Cover Storyreadersdigest.co.in 53dollars to spy on their citizens, and
the Chinese need to build incredibly
dystopian systems of human
management. Here in India, we do
it all manually—what surveillance
can you be scared of if you have
grown up in an Indian family? What
draconian social regression have we
not already had defended to us by
an older family member? We don’t
need to build location-based apps
to find romance—location-based
aunties will find you partners, often in
the face of your active resistance. Our
offline human networks have a speed,
range and reliability that no telecom
giant can match.
The threat of automation and large-
scale job loss? Indians are unfazed—
already there are no jobs, and we are
confident the machines won’t work.
Pollution and water shortage? Please.
We are already able to ignore the
world’s worst air and days of no water
supply while we send each other
Good Morning WhatsApps. Whenever
the apocalypse arrives, whatever form
it takes, our centuries of training in
ignoring harsh realities around us
will enable us to not really notice the
world has ended—and make rude
comments about people who Mark
Themselves Safe online afterwards.
What if we started seeing various
inescapable Indian traits as incred-
ibly woke trends? What if refusal to
stand in queues was a landmark pro-
test against global socio-political hei-
rarchies? What if going into swimming
pools in nighties and banians was
actually a statement against body
shaming, the size-zero fad, artificial
trends of corporate-enforced beauty
and the global swimwear mafia? What
if Hyderabad’s Visa Balaji temple and
Jalandhar’s Hawaijahaj (aeroplane)
Gurdwara are massive crowdsourced
public art projects mocking Western
imperialism and anti-immigration
hegemonies worldwide? Did we
invent influencers with our godmen,
blockchain with our dabbawalas,
and search-engine optimization with
our astrologers?
If I were in charge of a history-
rewriting project, I would place
Indians in key moments of history
that would add both great weight and
much authenticity to our ‘Indians
invented everything’ arguments. I
would talk about how Columbus,
upon sailing to find India, actually
found it, but was given wrong
directions at the coast and sent to
America. How Neil Armstrong, upon
landing on the moon, met a group
of lost Indian tourists, who looked
at his lunar vehicle and asked him
how many kilometres it ran per litre.
How years before Copernicus, Indian
astrologers had already mapped the
galaxy in a dosa. How Alexander
accidentally crashed a north-Indian
wedding and decided to go back home
because it was just too crazy—how he
gathered his troops together one last
time, and told them: Тие се вакви
само. They are like this only.