THE MICROPHONES OF MUSSOORIE

In 1981, as a  Fresher  in Delhi University , I decided to attend a show by the  Ghanaian Afro- pop band Osibisa  - for two reasons.  It  had a percussionist by the impressive name of Daku Potato and the performance was an all night show. Or so I thought. For those uninitiated to this group, listen to its rendition of Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram on You Tube. So, fortified and blitzed for a night long entertainment,  I reached India Gate at around 11 pm along with my friend Amit Jha, only to discover it was an evening function and the fellows were winding up. It was a cold night, the cops who accosted us were unhelpful, the DTC Night Specials sped past us.  Why am I  taken up by surprise at the turn of events which I could have easily tackled with a bit of an extra diligence? Such things end up as tragedy or a comedy or as mixture of both as it once happened with me in Mussoorie.

When lack of due diligence combines with microphones, the resultant cocktail  is devastating.The testing  and handling of microphones in themselves are events at an event - almost sub plots of a play. Malfunctioning of mics have been occasions for silent glare, loud arguments and even fisticuffs amongst  artistes and technicians. But when the tragedy  of microphones struck me in Mussoorie, surprisingly it had nothing to do with testing or handling  or malfunctioning of mics.

It was during my Foundation Course at Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussourie. Three hundred and fifty odd young officers of the different civil services  had assembled at Mussourie. The slew of activities in these fun filled three and a half months. 

Morning jogs and Whispering Windows walks,

Eyes agog and cheerful talks,

Guest lectures and back benchers, 

Teen patti and trekking adventures,

The afternoon halts  at the post office,

The anxious waits at the Director's office,

Courting, escorting by the prim and proper

Leer and jeer by the aggressively improper, 

New games of billiards and of squash, 

Of village visits and  the evening slosh,

The one act plays at Sardar Patel Hall, 

Tea and snacks at Hari's stall. 

The One Act Play was a regular  event of this course. Bhaiyya selected  the play "Chandragupta " penned by the celebrated writer Jayshankar Prasad as our entry.He brushed aside my previous experience in Class 5 when I had forgotten the lines in a play which  had led to two teachers being summoned by the Principal, and instead, pencilled me to play the role of Chandragupta.  Of course, Sanjay Pandey, who was a couple of years senior, chose himself . He would settle for nothing less than Raja Nand because it gave him the maximum time to sit  on the throne.  Most of the others  were unwilling, a few singularly unsuitable .  But the cast was cast in stone and Bhaiyya  picked  up the role of Chanakya for himself and started the rehearsals - mainly in my room at  14, Mahanadi after afternoon classes. 

Bhaiya wrote the dialogues, directed and even sang one song ( I only remember the words 'jahan pauncha anjaan khsitij per'…) which would  be repeatedly aired from the nepathya. He would pat us on the back, and in stark contrast to our pessimism, exuded confidence about winning the competition. Diction, delivery, facial expression, sword fight, the dress - he decided. He also gave a valuable tip.

' Vivek, Sanjay Sir, Rajinder, Anil, Alkesh,' he told  us repeatedly in closed huddles, "there would no  microphones in Sardar Patel Auditorium. We should be shouting at the top of our voices to be heard even by the backbenchers."

He even distributed  cough drops after the rehearsals and begged me  to me cut my smoking. 

Finally the day arrived- a particularly cold evening in November. Bhaiya had 'managed' to have our play listed  first. There were two reasons. One was that most of us were thinly  clad for a hill station winter  and second , he was not sure how long he could hold back some of the cast from hitting the bottle. Besides,  we would have the advantage of  a fresh audience. We trooped in.  The song rang out from the nepathya and Raja Nand, accompanied by me,  walked in and  started the proceedings , bellowing orders to the darbaris and santris. Then he bellowed a question on state matter to me, I also bellowed back and in no time  it was 

'Here a bellow, there a bellow,

 Every where a bellow bellow.'  

Which was fine by us  because that  is how  we had rehearsed. 

But I suddenly felt that something was amiss. Firstly, the audience in the first row started to smile in an unhelpful and  funny manner - a few  ladies  covered their ears,  and  even close buddy ICP Keshari followed suit. Then a wolf whistle  flew in from somewhere to signal a few more.  By  then I realised that even our ears were agitating.What to talk of the most soporific elements in the audience,  our bellows would have even woken up a sedated  python and sent the mice scurrying to their chthonic shelters if there had been any.

So without trying to make it obvious and managing not to forget my lines ,  I began to search for the reason. I let my eyes wander furtively, just the way one sniffs searchingly when someone breaks wind a bus.  Then I saw. Suspended from the ceiling, there were at least ten microphones -in rapt attention and dutiful submission to amplify the sound of the quietest shuffle and  the weakest muffle. And here we were, shouting,  thinking there  will be no mikes!!

Now for the damage control. I first beckoned at Rajinder Vij, the Selukus Nikator,  to lower his voice.

Not an expert at  Dumb Charades, he stopped in between , arched his eyebrows , and promptly forgot his lines! More jeers.  Anjali and Radha ,  Oindrilla and Sundari, KPP Rao and Bhaskar Mahanta left the hall. Alka, Chow, Bullu,  Atul, Punnu  and Poonam followed them. Catcalls flew in like bats in an abandoned garage.

Sanjay Pandey,  the Raja Nand, perched on a  throne and dressed in peacock colours , bellowed, " Tum chupp kyun ho Selukus?"

Selukus, thoroughly shaken  up by this time, jumped to the command of the royalty and seniority, but could only pout  his lips - in silent amplification and vigorous animation. 

I intervened,  deviated  from the script, looked  upwards  and lifting my hands at the mics, spoke " Maharaj Nand, kripya shaant ho jaiye, dheeraj rakhiye, yeh kuchh achambhit ho gaye hain." 

Raja Nand, Dhristrashtrically  blind to the mics, never saw the prompt.

He hyper bellowed, " Tumhari yeh dus sahas ki tum hamei shaant rehne ko bologe?" 

The first two rows , except the judges , jumped out of the hall. More catcalls  followed, prompting Raja Nand to further raise his voice  to drown them.

Bhaiyya made his entry singing 'Jahan Pahuncha Anjan kshitij  per ' to signal the change in cast.  As some others came in , I and Raja Nand went  out into the Green Room . I told him that there are mics which are functioning efficiently, that the Diro was wrong about them  and now we  must speak softly. He took a drag from the cigarette which was being shared by four of us,  wiped the  Raja Rum dribble   and in about three  minutes we trooped inside the stage to stare  at a larger number of empty seats.

Raja  Nand started his  second proceedings on  a much subdued, chastened pitch, I too delivered my dialogues tenderly - but soon realised something was amiss again. The judges started to crane their necks and hood the palm to their ears   to hear us . The backbenhers of Keshav, Mathursaheb, Ilango and Sivaramkrishnana started shouting. Bhaiyya was glaring at us to raise our pitch. Raja Nand,  an ex IITian from  Kanpur,  understood in a jiffy where the problem lay. He rightly  guessed that when we were away, someone had told the technicians to switch off the mics since we were hollering.

So he decided to  do some damage control for a change - he again raised his pitch to status quo ante to make up for the silence of the mics. But with astonsihing alacrity, even before Raja Nand had hit the pitch,  the sound technician, confused by the initial low pitch of Raja Nand's second innings, reverted the volume of the mics to the loud  status  quo ante volume. So again it was  bellows status quo ante. Bhaiya  had given up, and even smiled that luminescent smile which flutters in the eyelids of lambs just before slaughter.  

'Here a bellow, there a bellow,

 Every where a bellow bellow.'  

I conceded it was was too much to expect even my college mate Herman Prit Singh, my teen patti friend Srikant Mahiyariya and my classroom neighbours, Roll Nos. 17 and 18  Alka Thomas and Bandula Sagar,  to stay back and suffer this Comedy of Unadulterated Errors.   My big regret was that when I slew Raja Nand and sat on the throne, and  Bhaiyya  the Chanakya came  to anoint me amidst bellicose bellows of Raja Chandragupta ki jai, there were no cheers except polite and unenthusiastic handclaps  by the judges, about 20-30 officers and a few technicians. We did get a standing applause though- when the curtains came down and the  the audience was assured we were truly done. 

SALONE REMEMBERED

Over the years, the diamond industry has had a devastating impact in countries such as Sierra Leone, Angola and the Congo, where profits from the sale of diamonds have been used to fund brutal wars, with disastrous effects on local communities.

Sheherazade Goldsmith

The Ebola virus sweeps across, lifting a person here, snuffing  out a life there.  It no more remains a distant threat tucked away in sub sahara West Africa but has, of late, triggered a shrill pitch of alarm, if not exactly preparedness,  nearer   my home in Kolkata. I follow the news quite closely because once again a tragedy has struck  Sierra Leone where I  had spent about twenty months as a peacekeeper with the United Nations Assistance Mission in Sierra Leone or  UNAMSIL in 2004-06. It saddens me to see the  pictures of health workers, including the familiar Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) or Doctors Without Borders, fight a grim battle even as civic unrest grows following collapse of public health infrastructure.

But I  must pause and explain to you where Sierra Leone is located. I know for sure that for  most

Indians, the bias against dark colour gets reflected  not only in advertisements inserted in matrimonial columns or avoidance of  tea, but also extends to a galling ignorance of the Dark Continent. To many, Africa means  just South Africa. Sierra Leone, however,  is about 6000 kilometres  north west from that country  -  a sub sahara country lying in the western bulge of the continent , west of Nigeria and Ghana and cusped between Liberia and Guniea. Its latitudinal extremes are almost that of Kerala.  For those who cannot fathom how much is 6000 kilometres, let me tell you,  it is  300 kilometres  more than   Cairo is from Kolkata. And for those who didn't read books  and bunked classes to watch films, well, Sierra Leone was  the setting of the movie Blood Diamond, the famous Leonardo di Caprio  starrer which had received an Academy Nomination - a  film about how the RUF rebels collected illegally mined diamond to procure weapons and unleash one of the most barbaric civil wars in recent history between 1991 to 2002.

Oh Salone ( that is how it is called in its Krio), my heart bleeds for you. I remember, on being prodded by my friend Zulfi, I had opted to go on a peacekeeping mission in 2004, energised by the promise of an international experience and loads of money. I reached Sierra Leone, after a shot of Yellow Fever vaccine, and an amazing encounter  at Conakry ( capital of  neighbouring Guniea ) where I found porters jumping on the carousel to grab luggage and stake a claim to transport it. Disease plagued this country even then.  In  2004 it was the triple scourge of Lassa Fever, AIDS and cerebral malaria - I escaped the first two but succumbed twice to the last to be rescued by artesunate tablets.

The  capital ,Freetown, is so named  because after abolishing slavery, the British settled this place in 1787 with 400 formerly enslaved Black Britons from London.The Fourah Bay College is the oldest University in West Africa. The town  is located on the Atlantic and I would watch the sun sink sans a scatter  over  the horizon evening after evening from the Freetown Golf Club where I was a regular. The  town's Lumley Beach is the hub of  many activities, but none more amazing than the frenetic pace at which groups of amputees play football in the morning. By afternoon, it revs up again as a bunch of handsome Lebanese hunks play volleyball and locals and UN officials jog and walk. In the late evening , centring around the many shacks  selling  soda and beer and barbecued lobsters and barracuda , there is much of ear splitting music and merriment, soliciting by prostitutes and  the suggestive swaying and shaking of cars parked by the beach. 

Adjacent to the beach was  the Freetown Golf Club, an 18 hole course with

Browns instead of Greens, whose caddies would break into a jig at the sound of any music. But the Lumley was not a patch on the other three beaches I visited - the Laka, River No.2 and Burrey Town. The water is blue, the fine sand trickles through your toes smoothly as it would  through the neck of an hourglass. Walking in the Main Business District and old bazaar areas was fun- haberdashers, garment hawkers, vegetable sellers sat
cheek by  jowl with lingerie, shoe and toy sellers. The Sindhi and Lebanese Malls were well stocked, one preferred the latter because of the  extremely beautiful women manning the counters. However, the most amazing memory is of the large number of hair- do shops. Sierra Leone women are obsessed with their hair. It is in these shops that the tedious processes of threading, braiding and even beading are done so that the ever changing weaves and wigs of the women continue to fascinate everyone on a regular basis.

However, the  poverty of Sierra Leone was striking - wherever we went in the countryside, small boys

and girls would, at the sight of the ubiquitous White  Nissan and Toyotas of UN, shout, flail their arms and ask for  "Chop, Chop" or food. The number of orphans and displaced children was very large. Disarmed  rebels, most of them who had earlier been child soldiers, still roamed and threatened  to disturb the fragile peace. The  ravages of the decade long civil war still showed - in the thousands of 'uproofed' and burnt houses, dismantled railway tracks, stumps of trees due  heavy illegal logging and poignantly  distressing , the stumps of amputees . The countryside, especially the eastern districts of Kailahaun, Kenema and Koidu were pockmarked with ditches dug to pan diamonds.

Life expectancy was in early 40s when we were there and  healthcare was abysmal. One was legally bound to pay even for injuries sustained during physical crimes like assault and rape- and many a time victims would not press charges because they couldn't afford treatment at government hospitals. The roads would make the worst roads in India appear to be slick autobahns - and I still remember my first journey to Kailahun when it appeared at many stretches that the car was playfully wading on slush.The corruption of its poorly  paid bureaucracy would make its  Indian  counterpart look like the cleanest Scandinavian. People continued to vote on ethnic lines and rogue youth elements were routinely  enlisted by the two major parties  (SLPP and AFC) to intimidate rivals. In the donor dependant economy, the path to recovery appeared agonisingly slow.  But having said all this, I came away with an amazing takeaway.

.

This was the remarkable communal amity and peace. About 60 per cent of it population is Muslims, 20 per cent Christians and the rest heathens - but never has religious strife marred it. It did not inform a single political upheaval nor any civil war atrocity which was more on tribal and regional lines.The people are  intensely religious- the Muslims observed the  Ramazan fast with a severity that was amazing. The Christians of different denominations formed huge congregations in their Sunday best at the different churches . To ensure the success of meetings, they would start by  wonderfully phrased  'silent individual prayers. In 2007 General elections, a devout Christian of the Weselyan Church , and President of the AFC  Ernest Bai Koroma defeated the SLPP candidate  Julius Maada Bio, a Catholic  who  had married a Muslim Fatima Jabbie. I do not know of any country which is so secular- either its government or its people.

In Salone, it  was nice to be known as an Indian. Before the civil wars took its toll, there were a large
number of Indian school teachers ,including a few Bengalis, especially teaching science and maths. Alonwith Lebanese, the Indians, especially Sindhis were the largest expat community, mainly in trade including retail where their malls would sell everything including heeng and paachphoran. My caddies knew the names of children and wives of Dharmendra and had seen most of the Indian movies in the video parlours. There were cricket clubs as well.

The people were particularly  grateful to the Indians who had  initially led the UN peacekeeping army and took on the RUF rebels when they even managed to be besieged in Kailahun for over two months  - only to be  rescued by  a daring Operatiom Khukhri. After India withdrew over its objection to  disobedience  and complicity in the illegal diamond mining trade by Nigerian troops,  the mantle of  UNAMSIL military leadership fell on the Pakistanis . I watched with wistful sadness when  in meetings after meetings,  the credit for a successful UN Mission was  taken  by them even though it was  the Indian army which had engaged and subdued the rebels. 

Of course once I had a surge of  great pride when a local, employed in the National Service with the UN,  related  with great discernment the difference in the impact  of the two armies  on common people.

' How de body Mista Sahey saa, ?' he warmed up as he clipped the seat belt to my right.

I nodded and informed him that I was doing fine after a  biryani lunch at the PAKBATT Kenema camp.

" Indians very clever,' he plodded, " Mista Chukker Vatti taught me Maths  in school."

"And this military camp ye see yonder ," he remarked  pointing to the PAKBATT camp, " long time back, the Indian army used to stay there ."

" Very strict discipline they had. Then one day they just left and the Guinea Army came. No one stayed in the camp- they all came with their dollars and started living with the local girls," he complained.

" Must have been for a short while only Vandy," I said, " for the Paks came in soon thereafter."

" I am sure that would have been  pretty reassuring," I prodded with the hope to hear something bad about the Pak Fauj.

" Sorry Mista Sahey, they were a lot different than you Indians," he readily obliged  me.

" What do you mean?" I asked  with a mocked annoyance.

" You see Mista Sahey, the Indian army people  gave  us so many skills. They taught driving, they taught mechanics , they taught joinery and they also  taught computer. That is how I got a job in the National Service. I am so grateful  to one Bhasin who was my instructor," he explained.

"And what did the Pakistanis do?" I prodded aggressively.

" Aah, they only gave us food. They gave us food outside the camp, they distributed free food in villages and towns, in the schools and in the mosques. " 

" And made us a country of beggars , " he bemoaned,  before settling into silence for the rest of the journey.

COPYING PIRACY IS NOT ORIGINAL

"Nothing is perfectly static. Every word, grammatical element , every locution, every sound, and accent is a slowly changing configuration, moulded by the invisible, an impersonal drift,  that is the life of language"

--Edward Sapir 

" Of all the linguistic elements caught up in this drift , meaning is probably the least resistant to change"
 --Ullmann

Counterfeit once meant a legitimate copy and egregious was eminent, nice was stupid and foolish. Ejaculate was seminally a bit different than what it is now so  much so that Dickens could write in in Bleak House 'Sir Leicester leans back in his chair, and breathlessly ejaculates'. If 'exception proves the rule' appears illogical , it is because prove meant to test!. In 14th century Middle English, abandon meant “to subjugate or subdue” , an addict ( from Latin addictus) was an indigent person given as slave to a debtor and assassin was a hashish - eater. Awful in 1300s  was 'inspiring wonder' while in the 1400s,  a nervous person was actually “sinewy and vigorous” – as the Latin word nervus applied to both sinews and nerves.  

While I didn't have much of an opinion on these drifts, I was especially disappointed at the semantic change of the word pirate and piracy. I was not aware that piracy, though derived from an Indo European root which meant try or experiment, had to do with anything other than sea- thieves or robbers -  but robbers with a charm, élan and panache. Pirates held a special fascination for me in my childhood ever since I read in Class IV that they had held captive even the great Julius Caesar.  In the Warrant of Precedence  I had drawn up as a young boy, I placed them on top of the pecking order - ahead of  the land thieves and robbers. Sea life had held a special romance. It started with Jason and Argonauts, moved on with Robinson Crusoe before being totally besotted with  the lore and legend  woven around   Long John Silver, his crutch and parrot Captain Flint, treasure hunt, smell of salt and sweat, jollity and drunkenness:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest..

…Yo-ho-yo, and a bottle of rum!

Drink and the devil had done for the rest---

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

My favourite comic character Phantom had vowed to fight piracy, and the merry band of Gaul warriors Asterix and Obelix had repeatedly thwacked the sea pirates team of Red Beard, Peg-leg, the perched atop the crow's nest  African Pirate Lookout . Nevertheless, I always dreamt  about possessing  my own boat with its mast and sails, the Jolly Roger aflutter with its  crossbones and skull, a black eyepatch around one  eye, an extravagant   tricorne over my head and a luxurious  moustache drooping down. My friends and brothers clapped, and sometimes suffered, as I lead the charge with a swagger on my  peg -leg, brandishing the cutlass with my right even as  the dagger and dirk  lay next to the iron hook that served as my left hand . You could say a combination  of Long John Silver, Captain Hook, Red Rackham, Blackbeard and Calico Jack. 

Captain Jack Sparrow was many, many years after me- and Johnny Depp's was no match on my eye patch ! Okay, if it is overboard, doesn't matter. Cheer, cherish and celebrate a child's dream. Whenever we played Chor - Sipahi, I would always grab the role of the cop but when it came to sea fights, it was always the pirate chief for me. 

But the reverie of childhood was rudely broken much later when I landed with a job in Bengal. No, I had nothing against Bengal. Conceded that its vehicular  traffic, when not  yielding  to the gay abandon of jay walkers  would be blocked by makeshift bully pulpits on nooks and corners and crossings. There was no denying that it required Brazil , a nation thousands of miles away,  to unite its people emotionally. Its black and white era aantel paaturis  bathed with a regularity and energy that made Bedouins look like mermaids.  But then its capital  Calcutta is a lovely city, the people have a history and future of  unequal measures.  Even  though individually  revolutionary,  the Bengalis vote with emphatic unanimity - in cycles of thirty four years . They  have by far the richest Indian literary tradition and in my book the most delicious and variegated cuisine.  Being an artisanal society,  the people  are amazingly aesthetic while  their air is refreshingly unpolluted by caste fumes that are belched from the hate chimneys of  Cow Belt.

Where Bengal disappointed me was in  the quality of its  pirates or the jal dasyus. How could a state which had the most ingenious of the money launderers ( the art being reverentially called the Kalkatta channel), the most intrepid of international cattle smugglers and human traffickers, gun runners, and extortionists  come to have such languid and lackadaisical jal dasyus?  After their capture and arrest near Kakdweep, I had a chance to meet and interrogate a few jal dasyus . I was devastated to learn that there were no boat- to- boat fights, no crow nests either, neither a scimitar nor an  eye patch, and nary a man disabled in any charming way. They all  smelt so ordinarily of brine and wet wood. Famished, scrawny, sad eyes sunk in their hollowed sockets,  veins throbbing out like those of professional blood donors,  ribs sticking out like cattle  in a drought, dirty lungi , soiled genji,  a gamchha, an assortment of unreliable country made guns - they were such a huge let down. I was shattered. I totally revised my opinion about pirates and piracy. 

And if this is was not enough about what the romantic vocation of piracy had come to, I was in for a bigger disappointment. When I joined the CID, I was asked to supervise the investigation of some cases of what amounted to piracy which was so morbidly  non nautical. Yes, these were cases of piracy  - about copyright violations of books and music. Somehow, I had no idea that these activities, so low on physical risks, with not a single icon to match the pantheon of the sea pirates, had been, for over five centuries,  termed piracies. Okay, the age of printing and the golden age of buccaneering coincided. But terming the violators of printing as pirates was such an overreaction and misrepresentation. Where was the derring- do in the printer keeping a supernumerary copy and selling by the side or a journeyman taking some extra copies like the scraps allowed to butchers' apprentices?

It appears that one Atykins, to further his own financial interests of securing the right to publish books on Common Law in late 17th century England, played  upon Charles II's fear and unease about the new book trade and the capacity of the new printed argument to spread knowledge beyond the traditionally controlled folds of university, court and church. He  picked upon the Stationer's Company which was a kind of a publishing guild through which all printing had be legalised. He termed  its stranglehold similar to that of the pirates ( already made infamous due to the string of buccaneering activities in Caribbean and de-romanticized and stained in a particularly harsh , though influential, narrative in Captain Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates). He demonised piracy as antithetical to civilisation quoting Cicero and Thyucdides and  also an apocryphal story of Alexander and a sea pirate. 

All forms of 'impropriety' that could come in way of capital accumulation would be termed piratical. And soon piracy became the new flavour of the season-  a synonym for all wide range of sins involving misappropriation of ideas- plagiarising, epitomising, translating, abridging, etc. People of different trade, the engineers, inventors, cartographers, naturalists, apothecaries, engravers, physicians,  dubbed their rivals as pirates. Interestingly, some famous people used the route of book piracy to put into circulation some works which through the legal channel could have invited state censorship- Isaac Newton used this channel to get a few of his  unorthodox texts published thus.

And now in the age of digital technology and internet, all forms of transgressions of copyright infringements and IP theft are interchangeably dubbed acts of piracy. Even if one stains and besmirches sea -piracy, it appears quite astounding that  the act of a twelve year old  swapping music with his friends is piracy. Industry has cried hoarse and keeps on devising strategies, both legal and technological, against the 'evils' of piracy which has affected its tills and balance sheets. 

However, the wail against piracy that it is theft from artists has been countered with argument that artists rarely hold ownership which are routinely assigned to a corporate distributor. The ideological underpinnings of the war against piracy in the digital age have been questioned.The conceptualisation of copyrighted works as property which is subject to 'ownership' and  is critical to the 'piracy' trope,  is fundamentally fallacious. Some have even wondered how much of "intellectual content" is actually original. High costs of software with no differential pricing has been criticised as corporate brigandry. Extent of loss of revenues and jobs have often been found to be inaccurate and fallacious. 

Well, this debate can go on, and this blog is not intended to settle it even though it may have flagged it. I only wanted to lodge my protest at the unseemly bending of the term pirate and its inappropriateness . Interestingly, the way to the future  for the various segments affected by Copyright  infringement and IP theft can be seen how the porn industry has dealt with its pirates. Pornography is the most commonly traded type of file on the net, but despite illegal file sharing, porn companies have not sued any file sharing company, and  have grown even as record labels and movie studios experience slump. This is no place to list out the corporate strategies of the porn industry, which I leave to you to surf and be updated and rewarded, but rest assured, piracy cannot effect a quietus interruptus.