Parliament on Twitter

Henceforth, all important communication in India should happen only through Twitter

Henceforth, all important communication in India should happen only through Twitter. It's already begun. We found out what to do if people want to protest against a protest against Shah Rukh Khan (wear a T-shirt and go watch his movie), which part of the airplane Shashi Tharoor prefers (the front) and where Lalit Modi goes to get his vilified toes massaged (a spa). But, like all things in India, this is not enough. Twitter's reach in our country needs to grow faster than the list of Tiger Woods' mistresses. Here are a few suggestions on how.

Firstly, we can do away with that institution no young person has ever heard of, called the parliament. It largely exists for MPs to shout at each other and throw (nice colonial) furniture. It has this other little function of making laws, which is largely irrelevant, because no one follows them. Solution -- do away with law-making in parliament. Instead, make all the MPs follow each other on Twitter. Sell the building to DLF, so they can create a 1,000-floor posh apartment complex and call it 'DLF Swadesh Sky Villa'. Of course, with your own private jacuzzi, butler, postman and dog. Every MP will naturally get a flat, so it will skip all the unpleasantness (like helping poor people) to their main goal, which is making enough illegal money to buy a penthouse.

The lovely parliament house furniture and paintings can easily become custom-made high-end antique stuff that a home furnishing boutique can market as the "The 2010 Chic Constitution collection" .

Illustrations / Sameer Pawar
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As for the laws themselves, this is how it would work. The Honorable Minister of Women's Affairs would tweet "Thinking of Passing Women's Bill. Who's In?" The responses could range from "Yes", to "No way" to "Grrl Pwr" to "Please write that tweet in Hindi, Marathi and Kannada" to "It's passed. LOL!" As citizens, you can obviously follow your parliamentarian and if you found him/her offline, send them an all caps tweet, "PUT DOWN THAT SCOTCH AT BOMBAY GYMKHANA AND TWEET, YOU LAZY REPRESENTATIVE".

The accidental benefit of doing away with parliament is that we would not need the Lok Sabha TV channel, which, apart from terrifying viewers, has also killed millions of people with sheer boredom.

The next big benefit is for the TV media. Instead of having to drive to the location of a news incident with an OB Van with some teenager as anchor, they can just follow the important person on Twitter, wait for their updates, and debate. It's exactly how it is now, but with benefits -- you don't have to look for parking for your OB Van (it's a big van, you're always bribing policemen not to tow it), you save hours waiting outside a celebrity or politician's house in the heat wearing a suit and shouting nonsense into a mic. More critically, the teenage anchor can get down to the real business of why they have that media job -- dating. All they need is a cell phone and they can relax at a mall with a lover waiting for a PVR matinee and casually scrolling Twitter updates to find if the nation has disintegrated. For live tragedies, they can pay someone inside the crisis for live tweets with things like "Still on fire" or "Plane still crashing. Not fun".u00a0 I admit, one may have to do some perception changes like remove the permanent "Breaking News" to "Breaking Tweet" but don't forget the huge amount you save on travel costs.

The final big benefit is for Bollywood. It's extremely expensive to make a movie and the business is too precarious with 80 per cent of films flopping and money going down the drain, whereas stars themselves have never been more popular On Twitter. The biggest of them have followers in the hundreds of thousands. Instead of spending all this money for a script and then all the hassle of playing characters in that story in some expensive foreign location which you'd have to shoot beautifully, save all that money and just have the star tweet the story. It is rumored that our whole movie industry exists for the stars to relate to the masses and the rest of the rubbish like the story, ideas and lavishly shot scenes are unnecessary. So what better way for the star to reach his follower than having someone follow you and talking to them directly? So for example, if My Name Is Khan was never made, just tweeted, megastar Shah Rukh Khan would begin, "Audience, We begin.

Imagine me with Asperger's and a backpack on a Colorado highway ufffd" Apart from saving money, it does so much that art was supposed to; it makes us imagine. And in some cases imagining is so much better than seeing. Wouldn't there be a collective global relief if actor Vivek Oberoi tweeted, "So I'm a superhero" than to see him as one in a recent tragic release called Prince?u00a0u00a0u00a0

Anuvab Pal is a Mumbai-based playwright and screenwriter. His plays in Mumbai include Chaos Theory and screenplays for Loins of Punjab Presents (co-written) and The President is Coming. He is currently working on a book on the Bollywood film Disco Dancer for Harper Collins, out later this year.u00a0 Reach him at www.anuvabpal.com