Cyber Sutra: The Internet Is for Porn

In the year 2012, a generation ago in digital technology, the person who generated the most internet searches in India was not a cricketer or a Bollywood star. Nor was it a politician or a religious figure. None of them were close. The person most Indians were curious about that year—as measured by the total number of Google searches—was Canadian-Indian Karenjit Kaur Vohra, a.k.a. Sunny Leone, a former porn star and Penthouse Pet of the Year. It wasn’t the case only in 2012. As hundreds of millions of Indians continued to discover the internet through 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and even 2017, Sunny Leone remained the most-searched-for person in India. People simply couldn’t get enough. (Prime Minister Narendra Modi made it to number two in 2014, the year he was elected, but Leone remained the clear favorite.) Prudish, conservative, family-values India . . . and a porn star? Leone was no longer even performing; she had stopped around 2010 and started her own production company with her husband and manager, Daniel Weber. In 2011, she came to India as a guest on the reality TV show Bigg Boss, a local version of the Big Brother franchise. Leone’s appearance was predictably controversial (by design, of course: it was good for the ratings). Although most Indians hadn’t heard of her, it didn’t take long for word to spread: “A porn star—from America—here in India?” At the time, parliamentarian Anurag Thakur complained to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, arguing that Leone’s presence on a nationally telecast program would “have a negative impact on the mindset of children.” Thakur added: “When children see these porn stars on TV and then do a Google search, it shows a vulgar site. It will have a bad impact in the long run.” There were no laws, however, to stop Leone from appearing on TV. While the production of pornography was officially illegal in India, Leone could justifiably argue she was no longer involved in the industry. She was trying to pivot to general entertainment.

Missed Call: The Smartphone and Job Creation

In the summer of 2015, the government of Uttar Pradesh began putting out advertisements looking for “peons”—the local term for low-ranking office helpers. UP, as the state is known, is home to more than 200 million Indians, packed into an area about the size of Texas (which has one-seventh as many inhabitants). Fittingly, UP needed a small army of new peons: in all, 368 jobs were posted. A very strange thing happened next. Applications poured in. After a painstaking survey that took weeks, 2.3 million résumés were counted. There were 6,250 candidates for each available position. Some of the applicants had doctorates. While peon jobs are stable—even respectable—they are by no means glamorous. Peons are usually the first people one sees at Indian government offices, dressed in shabby, faded khaki uniforms; their work involves tracking down dusty files, fetching tea, and ushering in guests. Salaries range from just $150 to $250 a month. The question is why these low-skill, low-paying jobs were in such high demand. There are several possible explanations. First, $250 a month may sound like a pittance, but it is not insignificant: it amounts to nearly double the median national salary. Second, peons are influential gatekeepers in Indian bureaucracy. If you need to see a local officer, a small bribe can go a long way. But workplace corruption is hardly something young, idealistic Indians aspire to (let alone the ones with doctorates). Something deeper was going on. A third possibility is that India simply isn’t creating enough jobs. A 2016 report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) revealed that India’s working-age population expanded by 300 million between 1991 and 2013. But during those same twenty-two years, the UNDP says, the economy created just 140 million new jobs. Put another way, 160 million working-age Indians were without formal employment. Job creation is the number one headache for India’s policymakers. By some estimates, India needs to create a million new jobs every month simply to keep pace with the gush of new entrants to the workforce. There is little evidence that India has a plan to meet this demand.

Google’s Saathi :Women and the Smartphone

As night fell in the tiny hamlet of Nangli Jamawat, a light glowed within one section of a small two-roomed home, like a soft beacon. The house was rectangular, built of brick with gray cement coarsely patted over its surface. Inside the main room were two wooden beds, side by side. On one, two young children were sleeping soundly, neatly curled into cashews. On the other lay Satish, on his back, as his wife, Phoolwati, readied to join him. A cool desert zephyr had seeped under the door and into the room; human warmth was a welcome relief. In a bare corner, on the cement floor, a thin white wire coiled to a rectangular object that was the source of the light. Phoolwati had set her smartphone down to charge. As she lay down, before she could shut her eyes, the rectangle of light faded into a black mirror. Room, home, fields, village became night. Phoolwati had been the first to show her fellow villagers a smartphone. “Want to see a miracle?” she asked a group of women sitting together and tossing rice on wide bamboo sieves, separating the grain from its residual husk. “There’s this new thing called Google—want to see?” “Goo-gull? What’s that, a game?” replied one of the women blandly, bored, barely looking up as she kept tossing grain. Her name was Chameli. “No, no, it’s a really useful thing. It comes on the mobile,” said Phoolwati, pointing to her smartphone. “If you want to learn about the best seeds to plant, you ask this thing. If you want to know how to get government money to build a toilet, you ask Google. It has all the answers in this world.” Chameli stopped to look up at Phoolwati. She raised an eyebrow theatrically, as if to ask: “Don’t you have anything better to do, woman?” Phoolwati was not deterred. “It has the Hanuman Chaleesa also, set to beautiful music,” she tried again, changing tack to matters of the divine. The tossing paused. The name of their chosen deity, the monkey-god Hanuman, made her audience sit up and take note.

Conclusion: The Everything Device

The world changed on January 9, 2007. It was the Macworld trade show in San Francisco, an annual showcase for Apple products, and founder Steve Jobs was about to introduce a new gadget. “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” announced Jobs. The Macworld audience had a Pavlovian expectation for something game-changing that day. In 1984 Apple introduced the Macintosh, which went on to transform computing and make the mouse a mainstream accessory. Then in 2001, the iPod arrived. “It didn’t just change the way we all listened to music. It changed the entire music industry,” Jobs reminded his audience. (This was no exaggeration. When Apple began offering individual songs for ninety-nine cents on its iTunes store, the era of record companies selling entire albums was shattered.) “Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products. The first one is a wide-screen iPod with touch controls.” Jobs paused for dramatic effect. On cue, the audience broke into hearty applause. “The second,” continued Jobs, “is a revolutionary mobile phone.” This time, before he could pause, cheers rang out—with a louder, prolonged burst of clapping. Apple had never manufactured a phone before. “And the third,” he went on, as a big screen behind him mirrored his words, “is a breakthrough internet communications device.” A whoop, followed by a polite round of clapping; by now the audience was a bit confused at the deluge of new products. Jobs let his words hang in the air, teasing the crowd as it waited in anticipation. “So, three things,” he recapped, as the screen behind him showed three Apple icons representing an iPod, a phone, and the internet. “A wide-screen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device.” Silence. “An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator,” Jobs repeated, as the screen displayed each of those icons in the center, flipping to reveal the next one. The animations behind Jobs had been carefully choreographed to match his words.

Introduction:The Magic Device

In the dusty northwestern state of Rajasthan, Phoolwati was visiting a neighboring village on business. She was addressing a small circle of women dressed in sarees. Together, they formed a kaleidoscope of reds, yellows, and pinks. The colors parted obediently when an older woman, in white, pushed her way through the huddle. “What’s going on here?” bellowed the wizened old lady, speaking the rustic Hindi of the region. She pointed at the wiry newcomer, the hub of the commotion. “Who’s this?” All eyes turned to Phoolwati. “I’m here to teach the village women about the internet,” she said, as she thrust her hand out, revealing a phone with a large screen of images and text. She encountered a blank stare. “In-ter-nate,” tried Phoolwati once again, spelling it out phonetically in Hindi. “It’s a wonderful thing. You can get all kinds of information and knowledge on it.” The old lady snorted in disdain. “We’re all illiterate here, child,” she said. “Why are you wasting our time?” This was a familiar refrain to Phoolwati’s internet evangelism. She was prepared. “Who says you need to read and write to use the internet? Who says you need to know English?” demanded Phoolwati. “This is a magic device. See?” She held up her smartphone and pressed a button. The image of a microphone popped up on the screen. (This might have been more effective had the village women seen a microphone before.) “Go on. Ask it something,” Phoolwati told them. “Kuchh bhi. Anything. This has all the answers! You must be curious about something, na?” The old lady looked on incredulously. She slapped the top of her forehead in an exaggerated show of despair. Another woman had seen a city cousin toying with a smartphone once. She felt emboldened in the presence of Phoolwati’s gadget. “Show us the Taj Mahal!” she exclaimed loudly in Hindi. To instantly summon an image of the country’s most famous monument—one that none of them had ever seen—seemed an insurmountable challenge. But Google understood. The phone came alive; a video appeared on the screen. Phoolwati pressed Play.

Big Brothers: Internet Shutdowns and Internet.org

The rat-a-tat of automatic gunfire burst through the morning air in Anantnag. For the locals of this troubled district in the south of Kashmir, it came as a shock but no longer a surprise. Separatist militants had once again clashed with army forces. Several civilians were caught in the crossfire. One died; three others were wounded. It was Saturday, July 1, 2017. Hours earlier, at midnight, India had adopted a new national sales tax, designed to stitch the country’s twentynine states together into one economic union. The new system—known as the Goods and Services Tax, or GST—was heralded as an economic reform that would spur growth, enlarge the tax base, and make it easier to do business. Kashmir was the only state still debating whether to join. It was a symbolic outlier. Some distance from the gunfire, sixteen-year-old Zeyan Shafiq was just waking up. He hadn’t heard the shooting; his home was well insulated. When he opened his eyes, he told me, the first thing he did was to reach for his iPhone. He looked at the screen and sighed. The wireless internet at home was down. So was mobile data. Shafiq got out of bed, put on his slippers, and shuffled toward the front door, where he knew he would have a stronger mobile signal. No luck. He couldn’t catch the internet. Shafiq looked up at the skies, opened his lungs, and let out a bellow of frustration. For Shafiq, it was easy to guess what had happened. There must have been what locals called an encounter—a skirmish between Kashmiri separatists and the state. These days, encounters were inevitably followed by the government shutting down the internet. The digital blackouts weren’t aimed at stopping separatists or terrorists from communicating. They were usually already dead. The shutdowns were to prevent people from sharing videos and photos of the violence on social media. In effect, 13 million Kashmiris were collateral damage, unable to do something as simple as check email. There was a time when curfews were merely physical, imposed with barbed wire, barriers, and troops on the streets.

Hello Macaulay: Fixing Education

“My business is simple,” said Abdul Wahid. “I . . . I . . . P.” He paused. I waited. “Is . . . It . . . Possible.” As he said the words, Abdul Wahid drew in the air a grand billboard for his tutoring company. He paused once again for effect. “Is what possible?” I asked, finally. “Anything. Everything.” And then he added: “It is a cun-sept.” Abdul Wahid was very fond of concepts. Abdul—as he insisted I call him—was the son of a small dhaba owner in Kolkata. Ambitious, he didn’t want to run a loss-making, hole-in-the-wall restaurant like his father, dishing out dal-roti-sabzi to customers who were rude and never tipped. He didn’t want to do the same things every single day. Abdul wanted more. He wanted to be his own man. An entrepreneur. He had dreams that went beyond his father’s street. With the help of his smartphone, Abdul had turned himself into an English-speaking teacher-CEO. And now, with his tutoring company IIP, he wanted to transform education in India. Still, it was clear to me that the past clung to Abdul. He was only twenty-five, but he dressed like a much older man, in a crisply starched white shirt and pleated dark khakis. His eyes were almost comically enlarged by his old-fashioned rimless spectacles. When he moved, he gave off a faint aroma of cardamom; he carried pods in his trouser pocket, just as his father and his grandfather before him. Abdul had a vision for tutoring in India. “I want to make education like a gaming platform. Indian teachers think in 2-D. I want to make it like a planetarium experience. I want kids to see and feel projectile motion. Is it possible? Yes, it is.” Money was scarce in Abdul’s childhood. Back then, his dreams were dull, black-and-white, 2-D, standard definition 4-by-3. His father sent him away to a boarding school in a town in neighboring Bihar. Abdul found the system of rote learning a bore; his teachers were disinterested, playing truant more than he did.

The Great Indian Currency Scramble: Digital Money

An hour before dawn on November 8, 2016—a Tuesday—Sarvesh Kumar woke abruptly from what had been restless sleep. As he propped himself up on his charpoy, he told me, his eyes adjusted to the darkness of his tiny room, tucked away in a slum near New Delhi’s prosperous Vasant Kunj neighborhood. It was, he recalls, pitch black. Kumar’s inability to see enhanced his other senses. His ears picked up a chorus of mournful howls from the stray dogs roaming the streets some distance away. A few seconds later, he began to take account of a gentle rumble of snoring. Bandhana, his wife, was still asleep beside him. The next stimulation to hit him, he said, was that of smell: they had saved leftovers from dinner in a small dish, placed on the floor in one corner of the bedroom. (There was no kitchen, no fridge, no cupboards.) The smell of stale dal and starchy rice lingered in the air, mingling with the stench of urine from the latrine right outside. The apartment’s only toilet had no working flush, just a mug and a bucket with which to pour water. At night, Kumar’s father—who slept in the next room—would get up to urinate in the dark, sitting on his haunches and peeing all over the cramped toilet floor. Kumar was only twenty-two years old but looked much older. He was developing a hunch. His gray shirt and trousers—both made of the same rough, fraying cotton—seemed to fall over his limbs like oversized bags. Life was wearing him down. Kumar was working sixteen-hour shifts driving a three-wheeled auto-rickshaw, seven days a week. Ever since he had gotten married and brought Bandhana to join him in the city, his expenses had ballooned. His father, meanwhile, was working less and less, his health and eyesight beginning to fail him. Asha Ram Kumar worked as a chauffeur for a family nearby in Vasant Kunj. He had recently bumped their car into a lamppost. Any day now, Kumar told me, his father would lose his job.

India’s iGen : Growing Up with Nomophobia

Sometime in the middle of May in 2017—at the height of summer in India—a grainy mobile phone video began to make its way across the country. The recording rocketed from phone to phone, first in the eastern state of Jharkhand and then nationally, circulating among groups on WhatsApp. The video was shot in portrait, showing a man beaten and bloodied, crumpled up on a patch of barren earth. His white undershirt was rolled up to his chest and drenched in blood. Encircling him was a small mob of men armed with cane sticks. Several appeared to be filming the proceedings on their phones. “You son of a bitch,” someone screamed. “Motherfucker! We’ll kill you!” A cacophony of abuse was under way. The man was pleading for his life, but his cries were drowned out by a rising tide of expletives and fury. The mob continued to beat the man. The video cut to black. The subject, Sheikh Haleem, was killed. He was only twenty-eight. Six others were killed as well, across two separate vigilante attacks. It was as if a cloud of rage had suddenly descended on a small part of Jharkhand, propelling village men to embark on extrajudicial murder sprees. It turned out that a rumor had spread that a group of strangers was abducting children from nearby villages. The rumor made its way onto WhatsApp; the rumor morphed into “news”; the news, circulating from phone to phone, villager to villager, was weaponized; a group of locals decided to act. The rest happened very quickly. A mob was formed. Strangers were produced, beaten up, and murdered. Justice was delivered. The recordings of the killings were duly sent back out into the ether of WhatsApp, completing the cycle of horror. Jharkhand’s police were befuddled. There had been no reported cases of child abductions. The rumor was completely unfounded. “Rumors have always flourished in India,” says Pratik Sinha, the founder of a myth-busting website, AltNews.in. “But it’s become exponentially dangerous because of the internet.”

Lord Kāmadeva’s Digital Bow: Dating and Marriage

When simran arora returned to New Delhi from London, master’s degree in hand, her parents welcomed her with an enough-is-enough ultimatum: she was twenty-six, and it was time to settle down with a good Punjabi boy of their choosing. “I said sure, why not,” recounted Simran, four years older (and wiser, as I was to find out). “If the guy is Mr. Right, who cares if it’s an arranged marriage?” Simran isn’t her real name. She asked me to keep her identity secret because she didn’t want her family and friends to learn the details she was about to tell me. “It’s a complicated, messy, crazy story,” she warned me. Simran’s willingness to be matched by her parents was not unusual. The 2012 India Human Development Survey found that a mere 5 percent of women picked their own husbands; 22 percent made their choices along with their parents or other relatives, and 73 percent had their spouses picked for them with no active say. When marriages are “arranged,” parents usually filter candidates based on compatibilities of caste, class, and family. In many cases, the stars must be aligned—quite literally—as astrological charts are matched to ensure a future of marital harmony. Not everyone follows convention. A small but growing number of Indians, mostly young urban professionals, dismiss the prospect of being set up. Their alternative is the curiously named “love marriage”—a union that implies not only the serendipity of falling for someone but also a proactive, defiant choice. Adding the prefix “love” attaches a hint of illicit romance to what is known in most other parts of the world as, simply, marriage. The choice isn’t always binary. Sometimes unions nestle between “arranged” and “love.” There is, for example, the increasingly common “arranged-to-love” approach, where old-school-but-liberal parents allow a family-matched couple to go on several dates in the hope of Cupid doing his thing. (Incidentally, Indians have their own version of the Greek god: the Lord Kāmadeva is often depicted as a handsome man with green skin, wielding a sugarcane bow with a bowstring of honeybees.