By The Way

There is a hope built into the idea of mobility, that getting somewhere else might change something. But for a large part of the world, mobility is not a real option. The will is there. What is missing is the freedom to act on it, and the access to make it possible. Start with the most basic of things. Physical movement within your own city, to work, to study, to just exist freely, is still a struggle for most people in the global south. Public transport is often unreliable or does not exist at all. What does exist tends to be overcrowded, underfunded, and unsafe. In many Indian cities, even something as ordinary as taking a bus or walking to the nearest train station involves a fair amount of luck, patience, and personal risk. Infrastructure fails, and so does everything tied to it. If your ability to reach a college, a job, or a hospital depends on a crumbling system, then your life is already running into walls before it has a chance to move forward. This kind of immobility shapes e...

Some books lose their relevance with time. 1984 did not. It aged differently. The world Orwell imagined was based on the politics of his own era, fascism, Stalinism, war, surveillance. And yet, it is hard to shake the feeling that his outline still lingers somewhere beneath the surface of the present. Not in an obvious way though. We don’t live in Oceania. There is no Big Brother on the wall. But parts of that world feel disturbingly close, in what we are slowly becoming accustomed to. Publicity photo on the set of the CBS anthology television series Studio One. This was a presentation of George Orwell's 1984. Orwell’s idea of surveillance was heavy-handed. Constant monitoring, screens that watched as much as they showed, the sense that you were never really alone. That’s not how it looks today. Surveillance now is quieter. It is not imposed, rather it’s accepted and volunteered for. Devices track everything from steps to speech to sleep. Apps watch us with a precision Orwell could...