When the Towers Rose

It has been the lot of a certain section of my generation in India to be the witness of a great many revolutions. I could extend this to millennials globally, but nowhere has this been more pronounced than among Indians born in the 1990s. These individuals, now in their late twenties to mid-thirties, form the bulk of the country’s working professionals. 

The first of these upheavals was the economic liberalisation and globalisation of 1991 (which I have written extensively about in several of my other pieces), without which our childhoods would have looked very different. Next came the data revolution of 2016, driven, in large part, by a company called Reliance Jio, which was the first to offer free and unlimited high-speed data at scale. The third, still unfolding, is the AI revolution, which began reshaping professions and lived realities around 2023.

Needless to say, our values were impacted drastically by each of these revolutions. I shall proceed to explain how. The first of these revolutions brought with it refrigerators, cars, computers, internet, ovens, vacuum cleaners and washing machines into the houses we were growing up, not to mention, a whole host of movies, tv series, news of global events, unfamiliar value systems and all manner of newfangled ideas that took root in the minds of the young. The shutters of shops rattled open to new goods: bright cans with foreign names, strange biscuits wrapped in silver foil, televisions flickering with voices that spoke in strange accents. Children pressed their noses to the glass, and fathers brought home machines that whirred and clicked, promising easier days. But beneath the laughter at the dinner table was the grimness of men who knew that the old world was slipping, and the new one was not waiting for them to catch up.

The second revolution was particularly instrumental in shaping my own career as well as that of several others I know. Free and unlimited data meant that anyone, anywhere, even in a remote corner of India, could access the internet. Admittedly, it took time for the benefits to reach every part of the country. There were snags too, for instance, by the time 3G towers were erected in several little towns and villages, 4G technology had already made its entrance and made the freshly laid infrastructure obsolete. Still, this revolution opened vast new markets for companies and created opportunities for products that had never before reached such wide audiences.

In the small towns, the towers rose like iron trees, their red lights blinking in the dusk. Boys with second-hand phones saw, for the first time, moving faces from far-off lands. In little homes, fathers frowned at their sons glued to screens showing YouTube videos, and mothers shook their heads, but the children laughed, for a whole world had opened in their palms. And the hum of the data lines was not just a sound of progress, but of hunger for what lay beyond the fields they knew.

This was also the year (2016) when I began to earn my own money. I worked in the Edtech sector, which benefited enormously from the sudden explosion of internet access. What was once a product meant for middle- or upper-class customers with personal computers now became available to anyone with a smartphone. Mobile apps of every kind flooded the market. Those of us who entered the sector at this crucial juncture enjoyed a first-mover advantage that would never again be available to entrepreneurs who arrived late to the party, or to workers who only later realised the sector’s potential.

I will not dwell much on the pandemic years, for the reader already knows the impact of school closures on online education. Despite the surge in demand, I would not call this period a “revolution”. For me, the benchmark of 2016–17 remained unmatched, even in comparison to the pandemic’s aftermath.

Then came the machines that could speak back. At first, they answered like schoolchildren, fumbling and uncertain. But soon their voices grew smoother, quicker, more certain than our own. In offices and bedrooms, people stared at the words unfolding on their screens, half in wonder, half in fear. Teachers felt the ground slip beneath their feet, writers clenched their jaws, and clerks wondered if tomorrow the machines would take the pen from their hands.

Although its roots stretch years back, AI only began to be taken seriously as a mainstream tool around 2023. There are all kinds of stances people take when it comes to artificial intelligence. Some swear it off entirely, unwilling to profit from what they see as the death of human creativity. I have some respect for these purists. However, I also believe that AI, like other technological tools, has the potential to be useful in some contexts and disastrous in others. I call upon discretion. I also believe that if one is unwilling to learn to apply AI in a manner that it is subordinated to human ends, one runs a greater risk of being replaced by it.

What happens when one’s source of livelihood collapses overnight? We have already seen examples. Chegg, once a dominant player in the online learning and textbook solutions market, saw its stock value plummet by over 90% after openly admitting that ChatGPT was eating into its core business. An entire generation of tutors and freelancers who had relied on platforms like Chegg suddenly found themselves struggling for relevance. This is the peril (and the promise) of technological upheaval.

In Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, Rhett Butler once said that there were two times to make big money: one when a civilisation was being built, and one when it was being dismantled. Several of us who chose to stake our futures on the destiny of a developing nation like India can testify to the truth of these words. 

I have friends who live abroad, and we often find ourselves debating the pros and cons of having left versus having stayed. The option of leaving, of chasing foreign lands and foreign gold, has been a perennial temptation across history. It has been rewarding to many who took the risk to uproot themselves from everything they knew to make their way to gather breadcrumbs from richer tables, tables that were built and laid by others, tables that could uninvite them on a whim. So unpredictable in its rewards and costs can such a risk be, that it is often forgotten that the opposite, that is, to stay in an imperfect, upcoming land where one was born, is also a risk of equal measure. Those of us who did stay have been well rewarded: we have helped build this civilisation from the ground up, through the companies we set up, the people we trained, and the money we invested in India’s grand development projects. We gave what little we had to our country, and it has returned our contributions to us, many times over. 

“I told you once before that there were two times for making big money, one in the up-building of a country and the other in its destruction. Slow money on the up-building, fast money in the crack-up. Remember my words. Perhaps they may be of use to you some day.”
- Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind.

Image source: The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai.