Outlook – July 20, 2019

32 OUTLOOK 22 July 2019

the part-comic Book of Lists, to the inexhausti-

ble catalogues of the US Library of Congress.

Or should that be Borges’s Library of Babel,

which contained: “Everything: the minutely

detailed history of the future...all that is given

to express, in all languages.”

But it’s Google that has come closest to fulfill-

ing that frightening mandate. Forget God, you

can Google yourself. It knows what you did last

summer, where you plan to eat tonight, where

you’re reading this sentence right now. You

have practically outsourced your memory to

the machine, also the “detailed history of your

future”. Imagine, then, a life without Google!

Would bridges collapse and the skies come

crashing down? For those who grew up in the

past two decades, such a life would be well-

nigh inconceivable. But for even those from

the other side of the millennial wedge in time,

it’s becoming a little hard to remember how we

got around with life those days. What

did we do, for instance, when there

was a fork in the road somewhere out

in the country? Duh.... Or needed to

find the nearest Decathlon...oh wait,

there was no Decathlon either. No

FitBit. Before Google, there was

only Govinda.

Okay, back to the thought exper-

iment...you’re the protagonist of

your own work of fiction. It’s

titled ‘Ungoogled’... You are sud-

denly bereft of the whole enchi-

lada, that alarming array of

products from the Page-Brin

stable. Things you take for

granted. That calm, simple

white screen with minimal-

ist design where you track

everything from the

Kapil Sibal

Lawyer and politician

The advent of Google or other internet

search engines has certainly made access

to information much easier than what it

was when people like me started our legal

practice. Of course, before Google, it wasn’t

as if it took lawyers weeks and months to

cull out information for building their argu­

ments in a case. There were other systems

that were in place to source information,

like the SCC journals and research digests.

Particularly for lawyers practising in

the Supreme Court or the high

courts, these digests were of

great help because whatever

precedents or reference mat­

erial we were looking for

was available in them. Since law, unlike

science, is not a universal subject and is

jurisdiction­specific, lawyers did not need to

wait endlessly to get foreign research jour­

nals. In any case, the frequency with which

foreign judgments or foreign law needed to

be quoted was far less then than it is now.

Yes, for trial court judgments, access would

be more difficult, but then we wouldn’t need

these for every case in the higher courts.

The more you read, the more knowledge

you gathered and the richer your arguments

would become. There were many incidents

when we would argue a case based on

certain information that was not easily

available in the public domain and our

arguments would leave our opponents

completely stumped. The same, of course,

would happen to us too. Researching cases

was surely a lot more fun.

For our generation, it required a lot more

investment of time because we had to read

a lot, and then decide what to use for our

case and what to discard. That is not the

case today because young lawyers,

aside from all the tools that were

available to us, also have access

to free­flowing information on

the internet and practically

every judgment, court order

or research material is

available at the click of^

a button. Perhaps, the

pre­Google era made for

better lawyers because

we did not have the

luxury of short cuts. O

(As told to Puneet

Nicholas Yadav)

“Each time

I am in India,

I notice how

quickly it

changes.

India will

keep helping

us build

products for

everyone.”

Sundar Pichai

CEO, Google

COVER STORY

Illustrations by SAAHIL