When the history of India is written a hundred, maybe two hundred years from now, the only ‘Before’ and ‘After’ will be the advent of cheap bandwidth, and self-published content and messaging apps. WhatsApp, Facebook/Instagram videos, and TikTok have transformed our society. And as this goes to press, none of it has been for good.
I’d go so far as to claim that we have the cause and effect reversed. The NDA Hindu Nationalist government and all the social upheaval that came with is not the reason why we have cheap bandwidth, as most bhakts like to harp on. It is the other way around. Cheap bandwidth caused polarisation caused this regime. And they are smart enough to know that this opium, as long as it is in plentiful supply, will keep giving them disproportionate returns on their paltry ‘investment’. The youth will remain addicted and glued to their screens either creating or consuming mindless content as the middle-aged and older generations keep sharing and forwarding bullshit.
Unlike the telecom revolution that leapfrogged us from a rare fixed line to a mobile phone in every hand starting from the late 1980s and the Y2K scare that catapulted the economy and the reputation of this country a quarter-century ago, the cheap bandwidth revolution over the past decade or so has only hastened the inevitable fall of a civilisation that never did bother about fundamentals and foundations, even when these were forced upon us by our early leaders and farsighted representatives back when we achieved hard-won independence.
Or maybe it is too early to tell. Maybe there is some secret redeeming feature of even this curse that we could create a jugaad for to turn into a boon. I don’t know. Only history will tell. But, as I predict, it will record the two eras as distinct from one another, with the two Indias on either side of that line as distinctly different.
