Google Doodle pathos

Of late, Google Doodles (the cartoon you see sometimes when you log into the Google India home page) has been ‘honouring’ notable Indians, especially women, on their birth anniversaries. I think it’s not a bad effort when I consider that the average netizen in India (definitely ‘educated’ in today’s utterly trivial sense, typically a B-grade engineer, journalist or sales manager) would probably never have heard about most such people otherwise, but it makes my lips curl with disdain when I reflect that Google does this cynically, with its eye on nothing but the bottom line: this is their way of currying favour with that (large-) section of the Indian populace whose custom they want to attract – nothing more and nothing less. So today they have drawn attention to Mahasweta Devi. Now she happens to be one of the few contemporary Indian women (well, all right, not exactly contemporary: she’d have been 92 today, and died in 2016) I happen to respect, and mine is not the kind of respect that is here today and gone tomorrow. Ask around in Durgapur about how many people besides me remember the once-legendary Father Gilson of St. Xavier’s and still talk about him eulogistically whenever the opportunity presents itself. But I wonder – will Google’s way of remembering make any real difference to anybody, and to M. Devi’s ideals and aims in particular? The ET story says the Doodle has ‘immortalized’ her. Do people like her need Google to be immortalized, or is it the Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump types who do? Yeah, yeah, I know the latter are vastly more numerous, so that proves what exactly?