Little niggles in the big country

Or Why India is Steampunk

India is steampunk.

Technology, while revolutionizing many aspects of the country, thrashes jarringly against it in a million different ways. The really old exists with the really new.

Data is being passed through brand-new undersea cables to exotic server farms from a terminal running Windows 98. Cables break when the sewage department digs the ground, cutting off internet access for about a few hundred employees of FAANG companies working from home. People are forced with new technology at a pace they struggle to catch up at best and have mini panic attacks at worst. Scamsters wiggle into this grey zone, luring unsuspecting new technology users and cheating them of valuable life savings. Amidst all this, new Uber drivers, Swiggy delivery guys, and death-defying BlinkIt bikers weave through potholes, drains, and cows, punch OTP into their phones, and wait for the algorithm to tell them what to do. Meanwhile, Ganesh pandals have QR codes, ISRO rockets, and robotic arms. My tenant copies and pastes a ChatGPT-generated message to argue with me about an issue in the house…..

This is a little love letter to the little niggles of Technology across the dusty, bustling, chaotic, and ever-changing streets of the country.

• At the petrol bunk, the little bill printer is stuck. The attendant carefully unspools stuck paper while a queue starts building up. She pushes it back in with all the force of her annoyance — doesn’t work. Patience is beginning to wear thin all around.
• At the same petrol bunk, after the printer is fixed, the next customer presents a credit card (In the land of UPI? Gasp!). There is no card machine in this specific bunk and the attendant wades leisurely to another bunk to borrow the machine. Patience has run out. Honks start. The man who gave the card is being stared down.
• At the A2B snacks counter, the billing is stuck again. But it’s not a printer issue but the system coldly demands a server code — a cryptic query that stands between me and snacks. A conference of snack-counter boys and girls ensues to resolve this new problem.
• At the post office with one counter to serve everyone, the speed post guy is wrestling with another printer — a dot matrix printer from the years when there were four fewer states in India. He unspools, unravels, and reengages the paper. His speed is inspired by the sloth in Zootopia.
• My Mom’s thumb is refusing to be scanned in the Aadhar scanning machine. Naturally, her fingers are blamed and she looks helplessly at her hands telling them they are not keeping up with the new digital India. She steps aside, her hands having been rejected by a machine. The same thing happens to the guy next in line. His fingers are blamed too. How many hands have to be rejected before the machine gets blamed?
• “Server down sir”, says the bank counter guy stifling a yawn. These three words are uttered with such regularity across services that you know what it means, nod and wait for the all-knowing, all-seeing server to wake up and decide to serve.
• “Sir, you have to press ‘delete for me’ in WhatsApp for the photos you shared with me,” shouts the Xerox guy multiple times to a customer. Together they are trying to have the documents that the customer sent for printing deleted since these private ones had been shared with a complete stranger who is doing the Xerox and printing. The customer is confused. “It is ‘delete for everyone’ not ‘delete for me’,” I chip in. I try to move in to help but the customer is suspicious of me looking at his phone. Fair enough. They ignore me and the customer declares that it is deleted. “It is still there for me sir!” shouts the Xerox guy. This standoff will go on for some hours it looks like. Are any WhatsApp product managers noting all this down?
• N is trying to log in to her EPFO portal to access her old employee provident funds. “Your Aadhar is not linked to EPF. Ask your employer to seed the Aadhar number,” declares the portal and refuses to log her in. A quick Google search confidently declares that you can link Aadhar after logging in. This is the Indian system ouroborous devouring the sanity. “Ask your employer to provide the Aadhar,” says the guy at the EPFO office. How do you explain that the said employer was a product of VC-funded excess and has long since closed shop and is now shilling how to live in other countries to people on Twitter to a government employee?
• An irate government employee hits the keys on his keyboard, “Everything is online, madam and this Captcha is full nonsense. I don’t know whether it says I or L or zero or letter O half the time,” he cries as he completes the life certificate process for my mom which is now ‘fully digital’. He is sitting in a BSNL office built in 1970 with peeling walls, rotten wooden doors, and a metal desk that’s rusting.
• My dad inserts his passbook into the automatic passbook printing machine. It prints on top of existing information since the existing information is so light (itself a result of insufficient printer ink the last time). Now the whole thing is completely unreadable and my dad spends a few minutes voicing choice abuses at the unfeeling clunk of a machine.
• N and I sit at a restaurant in Bengaluru where no one comes to get our order. Sighing, I scan the QR code for the menu but all I see is a red box on the screen. After five minutes of increasingly getting worked up, I realize that I am seeing the top left corner 5% of the menu, and that it is a non-responsive page that’s loaded on my phone. Exasperated I complain and am given a menu on printed paper.
• Trying to enter PVR to watch Leo, but the QR of my ticket refuses to be scanned. I brighten the screen, but still nothing. Finally, the PVR entry security makes a note in a notebook and waves me through.
• At Annapoorna, where my dad has been eating nearly his entire lifetime, a new system involves order takers with tablets sending orders to the kitchen. “Keep banana leaf for this plate,” says my dad as he has done for a decade now. “Sir, there is no option for that in this,” says the order taker fiddling with the tablet.
• I walk to the little box shop selling cigarettes and magazines to get myself a Polo. It costs Rs. 5 and I do not have any cash on me. “GPay?” I say squeamishly as the shop owner stares me down, picks up a QR card, and shows me. “Sir, you are ruining the name of Gpay,” he says dead seriously. I can only laugh and agree.

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