Capital Punishment
‘It’s just a small difference. In one moment your lungs are exchanging air, the heart is ticking away and the brain is making a million calculations to keep the machinery on. The next moment the ground beneath the feet is lost, the mass moves down by the act of gravity while the rope above tries to prevent that from happening, and in this tug of war the neck gets pulled and the odontoid process holding the head goes beyond the atlas and crushes the medulla stopping the machinery. It’s a quick and painless and in a moment what could be called a miracle of life is over and the body hangs as a just a mere mass, piece of meat, a lifeless creature. It’s the moment that man plays God, punishing people who break the rules they have made not knowing the number of laws they themselves have broken the court of heaven”
In many ways Mouthshut.com is a little society, a assemblage of human beings who live together, sometimes helping others sometimes cursing them, sometimes it brings joys and many a times disappointment. And like all societies of the world, this one too has it’s rules that you must obey. Breaking them leads to punishments right from warnings to the death sentence, being banned !
But like all laws, these too would in coarse of time be questioned, even ridiculed. As generations change and society moves, the dynamic nature of the society mocks the static laws. They are afterall arbitrary set of do and dont’s. People question the usefulness and validity of these laws and propose changes. Many a times changes are made, rules are reformed and many a times the tried and tested formulas are applied.
So if MS is like a society with laws the question of ’Is it justified to Ban members from MS’ is very much like asking the perennial debate of law ’Is Capital Punishment Justified’ and my stand on both the issues is NO It is certainly NOT justified to ban members.
Has it changed anything ?
Has the banning of members stopped the various misdoings on MS ? Has it stopped third party violations ? Has it stopped imitation ? Has it stopped ‘devils’ from springing from every nook and corner ? And most importantly can we say for sure that only the guilty are punished and the innocent get justice ? The answer is NO in all the cases.
You see, as you all know I am on kind of a probation, the blue stamp with words ‘FLAGGED’ prove that. I have been on both the sides of the law, I have been both a criminal and a victim, so I know the mindset of the violators. Their motive is certainly to get caught, infact if they are banned they become ‘martyrs’ in their own eyes. When I started ‘love2hate2love’ I wrote somewhere that ‘my motive is to get banned in a record time !’ Infact by banning the members we are simply complying to their motives !
Let me get the same point home in another way. You see MS bans members in three ways. One it gives you a Warning a ‘Blue stamp’ , if you don’t mend your ways you get a ‘Red Stamp’ which means your account gets frozen and you cant write more reviews from that account. In both the cases your name gets listed in the ‘Community centre’s’ Members Banned section with a direct link to your account ! The third way is that MS simply deletes your account completely. The third way is fine, because I trust MS’s judgement and only the really bad ones get this, but the other two are kind of a promotion of evil. To prove it to you, I have got more hits on ‘love2hate2love’ after being banned than before that !! And tell me one person on MS who has not been inquisitive enough to go through the lists of the Members Banned section and read their reviews to find out why they were banned !! Get the point …..
Another interesting thing which is on similar lines, a kind of a flaw in MS system is the ‘Best Debut; system. You see this is completely automated. So what an offender would do is that he would make up a new account with a catchy name, or with a fixed system (like a serial offender use to take up the names of famous directors) write racy reviews on common columns like “Five Worst Reviews” and similar ones and start generating hits by sending M2M’s. Since we are all fancinated by evil we read his reviews and hence he manages to come into the ‘Best Debut’ section because of the number of hits he gets, then he gets more hits until the MS people hear about it and ban it…..by that time his motive has reached and sufficient number of people have read his thrash !
Above all the biggest loophole is the ‘Five Worst Review’, ‘Five best review’ , ‘Five worst reviewers’ and ‘Five Best reviewers’ section. These are the pinnacle and the septic foci of evil. I think first and foremost MS must kill the Worst Review sections, that would solve half the problems !!
Was ban of certain better members justified ?
Why was Suyog banned ? No one know’s the true story but I have heard a number of versions in the garpevine. But at the end of the day, the kind of writer he was, the kind of reviews he has written and the amount of fame he had brought to MS, I still wonder if MS was ungrateful to him ?
There are a few other too, who were once apple in the eyes of the MS community and somewhere down the line became public offenders. Of course at the other end of the spectrum there are people who were so bad that they deserved to get banned at any cost but then like I said before, what good is a system of justice that punishes even one innocent man !
Better Ways to Solve the problem
First and foremost there are many things in MS that make a person frustrated and go to the path of crime. This happens in every society you would say, but atleast MS should try to identify these things that are unfair for many. I might perhaps enlist that and explain it in a future review.
Kill the worst review section, the root of all evil.
Destroy the accounts completely of those who are really only there for vengeance. Yes and that includes ‘love2hate2love’ as well. Don’t make them martyrs, assassinate them without anyone knowing.
The easiest solutions is to hide the bad reviews. You see MS is a big place and many a times many review don’t even get read ! Simply don’t allow those bad reviews to come in any list be it Best Debut, or Hot Review or even the ‘Last 30 reviews’ list. I know it’s easier said than done, but if you manage to do that you would cut the oxygen supply these pathogens thrive on, and that is fame. Like they say any publicity is good publicity, give them no publicity at all and they would slowly dwiddle away.
Acknowledge the older veteran members of MS.
Finally I would like to say that MS stands on the strength of it’s members and it is the members only who make MS what it is. You cannot be unforgiving to them, you cannot ignore them and you cannot bully them. A few kind words, a bit of encouragement would do no harm but would make MS a cleaner and warmer place.
Finally, for all my friends, fans and family on MS…..it’s good to be back !