Art for art's sake? Not unless paisa's vasooled
Instagram pages. The very idea of it, for a 1980s child, is confounding. I suppose a social media page can be powerful the same way a good Fifa PlayStation player can call themselves 'an important footballer'.
When someone is introduced to me as a digital celebrity, I immediately assume she is either a millionaire, unemployed, or an online search will reveal a murky crime. What I'm trying to say is that I have no idea what 'digital celebrity' means.
I was, therefore, taken by a recent feud over Instagram pages. There's a storytelling platform called 'Humans of Bombay'.
It is an Indian photoblog about people in Mumbai, and these stories are shared via social media pages.
Now these good folks were unhappy with another Instagram page called 'People of India' because the latter copied and pasted posts made by 'Humans of Bombay'. A copyright violation was alleged. On October 11, the Delhi High Court restrained 'Humans of Bombay' and 'People of India' from copying each other's work.
Now, the rascal in me would have gone to court and said that I am not bound by this copyright because technically, people of India are also humans of Bombay.
But clearly, this is not a world of rascals.
In this non-rascal world, another Instagram page waded in. The ultimate humans page, the source of it all, the Brahma or Gangotri of the idea, 'Humans of New York'. And its founder, sitting up in the Amarnath of Insta pages, Brandon Stanton, said to these lowly tributaries of the plains that before 'Humans of Bombay' could criticise other people, they should look at themselves.
Apparently, 'Humans of Bombay' had done too much monetising for 'Humans of New York' to bear, the latter's core idea being an altruistic documentation of the stories of
