WhatsApp confessions is for anybody who has anything to say.
There was a time when a confession meant sitting inside a dark box and haltingly pouring your heart out to a Catholic priest behind a curtain. Or for some others, it meant a steamy page in a magazine. But now it's raining confessions. Everybody — from Calcutta and Coimbatore to Madurai and Mumbai — has a story to tell.
The trend took off earlier this year, after one of the top engineering colleges in the country opened a confessions page, following in the footsteps of colleges in the West. Soon, the page went viral — and spawned hundreds of such pages.
Sargam Prakash, the 16-year-old admin of the Hyderabad school Gitanjali Devshala confessions, says he was spurred by the popularity of the confession pages of other schools. He went to a link on Facebook which allows you to create a page for any organisation and started one. He remains anonymous and regulates the confessions, removing any that he may find offensive.
Many of the confessions are genuine. IIT, Madras, student Saptarshi Prakash says IIT pages have had students admit to and come to terms with being gay. Some students write about depression in a highly competitive environment.
Often enough, though, the pages act as mere forums for discussions. 'Hawliticious babes' cry out to a 'Rahul cutieee' at the Delhi Public School confessions page and a 'desperately lonely' girl wants to speak out her mind on the Chennai Women's Christian College confessions page.
Discussions on 'chalu' girls can be found on the Bessy page (Bessy, for the uninitiated, stands for Barista) while a Romeo reaches out to the 'girl-in-a-red-jacket-carrying-an-iPad-please-call-me' on the Delhi Metro page. The WhatsApp confessions page — with 2,97,777 likes — is replete with comments such as 'I kissed my cousin and her mom saw us'. Clearly, there is a sense of 'letting go' under the shroud of anonymity. It is a Facebook version of Sex in the City or reality TV with a vengeance. 'There is always a feeling of self-satisfaction after confessing,' says Parul Popli, a student at Bhagwan Mahavir Institute of engineering and technology in Haryana.
Popli says she spends three to four hours a day on these pages, though her favourite is the Eve Teasing page where she has written about being harassed by men in Delhi's buses. 'The fact that you can speak your heart out, without your identity being revealed, is what makes these confession pages stand out,' she says.
Dharitri Narjaree, a fifth year BTech student at IIT, Madras, was hooked on to the college's confession page when it started in March this year. 'But 70 per cent of confessions were about relationships and the rest revolved around 'disillusionment' about IIT,' reveals Narjaree, who used the page to confess an incident that had troubled her.
She had a face-off with a hostel warden which resulted in her being shifted to another girls' hostel.
'I had used harsh words with her and later I repented. So I wrote about it and sent it to the confession page. I felt good. It was cathartic,' she recalls.
One IITian felt 'liberated' after confessing about his poor marks on the page. Another post spoke about a group of drunk boys who hung a guard's security cycle on a tree one night.
'It was a way of releasing our frustration, especially during exams,' says Deepak Sahu, an ex-IITian. He confessed on the page that he had taken money from friends for an operation for a cat, but failed to return it after the surgeon did the operation for free. 'I felt really guilty about it and it was bugging me for a while,' he says. Finally, he shed his guilt after he wrote about it on the page anonymously.
Of course, not all youngsters are hooked on these pages.
'How is it a confession if a person's identity is not revealed,' asks 18-year-old Mona Madan (name changed), a student of Delhi's Lady Shri Ram College. Describing the pages as 'silly and immature', she holds that her school confession page largely dealt with breaking up and sex. 'It was just someone calling a girl ugly or giving the hottest tag to someone. It ended up being just another form of cyberbullying.'
Many of the posts indeed translate into bullying. A comment on a Delhi school confessions page names a girl, and then says: 'bloody gal...What do u think of urself?' Because you move around with Dolly, you think you are like her? She is different — the cutest of all. Before getting an attitude, get yourself a face that deserves an attitude, it says.
S. Sairam, a student of Sri Venkateshwara College of Engineering in Chennai, agrees that the comments are often nasty. 'These confessions are like writing on public toilet walls,' he says. Sairam recounts a post from the NIT, Trichy, confessions page from a girl who wrote that she'd given her girlfriend rat poison after the latter stole her boyfriend.
Sriram laughs off the poison incident as a cooked-up story, while IITian Prakash points out that students tend to post clever comments to garner 'likes' — a sign that records peer appreciation.
Comments that follow confessions often take potshots at the confessor too. Take the post on the WhatsApp page by a girl who saw a handsome guy at a wedding in Karnal in Haryana who was wearing a black shirt and eyeing her. 'I m finding sme1 please help me in tht,' she wrote. 'Plz if u r on ths page lyk ths or cmnt...'
Several people replied, all insisting that they were the man in question.
The comments about the commuter who lost his Note 2 were caustic. 'Touch kar ke touchscreen lai gayi (she touched him and took away the touchscreen),' said one commentator.
Sometimes, the comments lead to trouble. At IIT, Madras, a post was removed after it denigrated a community. Sargam Prakash recounts a case when someone identified a boy as a show-off and called him a loser on his page. The boy complained to Facebook and the post was removed. 'After this I created guidelines on what could be posted on the page,' he says.
Rajani Konantambigi, associate professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, believes that the pages are popular because people find solace in chatting with strangers and discussing issues they would not speak of in person. Further, teenagers willingly embrace this trend because they are most comfortable in expressing themselves in the digital mode. But it can also lead to problems, she cautions.
'Relationship issues can escalate because, once posted, it cannot be denied,' she says. Second, anonymity helps but it can also result in guessing games and assumptions that a particular message is meant for somebody — which can lead to the person feeling abused or rejected. Anonymity also prompts people to engage in 'risk-taking behaviour', that is, behaviour generally disallowed by society. 'And this can have repercussions,' she says.
Some of the posts could also be an expression of deep frustration or a lack of ability to face problems in the real world. 'And the electronic, digital medium has an inherent property of providing immediate feedback from social others. So there is this huge high from what psychologists call instant gratification,' Konantambigi adds.
The other problem with these pages is that there is no closure, points out Dr Shivakumar M. Srinivasan, professor in charge of Mitr, a counselling centre at IIT Madras. 'In these pages there is no priest making the sign of a cross,' he stresses. 'There's no one to advise them to move on.'
But most observers believe that sooner or later, the confessors will move on. Virtual trends, after all, are gone with the click of a button.
True confessions
Go to...
www.facebook.com/delhimetroconfessions
www.facebook.com/pages/Mumbai-Local-Confessions/123652601151497
www.facebook.com/ConfessionsOfIndianStudents
www.facebook.com/ALAKNANDA123
www.facebook.com/InfyConfessions
www.facebook.com/NittConfessions
