Ctrl + Del: Google, Can You Forget Me Please?

Haunted by their indiscretions, some Indians are seeking to erase them from their digital past. But do they really have a right to be forgotten?

- Himanshi Dhawan

In a day and age when most people would kill to be famous, reality TV star Ashutosh Kaushik is fighting to be forgotten. So why is the star of two high-profile shows running away from the spotlight? This desire for oblivion has come after nearly a decade of what he describes as “digital punishment.” But it was not always like this. “I landed from Saharanpur to Kuala Lumpur,” he jokes about his rise to fame. Film offers lined up and he set up a base in Mumbai. But the fame that came with being a TV celebrity is a double-edged sword. In 2009, he was captured on video getting caught by the police for drunk driving. His license was suspended, and he had to pay a fine as well as spend a night in prison. In 2013, he was involved in an inebriated brawl at a Mumbai restaurant.

Kaushik says he’s sobered up, but the internet will not let him forget his imperfect past. He found that the videos followed him everywhere he went seeking an audition. Labelled as a troublemaker, callbacks reduced to a trickle, eventually drying up. He had trouble getting married, but worse, his family suffered from taunts. “I was a 26-year-old small-town boy in a big city like Mumbai. I didn’t have a mentor and I didn’t know how to behave. My contention is that why should I pay the price for those mistakes even now when I am 41 years old,” says Kaushik, who last month approached the Delhi High Court asking for these posts to be taken down as part of his “right to be forgotten” (RTBF).