Unique protest ends after man gets to know about ill-effects of mobile tower radiation

A unique protest in the national capital ended today after two IIT professors delivered a lecture on the harmful effects of radiation emitted by cell towers.

Delhites woke up to the news of a man who had climbed a 200-ft mobile tower to protest against social media giant Facebook forcing him to adopt its Timeline feature.  Anand Kumar, a techie with a software company in Noida, climbed the tower at Ajmeri Gate at around 1 pm today and refused to come down till late night despite appeals by police and Mahesh Bhatt.

Anand’s main grouse was that he hated timeline and didn’t want his landing page on Facebook to look like a 'wedding album’. He claimed that all this while he had avoided the featured but now Facebook was forcing users to adopt it and that was constitutionally incorrect and against his freedom of choice. He said he wanted to discuss the matter with Zukerberg and his protest will help him do that.

The high altitude drama had a happy ending

The 35-year-old told PTI over phone, "I want to meet Mark Zukerberg. I will come down only if I'm allowed to meet him." After several futile attempts to convince him, Delhi police requested filmmaker Mahesh Bhat who was in town to ask the man to come down. Mahesh Bhatt spoke to the man for nearly 45 minutes post which the man became even more determined to hold on. When asked as to what transpired between him and Mahesh Bhatt, Anand said Bhatt simply told him that he wanted to make a movie on his life with Emran Hashmi in the lead. “I didn’t agree to that. I don’t mind the movie, but I do mind that Hashmi guy. Even Rajpal Yadav is better than him. So Bhatt left saying he will anyway make the movie without acknowledging me”.

With all their diverse efforts coming to a naught, the Delhi Police finally hit upon a brilliant plan. They got a professor from IIT Delhi to come down and give a lecture on the hazards of mobile tower radiation. The professor agreed and gave an hour long presentation backed by latest stats and a multi-media demo. Anand however said he wanted a second opinion from another professor. So Delhi Police got another professor to come down and share insights on the topic. The prof said that “a 35 year old on a 200ft tower reduces his life span by 3 years by hanging on the tower for 2 hours. The lethality increases as the time goes by and chances of cancer developing in some uncomfortable area of the body also increases proportionately”.

Cops said that Anand can stay on the tower for the next two years as Zukerberg will only be free by then. Anand then agreed to come down and said he wanted a complete health checkup to be done before he agrees to accept timeline as an inevitable option. Addressing the media later, Anand said that his protest was not over yet and he has decided to form a political party to 'fight the system from within' and bring justice to people affected by Facebook's forced imposition of timeline.