Chapter Synopsis
Let me tell you about two phones. The first sat in our home in Mumbai when I was a child — having a telephone at home was itself a small miracle. To call family in Kolhapur, you booked a trunk call, told the operator you needed a PP call — a Particular Person call — then you waited. Sometimes hours. You had a few minutes to say everything because every second cost money that felt like a meal.
The second phone sat in the hands of a young man a few feet away from the author's desk. He works in his home. He had an iPhone in his hands — the same model that costs more than a month's salary for most Indians. He was watching Reels. His iPhone has more computing power in its palm than several laptops combined. The most powerful tool in human history was in his hands. He had no idea.
And sitting there watching him, something like grief arrived — because what is coming is something he has not been warned about, and his unawareness right now is not a luxury. It is a danger.
The author is not a professor. Not a politician. What he is: someone who has lived through every technology surge that has swept through India in the last four decades — not as a spectator, but as a builder, a seller, a person with skin in the game. The internet at 7 kilobits. Mobile phones when Mumbai thought you were listening to FM radio. The dot-com bust. Launching things the world was not ready for.
This is the most alarmed that watchfulness has ever made him. Not for himself. For the boy on the phone. For the farmers. For the young man in Pune studying for a data entry job that will not exist when he graduates. For the woman in Chennai who has been running accounts for eleven years, certain that a skill with numbers is a form of permanence, and has not been told that the software can now do what she does in the time it takes her to open her spreadsheet.
The poor are poor because they sell minutes. The shorter your repetition cycle, the closer you are to the cliff.