There is a multi-tasking little joint in my locality that I use regularly. It has a photocopier, a fax machine and an ISD telephone, and computer kiosks with a printer. I am compelled to know it well, since I have neither a photocopier nor a fax machine at home, and my printer has become a piece of junk no one will take off me. The last time I went in was a couple of weeks ago, to get a print-out of a seminar paper. The paper being about what terrorism has done to our everyday lives, my eyes fell on a notice from the police stuck on the wall.

It said, to put it briefly — and in altered language — that anyone who came to use the computers had to demonstrate his identity through a choice of various cards. The PAN card, I think, a photographic credit card, a voter’s identity card, and so on. The person is to sign a register, which is to be kept by the shop for a fixed number of months. It was my seminar paper come alive.

I found it difficult, given the thrust of my paper, to accept that I should not be blaming the police here, or any State institution that is taking the responsibility of protecting the vulnerable. But the image that struck me had nothing to do with all that. I imagined the guardian of a boy or a girl from the districts coming frantically to the city on the last day that a college his ward wants to study in is giving out admission forms. But the form, he finds, has to be downloaded from the internet — because development and the IT boom expect this of everybody. There is no alternative. Would he have a ready way to demonstrate his identity, the simple fact that he is not a terrorist, with cards that have his photographs on them? What would he tell his child if he doesn’t?

Staying with this imaginary scenario clarified for me the key terms of a question that lay side by side with the discomfort associated with the question of democratic rights and measures against terrorism. In the case of my example, how would a student get access to the higher education that the State is so anxious to make available when he or she is unable, given these specific circumstances, to keep up with the progress that IT is making real, and which must be dealt with on that crucial day? No one would be able to fault institutions conscious of saving paper, energy and the pain of long queues.

But how would this student enter the world of his dreams?