22 July 2019 OUTLOOK 39
means no company. Maps of India has no such
presence.” A whole economy is flourishing on
Google Maps and, if it were to disappear one
day, many businesses would come to standstill.
“Even network hiccups cause us trouble, but
imagine if the main app disappears—we
would have to pack our bags and go back
home,” he adds. Ditto for Zomato, which
tracks orders on Google Maps. Again,
the executive didn’t wish to be
identified. Neither company offered
a formal response.
For all this, interestingly, no one remembers
when they started using Google in India! Even
Google is quite clueless about its usage in
India—although, technically, Google set up its
first office here in December 2004. “Developing
maps was fun in the 1980s-90s,” says Swati
Mitra, executive publisher of Eicher Goodearth
Private Limited, who formerly also headed
Eicher’s map division. “We would travel
hundreds of kilometres and study hundreds of
maps to come out with city guides and maps....
Now one app gives you all that.” Even a decadeDuh, Google
JUMP CUT SATISH PADMANABHAN
Executive editor, OutlookT
HE cab hailing app says Harinder will be there
in three minutes. And he is. He taps his phone
smartly and asks if we shall proceed. I nod. “Go
onn sttrait for ttwo killometers,” the lady in his
phone twangs. Harinder is chatty. “Arre wah, sirji,
what is this gol building?” he asks. It’s the
Parliament. “Ah, even bigger, what’s this?” he
wonders. Rashtrapati Bhawan. Is he new to Delhi, I
ask? “Yes, sirji, came the day before yesterday from
Hoshiarpur. My brother asked me if I want to drive a
taxi. I said why not.”
I would always be filled with envy whenever I saw
the sequence in a Hollywood
film noir when on a rain-
drenched night the hardboiled
gumshoe dodging the hood-
lums would hail a taxi, give a
chit of paper to the driver and
ask him to hurry. In India, it is
unthinkable. First, there will
be no taxi. If you found one, he
would refuse. If all went well,
chances are the cab driver
would ask the chasing hood-
lums for directions when you
gave him the chit with the
address. But Google Maps
takes the cabbie’s ignorance streets ahead. Harinder,
for instance, could be driving in Boston or Bosnia.
“Arre, her professor looks like that American actor,”
says a friend looking at a photo her daughter has sent
from the University of Chicago. “You know, that big
blonde guy who used to boast of dating all the leading
ladies; the one couldn’t act much, but had greatscreen presence?” We look askance. “The one who
was there in the movie about the comic character, it
was partly animation?” she implores us. “There was
Madonna as Breathless Mahoney?” The actors’ name
is on the tip of all our tongues, but nobody can
remember. A Google search would have told us she is
thinking of Warren Beatty and the film she is refer-
ring to is Dick Tracy. But if we don’t Google, like we
did not that balmy evening as it was a ‘phone-off ’ din-
ner, the conversation takes us to other places, to films
made of graphic novels, to Alan Moore’s From Hell,
was the identity of Jack the Ripper ever proven, is it
okay to cheer Lector Hannibal
to escape from prison...
Google kills any conversation
that begins with who was that
who wrote, or sang, acted,
painted, performed, invented,
created, won or lost. The
search engine is Jeeves to the
power of infinity and makes a
woolly-headed Bertie Wooster
of all of us. It takes the juice
out of any discussion where
the mind wanders; it’s like this
abominable cousin who used
to be called a ‘walking
encyclopaedia’—it piles on fact over fact to bury
imagination. It nullifies the experience of age; it dulls
the exuberance of youth. Google is post-debate,
post-curiosity, post-ponder.
An unexamined life if not worth living, Socrates had
quipped long ago. Google is the nemesis of Socrates, it
makes examining too lazy. OGoogle is like this
abominable cousin we
used to call a ‘walking
encyclopaedia’. Piling on
fact over fact to bury
imagination, it nullifies
experience of age, dulls
exuberance of youth.