STORIES FOR THE SMARTPHONE AGE
One of my favourite characters in this book is Abdul Wahid, the son of a Kolkata dhabaowner, who learnt English on his smartphone. His teacher is an app, Hello English, and it ranked him number one among 15 million users worldwide in 2015. That app and the smartphone helped transform this 25-year-old into a teacherCEO running a busy coaching centre in Rajasthan (where, ironically, smartphones are banned, as a distraction). In 2016, over a dozen of his students made it into medical schools. His goal is to reform the education system. “There are a million things that can go wrong in India, but there are a billion reasons to keep trying,” he says.
The stories in India Connected paint a colourful picture of contemporary Indian life, every story woven seamlessly with the next. The snapshots from cities, towns and villages make up a collage of an India transformed—for better or, sometimes, worse—by the smartphone and the internet. Of lives that have changed. Of ‘internet saathis’, village women trained to train other women to use the internet. Of those still deprived (the villages that decree: ‘No phones for girls’).
Few authors are able to do the kind of research reflected in this book, but it helped that Ravi Agrawal was CNN’s Delhi bureau chief for three-and-a-half years. Many reports and interviews he did then fed into these stories. He’d report for CNN, often taking notes, and “I’d meet someone like Abdul or Sarvesh where I’d want to do more than just the one-minute TV news clip. Some of them began to develop as book characters”, he says.
Sarvesh is an auto driver and the protagonist for Agrawal’s demonetisation chapter. He loses his income, and even his home, but remains firm in his support for the move by the Narendra Modi government, for, he believes it hurt the rich more—and that any stories to the contrary are “fake news”.
Which is Agrawal’s own favourite story? “My enduring favourite is the story of Simran and Ritesh,” he says.
Simran returns to Delhi with a post-graduate degree from London, and submits to umpteen arranged marriage attempts, often with “sheer morons”. Nothing works out. She moves on to dating apps, with very little success. Woven into her chapter is the story of India’s Tinder, Truly Madly, and a billion-dollar online astrology market. There’s a partly, but not entirely, happy ending.
Agrawal followed some of his characters for months, even years. Simran came to one of his book launches.
He also writes about the 2.3 million applications counted for 368 peons’ jobs in Uttar Pradesh in 2015. A timeless India story. In August 2018, for 62 peons’ jobs in one department of UP police, 50,000 graduates, 28,000 post-graduates and 3,700 PhDs applied.
Most books on India’s tech and telecom boom quickly get dated. The stories in India Connected are timeless, and will age well into nice snapshots of history, from a key period in India’s development—the run-up to a billion smartphones.
The jacket carries tributes from Amitav Ghosh (whose blog carries a full post on the book), Shashi Tharoor and others. The front-cover blurb by Fareed Zakaria says: ‘Quite simply, the best book about India today.’ That’s quite a statement, and I can’t say I disagree. This is the first book in a long time that I’ve read twice over in rapid succession, with a relaxed read on a vacation and flight last week.
The stories in India Connected paint a colourful picture of contemporary Indian life, every story woven seamlessly with the next. The author shadowed some of his characters for months, even years