No cats or fishes were used!

Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare (Documentary; 2024)

Director: Lyttanya Shannon

This is an unbelievable case of catfishing that went on for ten years. It was initiated by a close relative for no apparent reason. For those out of the loop, catfishing is a new way to deceive the unwary by creating a fake online profile and building a relationship. The profile will use fake pictures, and the final modus operandi is to swindle people of their money. No money was transacted to add more perplexity to the situation narrated in this documentary. 

Kirat Assi invested her ten youthful years in a long-distance relationship with a social media character whom she thought was an acquaintance with whom she had one casual face-to-face contact. The guy, Bobby Junda, was the brother of her second cousin's boyfriend. 

All the people in the story are from the small Kenyan Indian Punjabi community in the UK. Kiran had a fallout with her childhood boyfriend when she was about 30. She had her life in order, though, working as a DJ on a local radio.

Kirat starts communicating with Bobby online. Over the years, Kiran sees him meeting up with his wife, having a child, and separating from his wife and then suddenly, Kiran is told that Bobby has been shot. Then, again, through communication with other 'common friends', it is said Bobby was in New York under the witness protection programme. 

What followed after that were prolonged hospitalisations, multiple surgeries and loss of ability to speak. The question of how a person under the US witness programme could still be with acquaintances was raised but was given a wish-washy explanation. Love soon blossomed, and both confessed their devotion to each other, all online, one in the UK and the other in New York. Soon, Booby's toxic nature manifests, affecting Kirat's mental and physical health. Nevertheless, she lingered on. The pressure to be married was palpable as her biological ticking, so she thought.

Almost a decade into the relationship came the much-dilly-dallied meeting in London. Again, Bobby delayed his meeting even though he was already in London. Kiran engaged a private investigator to track him down. Hold behold. This leads to the home of a particular gentleman named Bobby Junda, whose resemblance to the social media profile is uncanny. He appears to be still married to the same girl he is supposed to have divorced with a child. This is the real Bobby Junda, and Simran, Kirat's cousin, stole his identity.

Then came the police reports and investigation. Kirat's cousin had been using Bobby's profile with a fake account. Not only that, but she also created multiple fake profiles to build a big group to outwit Kirat. When confronted, Simran refused to comment but apologised in private.

For all her shenanigans and the emotional and physical trauma she caused, Simran got away scot-free. Simran herself had to endure embarrassment when her mischief was exposed, not to mention the community's gossip. In those ten years, Simran lived a whole life with a high-paying job, getting married, and having a child. Kirat, now in her mid-40s, feels she has missed the boat of finding a life partner and having kids. These are important to her. She thinks that all the pointless waiting and the building of a hopeless dream happened because of Simran's actions.

Unfortunately, the UK legal system does not have a provision to prosecute someone for catfishing. It is not a criminal offence.

* Catfishing is the fabrication of a false online identity by a cybercriminal for deception, fraud, or exploitation. It is most commonly used for romance scams on dating apps, websites, and social media platforms. The 2010 film Catfishing popularised the term. It is said that catfishes used to be placed in the same tanks while transporting cod. Catfishes are natural enemies of codfish. By keeping them together, the cod will swim around, scared for their lives. Hence, the cod will appear more energetic and fresh.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

A private eye to the world

Don't F**k With Cats (Netflix 3-part documentary, 2019) 
Hunting an Internet Killer

I just happened to bump into this as I was on the treadmill and I was hooked. It was not much of love at first hello, but I liked the quite convoluted storyline. It illustrates the twisted nature of human behaviour, but at the same time, there are people who, through their actions, show that humanity has not died. But life, as it is, is never straight forward.

In life, Occam's Razor states that 'entities should not be multiplied without necessity' does not solve all puzzles. Things are more complicated than they seem. Simple answers may not be the correct one. 

It is not an easy watch and is not for the faint-hearted. Few viewers could pass beyond the first 20 minutes of the show as the subject matter is unpleasant. It is based on a true story that happened between 2010 and 2012. It involved many countries, including Canada, the UK, France and Germany. But I guess when it consists of the cyberspace, these borders are arbitrary.

The documentary starts with a youtube clip that came out in 2010 of a couple of kittens which were brutally killed in broad daylight under the full view of netizen with a live recording of them being placed in a plastic wrapper and slowly vacuum sealing them! Concerned cat lover netizens, including the narrator, Deanna Thompson, a data analyst from Vegas, who goes under the screen name of Baudi Moovan, started discussing this heinous crime. Pretty soon, they started trying identifying the location as well as the maker of the clip. Everyone chipped in with their amateurish investigative skills. The need to apprehend the perpetrator became more acute as a second video appeared online. In that clip, a cat was fed to a python. 

The internet sleuths slowly browse through pictures over pictures online, scrutinised in between the images, with the help of Google Map and all, managed to pinpoint the crime to a Luka Magnotta. Now, to pinpoint who Magnotta was and his whereabouts, that was an enigma itself. It appears like he was a globetrotting celebrity. The armchair investigators also try to analyse the character. In midst through it all, to avenge the death of cats, an innocent man was wrongly accused. And he took his own life due to the humiliation!

Another problem with this type of crime is jurisdiction. Who is to investigate these crimes when nobody knows where it happened.

The issue became more problematic when the video maker made a chilling clip of a person being stabbed repeatedly with an ice-pick.

The documentary makers cleverly put in the element of doubt into the whole story. They inserted interviews taken with Magnotta's mother. She threw a spanner to the works. She told of a manipulative character named 'Manny'.

From then on, the pace picked up. Police forces from many countries became involved, and the suspect was an Interpol's 'Red List'. It all came to a dramatic end with words like paranoid schizophrenia and bizarre role-playing of movie characters thrown in. Disturbing.

With all the benefits that the internet offers in improving lives and empowering people, there is a dark side to it. It becomes a convenient playground for weirdos and the mentally deranged for their one moment of attention in the world stage and sometimes to create mischief under the cloak of anonymity.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Sex sells

The Erotic Engine: How Pornography Has Powered Mass Communication from Gutenberg to Google (2011)
Author: Patchen Barss


Pornography has always been frowned upon as the destroyer of civilised societies. It has been put in the same decadent basket of other vices of man including cheating and gambling.

On the contrary, the idea of voyeurism goes back as far as our cavemen ancestors. They had been so fascinated with human anatomy, like excited schoolboys and toilet graffiti, that they decided to draw what they saw during the day on the wall of their dwellings. The early human civilisations were quite liberal with sexuality and nudity. Ancient sculptures of couples in various stages of undress and in acts of copulation are general knowledge. The Indian book of Kamasutra is the living proof of this. Even as late as the European Renaissance, the human body was immortalised in paintings.

Science and technology propelled the human race forward to meet various challenges. It helps Man to explore newer frontiers. Before the industrial revolution and the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press, books and illustrations were handwritten and drawn. It was expensive, and it catered for the rich, who was also coincidentally literate. The general populace could not read; hence, it did not matter what was written. The Books at that time were filled with erotica, but the learned were thought to be able to handle it.

© Roy Singh

The democratisation of printing opened this bag of worms to all. The middle class, who had their own moral standards, were ill-prepared to handle these. The Church which was the de-facto moral guardian of the masses intervened. The naked body became immoral, and its depiction against the law. Nevertheless, the interest never wanes but goes on underground. It created a new branch of a discipline called pornography to the masses but fine art to the high heeled.

The next wave of information dissemination came in the form of photography (pictures) and moving pictures (movies). Again the human body became the fascination of the makers and consumers alike. Peep shows, watching fuzzy pornographic plates became a cheap thrill. When a succession of photographs became cine, for the first time, people had the option of starring at a human body without raising the eyebrow of the other.

It was a godsend. To hide out in a dark theatre in anonymity watching ‘dirty picture’ in near lifelike visuals and audio.

Erotica continued tickling minds. The demand for it continued. It propelled advances in cinematographic techniques and optics to meet requests. Slowly explicit pictures made it to the mainstream. In the 80s, it became a norm for a Hollywood flick to have the mandatory flashing of breasts to hit it big in the box office.

Betamax - a relic of the past ©Yahoo

The video was the next thing to hit the market. Porn consumers were particularly enthralled. In the comfort of their homes with the company of a stag (or maybe mixed) party, in anonymity, they could watch all the smut they want to their heart’s content. The video was the in-thing in the 80s, creating trade wars and advances in the storage of visual data.

Computer games gave a shot in the arm towards this end. With interactive capabilities, the end user-provider barrier slowly starts to become interactive. Again and again, porn financed improvements in technology. VHS and Betamax graduated to LaserDisc and to DVD for that elusive high definition. UHF transmissions and cable TV were riding on pornography for profitability.

With time, silicon chips became a mode of the information revolution. Computer games gave users the freedom of creating their own avatars. It metamorphosed to their choice of a partner not only in the war games but something more intimate, like cybersex. From dirty talks using keyboards, it moved to joysticks and now the tip of the finger.

Next giant step in broadcasting must surely be the internet. Again, in its infancy, porn-related stuff was its best seller. It had an essential role in pushing the process of going on-line a breeze. For a seamless, uninterrupted flow of erotica, good bandwidth was needed. Poof, came protocol to this end. 


What is the meaning of all these if money cannot be collected properly? The model of consuming first and pay later is notoriously unreliable in the porn industry. As it is a shady business, its patrons, naturally act dishonestly. Hence, there needs to be a safe encrypted secure way of collecting money before consumption. This sole intention must have improved our current way of internet shopping and credit card transactions. The need for anonymity helped online privacy and data protection.

 Comfortably Numbed - VR © Slate.

To keep up with piracy of dirty pictures, the porn industry developed its own way of tracing the source of copying and protection of its 'intellectual property'. This was later found useful in tracking down paedophiles and serial rapists.

It appears like there is no limit in satisfying the demand for porn. Its consumers demand more even when newer avenues are made available. It seems that sensations acquired through virtual reality are insufficient. In the near future, the industry hopes to venture into the field of haptic stimulations. This technology tries to transfer temperature, texture, motion and pressure stimuli to its end-users to satisfy their ever-expanding sexual gratifications.

A deep link exists between pornography, the tools and techniques of human communication. Sexual depiction is a powerful source of creativity and a driving force in innovation. Many modern search engines, online retailers, video/photo sharing sites and media moguls owe their success to pornographic websites.   

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.