The Beautiful and the Damned

by Siddhartha Deb

  S.S. and I met up again a few days later to talk about the nanopoems. Although I had suggested we go to one of the cheaper coffee houses he frequented, S.S. insisted on the Barista outlet. He preferred to interact with me on neutral ground, where he would perhaps not have to reveal too much of himself. We sat on a small outdoor deck and looked out at the shoppers parading down Church Street, an occasional working-class man stopping at the liquor store across from us to have a quick shot of Old Monk rum from its pavement counter.

  S.S. had brought me a book, a slim yellow volume with the magnified image of a computer chip on the cover. It was self-published and had the modest title 100 Poems. All the poems included in it were nanopoems, which suggested that at some level S.S. did want readers other than just one engineer at the midpoint of the production cycle. The nanopoems consisted largely of sequences of ones and zeros, although S.S. occasionally used other mathematical signs or letters from the alphabet. They had conventional titles (‘Sunflowers’, ‘In the School Auditorium’, ‘Shooting’ and ‘Binary Porn’) and from the photograph in the book of a nanopoem on a microchip (‘Game’), it seemed that S.S. used similar short titles in his chips.

  Once the novelty of the approach wore off, there was a certain monotony to the binary sequences. Sometimes, they went on and on, as in ‘Fireflies’, which spread across two pages like a virus, and sometimes they were quite short, like ‘Common Centroid Sheep’, which read:

  ABAABAABA

  BABBABBAB

  BABBABBAB

  ABAABAABA

  S.S. said that the numbers in his poems carried a special significance, as did the title 100 Poems. When I said I didn’t understand, he scribbled down the following sequence in my notebook.

  1980

  2 + 0 + 0 + 8 = 1

  2 + 8 = 1

  40 + 0 = 1

  $10 = 1

  Rs 100 = 1

  100 Poems

  It made no sense to me, but the pattern had some kind of numerological significance for S.S. He began to talk about how proud he was of inventing the nanopoem, and that a short piece on this had appeared in The American Scholar. He had been inspired, he said, by a Chilean poet called Raúl Zurita who had written poems in the sky with the help of an aeroplane. S.S. had gone in the other direction from Zurita, choosing to focus on the minute, on what could be read only by an engineer’s cyborgian eye, part human orb and part microscope. The near invisibility of the poems did not mean that S.S. was deliberately seeking anonymity.

  ‘You know how they find pottery shards in archaeological digs?’ he said. ‘The inscription on such a shard might be all we know about an ancient civilization. I sometimes think that the same could happen with one of my chips. Chips get thrown away after they are used. Millions of them. They don’t disintegrate. It is possible that a chip might be all that is left of us, to be discovered by some other civilization that would then find one of my nanopoems on the chip.’

  S.S. had struck me as remarkably polished when I first met him. As he spoke of civilizations and immortality, I felt the same about his world view, running smoothly from ancient Hindu texts through the present to a future where all that was left of human civilization was a chip containing one of his nanopoems. I wondered if there were any edges at all in the plane of his existence, if there was something that would shake up his unsmiling, intelligent and always composed face.

  I asked him if he talked about poetry with his colleagues, or of the world that he tried to capture in his poetry.

  ‘We don’t talk about other things at work,’ he said. ‘We work.’

  I asked him how he felt as an Indian and as a Hindu about the inequalities evident in the country, especially about the hierarchies of caste.

  ‘I don’t disturb the environment,’ he said calmly, ‘and I don’t want it to disturb me.’

  Our session was nearly over and S.S. was getting ready to leave. I lingered on the word ‘environment’, and somehow the image that came to my mind was of millions of chips sitting in the earth somewhere. I didn’t know if chips ever disintegrated, but according to S.S., they didn’t, and so I asked him, ‘What do you think about global warming? Climate change?’

  S.S.’s face finally began to exhibit something like tension and unhappiness. ‘I don’t know what global warming is,’ he said tersely. He listened carefully to my rambling explanation. Then he replied, ‘I haven’t heard of global warming until now and so I do not have an opinion on it.’

  Later that evening, I got a phone call from S.S. He said he would prefer it if I didn’t write about him. I asked him why, feeling certain that he was upset about the questions I had asked him about inequality and global warming. He was indeed perturbed by this. But what worried him even more was the possibility that I wouldn’t give him credit for inventing the nanopoem.

  ‘I don’t want you to write that some person has invented the nanopoem,’ he said, sounding increasingly anguished. ‘I want it to be made clear that I invented the nanopoem. Otherwise, I would prefer it if you didn’t write about me.’

  A few days later, S.S. sent me a long email. It was polite and thoughtful, grappling quite sincerely with the question of the relationship between his poetry and the larger world. He spoke admiringly of Raúl Zurita, the sky-writing poet who had a background in engineering and mathematics and who had identified with the Chilean people oppressed by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. But he also referred to Indian women poets who had written about widowhood and about not wanting to have children, and maintained that these were ‘purely personal choices of individual selves and if it has to be applied to a larger mass of people, it needs to be time tested’. I got the sense, from the email and from our phone conversations, that S.S. was saying his ‘immediate surroundings’ were more peaceful than Zurita’s Chile and that he didn’t have to take an immediate position on social questions. In some ways, he was right. He lived in a democracy, in the relatively peaceful surroundings of Bangalore. If there was turbulence here, it wouldn’t be easily visible to someone like him.

  Yet there was turbulence even in S.S.’s placid life, and that was clear from the rest of the email.

  If you want to portray me as an engineer who writes poetry anonymously, I’m not game for it. Not many engineers in India write poetry and none of them have even attempted to merge one field with another … ‘Nanopoems’ are what I arrived at on my own. There is no second thought or looking back and forth the book about it! When Jerry Pinto wrote an e-novel, he advertised it everywhere with a note that it was India’s first-first ‘e-mail’ novel. My book is not a gimmick and in case you want to discuss anything about my poetry and engineering together in your work, I must be fully credited for it.

  I had asked S.S. why he thought personal credit was so important, given his admiration for the Vedas, whose authors were, after all, anonymous. He had been rather annoyed by this sophistry on my part. He didn’t think the anonymous authorship of the Vedas was relevant to his concerns. Perhaps it wasn’t, but the stridency of his tone in talking about inventing the nanopoem offered a sharp contrast to how measured he was in all other ways. I had struck a nerve somewhere, and if at the beginning of our interaction S.S. had hoped for some publicity, he ended it with the fear that I would indulge in intellectual property theft.

  6

  S.S.’s interests had led him to the chip even when he was being a poet. His was the song of the engineer, communicating not with just any human listener, but with another engineer. His poems appeared in a realm beyond the human eye, hidden, for the most part, inside a computer, and visible, briefly, under a microscope. They were written to function in a dimension beyond human time, speaking to future civilizations.

  I wondered if there were engineers who went in the other direction, towards the human sphere, into the world rather than away from it. There has long been a rhetoric of social change around the IT industry in Bangalore, promoted heavily in the media and in countless best-selling books that assure the reader that a new
technological approach is putting an end to old social inequities. One day, I met up with Sugata Srinivasaraju, the Outlook journalist who covered the IT industry quite extensively, and often in relation to the larger society in which the industry functioned. Srinivasaraju’s take on the issue was far more critical. He spoke of the engineer’s perspective on Bangalore as a combination of the traditional and the modern, as ‘technofeudal’, viewing the city and its environments as a neutral and apolitical space. He said that the IT industry in Bangalore and in India had never acknowledged that its success was built on the infrastructure created by the old Nehruvian state – the engineering colleges with their subsidized fees, the state industries like HAL that created a manufacturing and technical base – and instead indulged in anti-government rhetoric while continuing to depend heavily on the government.

  Srinivasaraju also spoke about how engineering had become a Brahmin occupation. The liberalization of the Indian economy in the early nineties had come directly after affirmative-action policies promised quotas in state jobs for traditionally oppressed castes and tribes. When the upper castes began to fear that they would be shut out of their traditional dominance in the civil services, they began to move en masse to jobs in the private sector, especially in technology. Srinivasaraju’s perception of the upper-caste dominance in the IT industry is supported in studies made by social scientists like Carol Upadhya. She has written, for instance, that the perception of IT jobs as being dependent solely on ‘merit’ is not borne out in empirical surveys. She discovered instead that engineers were ‘largely urban, middle class, and high or middle caste’. As Arvind of A Fuller Life had put it, they possessed a tighter distribution in terms of homogeneity.

  There is also something Brahminical in the very way engineers perceive their work around computers, if by Brahminical one means the idea of exclusive access to knowledge that cannot be shared with commoners. There is no glamour in India, for instance, associated with being a civil engineer, and in this it differs remarkably from countries in the West, where, through the nineteenth and a great part of the twentieth century, the civil engineer has been celebrated for his rugged masculinity, especially in the way he dominates nature by building dams and bridges.

  Today’s Indian middle class, in contrast, celebrates the engineer-entrepreneur who makes money or the engineer-functionary who sits at a workstation. The cubicle is clean, air-conditioned and unpolluted, while the factory is dirty and physical. The cubicle is Brahminical, the factory is Sudra, the realm of the low-caste crafts-person. Seen from this perspective, S.S.’s nanopoems could easily come across as Brahminical, part of a techno-millennial Hinduism where a secret, and sacred, text is passed on from computer engineer to computer engineer.

  Even as Bangalore confirmed this sense of engineering and computers as a Brahminical, inward-looking profession, I kept hearing about one project that had attempted to go in the other direction. It was about a special computer that had aimed to connect the esoteric knowledge of the engineer with the India that existed outside the technology parks, that had attempted to build a bridge between low context and high context. The computer was called the Simputer, or ‘Simple Computer’, and it was a device meant to be cheap, easy to use, and available to every villager. When it was first announced, in 2001, it had been considered one of the best inventions of the year by the New York Times, which spoke of the Simputer as ‘computing as it would have looked if Gandhi had invented it’. The engineer who had tried to make the Gandhi computer was Vijay Chandru, or Dr Chandru.

  I went to see Chandru one evening, taking an auto-rickshaw to the Sadashiva Nagar area at the western end of the city. Chandru’s house was across from the Sankey Tank, a large artificial lake built in the nineteenth century by a British Army official and that now featured prosperous-looking Indians in white sneakers going on their evening walks, each walker followed by a long shadow created by the halogen lamps planted around the perimeter of the lake. The house was separated from the road by a small garden. Chandru wasn’t in when I arrived and his wife, Uma, chatted with me until he came in an hour later from the biotech company he ran.

  Chandru looked tired as he walked in, his grey hair rumpled, his right arm a source of obvious discomfort to him. The stiff arm was the result of a shoot-out in 2005 when a man opened fire on a gathering at the Indian Institute of Science, where Chandru was a professor at the time. The assailant, who escaped after the shooting, was said to be Abu Hamza, a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamist outfit based in Pakistan, and a man who is said to have trained the ten gunmen who carried out an assault in Mumbai in December 2008. One professor was killed in the Bangalore shooting and three people injured, among them Chandru, who was shot in the arm.

  He had become a professor at the IIS in 1992, after spending a decade teaching at Purdue University in the United States. He had completed his PhD in 1982 at MIT, where he had been interested in the intersection of science, technology and the needs of poor people. Among those Chandru had admired while at MIT were Ivan Illich, a European thinker critical of Western modernity who had done much of his work in Puerto Rico and Mexico, and an Indian scientist called Amulya Reddy who had attempted to harness technology for rural Indians, especially in promoting gobar – cow dung – gas as a cheap source of natural energy. Uma, sitting in on our conversation as Chandru offered these details, said that the MIT group had been ‘a Marxist think tank’, but Chandru politely demurred.

  Chandru became increasingly interested in how technology, especially computers, could be made to contribute to the well-being of the poor, illiterate majority in India. In 1998, around the time Bangalore’s technology industry was booming, he took part in an international seminar on bridging the ‘digital divide’. The seminar had been called, in the usual hyperbole of the times, the ‘Global Village’, but it was out of this seminar that the Simputer project emerged. It was imagined as a device that would be ‘simple, inexpensive and multilingual’, a ‘people’s computer’ that would make access to digital information much more egalitarian. As Chandru put it in a paper he wrote later, it was ‘technology with a social conscience’. Three years later, when the first Simputer prototype was made public, it was received especially enthusiastically by the media in India and the West. The Gandhi computer was on its way.

  It is easy, now that the hype has vanished, to look back and see how the Simputer was part of a broader phenomenon that can be called the ‘technofix’. At any given moment in the past twenty years, there has always been some device or technology on the verge of saving the world: the personal computer, email, the Internet, Wi-Fi, the mobile phone, the netbook. But the Simputer belonged to a particularly interesting category, that of the low-cost computer, something attempted – and eventually abandoned – by Intel corporation as well as the non-profit venture One Laptop Per Child initiated by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT. These devices, which specifically addressed cost, were trying to solve the baffling contemporary paradox whereby incredible innovation in technology seems to go hand in hand with an equally incredible inequality.

  If the Simputer was significantly different from all other technofixes, it was in the fact that it hadn’t been thought up in the West, to be engineered there, manufactured in China and shipped to children in Mongolia. It had been birthed in India, a country whose upper layers demonstrated great technological ability but who were presumably closer than a Westerner to the social and economic conditions producing poverty. If there ever was any substance to the claim made time and time again by India’s new techno elite that it could uplift the masses, the Simputer was the device that should have made the claim good.

  The minds behind the Simputer, representing a convergence of academe, business and government, were brilliant. Its development was a joint effort by the Indian Institute of Science, a government institution, and Encore, a software company based in Bangalore. Together, the developers created a non-profit Simputer Trust that consisted of, in Chandru’s words, ‘four people from the acad
emic world and three from the corporate world’. The trust was meant to hold the licence for the Simputer’s design and software, which it would offer to different manufacturers who might want to put the Simputer into mass production. The manufacturers could modify the design but were required to ‘pool back the changes to the trust’ after a one-year head start. The trust also created a sliding scale for the licence fee, charging a one-time amount of $25,000 for companies in developing countries and $250,000 for firms in developed countries. The money from licensing would be put back into research and development.

  The operating system of the Simputer was based on the open source GNU/Linux platform, but application development for it could be done on any platform: ‘Linux, Windows, Solaris, Mac OS.’ In this, Chandru said, he was inspired by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, who had addressed a conference in Bangalore in 1993 on open source software. ‘If you really think about what launched computer science,’ Chandru said, ‘it was UNIX, written in C. What we called Berkeley UNIX became the de facto standard in engineering colleges. If we in India found an entry into computer programming in the West, it was because of our skill in UNIX.’