I was watching a show sometime in 2021 titled “Never Have I Ever”. It was about the experiences of a South Indian girl ‘Devi’ growing up in the US, trying to fit in amongst her peers even while experiencing so many different feelings in different situations, some of which she was way too young to be even dealing with. She wasn’t a traditional Indian girl in any sense of the word, didn’t relate to any of the customs or traditions, and felt like an outcast in both worlds: the one she was born in, and the one she was growing up in. The irony is that I, living in an Indian village, could relate to some of the things she was going through. As an agnostic atheist living in a society of deeply religious people, I could relate to the feeling of being a social pariah of sorts. Even though I was deeply religious growing up, I can’t stand some of the customs and beliefs of most religions now. But never mind, this isn’t about that. Devi in the show was cool with the Gods, she even prayed to them for different things. She had other problems, like family, and boys. She was cool. Weird, and imperfect, but cool.
But this isn’t an appreciation post about the show. Most parts of the show were good, some were a bit cringy. But the soundtracks used in that show were awesome. It had been some time since I was enamoured by the background music or tracks of a TV show. And one of the songs that I fell in love with, was the song “Heat Waves”. So naturally, I went over to YouTube and checked it out. It was by the artist named “Glass Animals” and it was catchy. But what caught my eye, was the video and the artist’s description of the process of the shooting of that video, which basically was done by his neighbours in East London during the lockdown, using their phones. That really fascinated me. Because I was watching in a remote part of India, a video that I first saw in a show made in the US about an Indian girl, made by an artist living in London, which was shot in tiny little things, by people in his neighbourhood, who at the time were almost forbidden to go near him. This really blew my mind.
It is no secret that we as a species today take so many things for granted. How interconnected we all are, is one of them. We can travel to most places in the world. We can talk to anyone with an internet connection anywhere in the world, at any given point of time. But just 200 years back, people lived in silos. They rarely travelled to any other country or talked to anyone from another country. Most people mostly lived out their lives in their villages or towns. And even just 30 years back, for a large portion of the world, interacting with someone on the other end of the world was a pipedream. but in the last 20-odd years, the internet boom has connected us like anything. I have talked to, video-called and chatted with people all over the world, through a tiny little device, living in a part of the world that most maps won’t be able to properly show. The notion of not being able to connect to the internet is terrifying today, and I don’t think we sometimes appreciate how amazing that is.
Every other day, we would see videos on the internet about how bad the internet can be. And I agree, it can be a very bad place. Misinformation can spread like wildfire, people can fall in bad company and destroy their lives and more. And as we are still in the nascent stage of this worldwide sensation, we don’t know how to properly control it, even while enjoying all the benefits it provides. And it does provide a lot of benefits. It is in fact life-changing for a lot of people. In all the talk about how bad it can be, we don’t appreciate how good it is. The repository of knowledge that rests on our fingertips, is larger than any library in the world. Anything you want to know, anyone you want to connect to, is just a click away. And we should never forget how amazing this is. Because for 99.99% of human existence, this was an impossible proposition.
I believe that over time, we will learn more about and get better at, managing the internet and people’s activity on it. The Internet can be a force of both good and evil. It can provide education, but it can also provide access to nefarious drugs. It can be used for nation-building, but it can also be a heaven for terror financing. It is our intention that makes all the difference. Human ingenuity knows no bounds, and I am quite sure that we will find solutions to the problems that the internet is causing right now or will cause in the future(or rather we will cause using it). But even while finding solutions to its problems, it would be mendacious on our part not to marvel at what it has made us able to do as a specie. How it has taken sequestered pockets scattered across time and space and has intertwined them in a deep weave of the web. And how it has given us the ability to access all of this, at our fingertips.
SRD
The Quest for Essence 