The Beautiful and the Damned Page 13

  There were a number of ways in which the Simputer was remarkably advanced and innovative. It had a touch-sensitive screen. It also included text-to-speech features in different Indian languages in order to allow non-literate users to operate the system. The device itself was expected to cost just $200, but since even this amount would place it beyond the buying capabilities of most villagers, the developers imagined that people would own just a cheap smart card rather than a Simputer. The smart card would contain the personal data and people would be able to use it on a communally owned Simputer, one for each village. Finally, because electricity is unreliable in rural areas, the Simputer was designed to run both on electric power and on rechargeable AAA batteries. ‘We wanted something small, hand-held and not too imposing,’ Chandru told me. ‘Villagers in India were already familiar with the transistor radio.’ The Simputer was envisaged as something similar, a transistor radio for the twenty-first century. ‘This was the first time a computer was built in India from scratch,’ Chandru said. ‘It even had an indigenous motherboard.’

  There was a packet waiting for Chandru. He opened it as he talked to me. ‘It’s my Simputer,’ he said. ‘I sent it back to be recalibrated.’ He gave me the Simputer to take a look at. It was a grey device, around the size of a smartphone. ‘It was ahead of its time in so many ways,’ Chandru said. ‘You know how everyone’s talking about the Apple iPhone and the motion sensors in it that switch the picture from portrait to landscape view when you tilt the phone?’ I nodded. ‘We developed that for the Simputer. Here, I’ll show you.’ He pulled up a game on the Simputer screen, the kind where you try to guide a series of small balls through a maze into the centre. He gave the Simputer back to me and watched as I played the game, tilting the device to make the balls roll in the right direction. ‘There’s something even more cool you can do with this,’ Chandru said. ‘You can set the sensor to work in an anti-gravity mode. Which means that you change the sensor to pretend that gravity is upwards, not downwards. Now try the game.’ I did, and although I was holding the Simputer the right way up, the balls moved as if they were upside down – gravitational force directed towards the ceiling, as it were. It was fun, and Chandru was pleased that I liked his device.

  Chandru and his colleagues had taken on the engineering challenges with gusto, working in the IIS labs from five in the evening till midnight, with graduate students helping them. At the beginning, they had not tried to raise money from outside sources because they were worried that venture capital would restrict the innovations they wanted to try out. Some of the initial funds came from Encore, some from the money provided by the IIS. The developers built the first ten prototypes in April 2001, which was when the media showed up and showered its superlatives on the project.

  When the prototypes were well received, Chandru said, the seven trustees planned to form a company to manufacture the Simputer, although they also hoped that other companies would buy the licence and manufacture other models of the Simputer. ‘But something awkward happened along the way,’ Chandru said. Encore, the private software partner in the project, had undergone a merger with another company. Then, the merged company went public. The people in Encore who had supported the Simputer no longer had much flexibility in the new company. Chandru, with a few of the trustees, formed a company called PicoPeta to produce the device anyway, but the drift between the original initiators of the Simputer had already started. Then, when PicoPeta went looking for venture capital to produce the Simputer, they failed to get anyone interested.

  It wasn’t incompetence on their part that prevented them from raising funds. Chandru’s biotech firm, which he started in 2000, had no problem getting money, especially from the Indian diaspora in Silicon Valley. But the same diaspora techies weren’t interested in the Simputer. For all the media hype, for all the rhetoric about bridging the digital divide and creating a global village, it wasn’t an appealing project to them.

  ‘There was no history in India of a device built to scale,’ Chandru said, ruminating over the failure. ‘The cellphone was also beginning to take off, and it had so much more value as a retail device.’

  ‘Do you mean people could make profits out of the cellphone but not out of the Simputer?’ I asked. ‘Was that what stopped the venture capitalists from giving money to the Simputer?’

  ‘Yes,’ Chandru said. ‘As engineers, we kind of didn’t guess right. We didn’t guess that cellular technology would take off in India, which, in 2001, had the highest long-distance rates in the world. Maybe we should have anticipated that, maybe we should have packaged the Simputer into a cellphone. We could have, but we ran out of money.’

  PicoPeta tied up with Bharat Electronics, a public sector company, to manufacture the device. The Simputer they turned out could have been much sleeker, Chandru said, but there was no money to be spent on design. Meanwhile, Encore, which also owned the licence on the Simputer, got $200,000 from the Singapore government and manufactured their own Simputer. Between the two companies, fewer than 10,000 units were built.

  By this time, according to Chandru, he had become more interested in his biotech company. The Simputer still remained, in two versions, one being produced by Encore and the other by Amida, a spin-off of PicoPeta, but its applications turned out to be for HAL, so to speak, and for big business. One version of the Simputer is now used by the Indian Army, primarily for its battle tanks. The other version is being refined to be a hand-held credit card reader that can be used in malls and restaurants, for the India on the right side of the digital divide. The Gandhi computer never made it to the villages.

  7

  One afternoon, I went to Chak’s office to talk to him over lunch. It was quiet inside the office complex, the only sound coming from gardeners pruning the hedges outside. The cafeteria was large, with marble floors and a food counter in one corner. It was two in the afternoon and the regular meals of rice and curry were finished, so Chak got vegetable sandwiches and coffee for us. ‘There’s this whole other part of my life we haven’t talked about yet,’ he said as we sat down, ‘the spiritual side of things.’ Chak was part of a ‘meditation group’ called the Sahaj Marg. ‘It’s meditation of the heart,’ he said. ‘We do it together every Sunday morning. You can look it up at sahajmarg.org, the Shri Ram Chandra Mission.’

  When Chak was studying computers at Pilani, he had been an atheist. He had remained one through his early years in the United States, unaffected by the religiosity he saw around him. Then, in 1988, the man who founded Sahaj Marg passed through Illinois. A relative of Chak’s had married the founder’s son, and the founder had taken advantage of the social occasion to hold a spiritual session in Rockford. Chak was derisive about it and did not attend, but his wife went. She was given a booklet about Sahaj Marg with a contact number in New Jersey. It was called ‘The Fruit of the Tree’.

  Shortly after, Chak had to go to New Jersey on work, and he took the booklet with him. It was a long drive, beginning in Rockford, Illinois, with an overnight stop in Pittsburgh and ending in Edison, New Jersey – almost a pilgrimage of industrial America, much of it already declining into the rust belt. When Chak read the booklet during the trip, he found himself laughing at the things it said. Nevertheless, he decided to ‘give it a shot’ when he reached New Jersey, where he called the contact number.

  That was how Chak had found his guru, whom he referred to as ‘the Master’, the word ‘master’ being pronounced with a sharp American accent. ‘You should never read spirituality, but dive into it,’ Chak explained to me in the empty canteen. ‘It took six months to work for me, but once you start fiddling with the transmission, it starts making sense. Then, as we progress in our spirituality, life becomes finer and finer. It’s like starting with crude oil, moving on to becoming kerosene, diesel and petrol, until at the most refined stage, you become aircraft fuel.’

  Chak became increasingly devoted to the teachings of the Master even as things changed around him. He switched jobs, became an American
citizen in 2002 and returned to India. When the 9/11 attacks happened, he was in America and disturbed enough to call the Master in India to ask him for his advice. ‘ “Governments have to do what they have to do, individuals have to follow their core values,” he told me.’

  When I said that this could be interpreted to mean that the American government had to do what it had to do and that the individuals within Al Qaeda should follow their core values, Chak hastened to assure me that the Master unequivocally supported the American government. In the spiritual scheme of things, however, neither terror nor the war on terror mattered. ‘The only thing you can do is towards yourself. You can’t change the world. You can change yourself.’

  I wondered how spirituality could be reconciled with a profession or with possessions like a $1.5 million house. ‘A job or a profession is a purely transactional thing,’ Chak responded. ‘If you have money, if you want a Mercedes car, the Master says, “Go ahead and buy it, but don’t fuss about it. Don’t complicate it.” ’ He explained this further with an anecdote that he told me as we strolled back to the leather armchairs in the lobby. ‘There is a pious king and a pious poor man. God keeps giving the king more and more riches. The poor man has one cow but God makes the cow die. How can this be justified? The poor man is dejected. See, the cow is all that stands between the poor man and God. The king, however, has all these possessions between him and God. He has much further to travel.’

  I wasn’t quite convinced by this, so Chak told me another story to reinforce the point. He had recently sent his two daughters on a trip to the United States. They had wanted to travel on their own, and he was supportive of the idea of their becoming independent. ‘It was one of the things where there was a difference of opinion between me and the Master. “They’re going on their own?” he said when I told him about the plan. He’s slightly conservative in these matters, you see. I thought it was fine, but then they ran into problems. First, they were stuck at the Chicago airport for twelve hours because of a missed connection. Finally, they reached my brother-in-law and his family in Oklahoma. They were sitting on the lawn there, watching fireworks for a Fourth of July celebration, when an insect bit my younger daughter. She went into seizure. She was having a severe allergic reaction and they had to call 911, and an ambulance came and took her.’ Chak paused and held up two fingers. ‘She was this much away from …’

  His daughter was fine now, he reassured me. She had been put on steroids, and she had recovered. I found the story interesting, especially how this conversation about Indian spirituality had become a tour of contemporary America: Rockford, Pittsburgh, New Jersey, 9/11, the Bush government, Al Qaeda, Oklahoma and the Fourth of July. Was the spirituality emanating from these nodes the significant phenomenon, or was it the nodes themselves? Because there was some way in which I didn’t understand the point of Chak’s story, unless it was that anyone could be subject to the vicissitudes of fate. It was, to my mind, the old religious justification, stretching from the Eastern idea of karma to the Western concept of the postlapsarian individual, employed always to argue that people, especially poor people, suffered as a result of past actions, and that they always got what they deserved.

  Chak had been speaking in a relaxed, even tone throughout. When he saw that I was dissatisfied, he leaned forward and gave me the point of the story, closing it like a perfectly solved problem. ‘The trip, you see, wouldn’t have been possible without money. Without money, there would have been no insect in Oklahoma, no seizure, no chance of death. So the Master was right to have his doubts about the trip. The Master was right when he said that it’s people who have the most money who have the most trouble. The Master was right about everything.’

  Chak’s certainty in his spiritual world view was of a piece with the certainties in his life. He had been with the semiconductor company for years, and unless something dramatic happened, he didn’t anticipate changing jobs. His $1.5-million house was around the corner, and he was looking forward to being closer to work when he finally moved in. ‘The company has an open, mature culture that I like very much. That’s another area where I have a disconnect with the Master. He thinks I like the office too much and his attitude is, “You don’t yet get it.” ’ Chak sighed and leaned back. ‘He’s right, you know,’ he said. ‘This is not everything.’

  When Chak socialized with colleagues, it was at events organized by the company, either on campus or at a hotel. People didn’t visit each other at home, nor did they socialize on their own initiative. ‘People don’t do much of the Western thing here, go and get a drink in a nearby pub,’ Chak said, sounding slightly regretful. ‘Everyone commutes in from a different area. As for the weekends, those are completely taken up with my meditation. See, instead of friends, what you get from the satsang is brotherhood. The difference between friendship and brotherhood is like the difference between religion and spirituality. Friendship is a social thing, and it’s exclusive because you choose your friends. You don’t choose your relatives and similarly in the brotherhood of spirituality, you accept everyone. There is no formality, it’s inclusive, you don’t judge them, and you do things for them. If you can.’

  On weekends, apart from meditating, Chak sometimes travelled to give meditation ‘sittings’ for newcomers. He had graduated to being an ‘abhyasi’ – literally meaning a practitioner, but Chak translated it as ‘preceptor’, bringing a little hierarchy into the more neutral Sanskrit word. ‘I will take a train to a small place in northern Karnataka where I don’t know anyone but where someone wants a sitting. I don’t even know the language, so we communicate with gestures.’

  ‘What kind of people?’ I asked.

  ‘All kinds of people. Teachers, workers,’ he said a little vaguely.

  ‘What if the people tell you about problems they have?’

  ‘They sometimes do,’ he said. ‘You listen. You help if you can.’

  ‘Are there other people in your company who belong to the brotherhood?’

  ‘Yes, there are some.’

  ‘Do you talk about spirituality at work?’

  ‘If it happens naturally in the course of the conversation. I don’t bring it up of myself. There was a woman from Admin who found out I did this. I arranged for her and her husband to come for a session. Now they’re part of the brotherhood too.’ Chak looked around at the lobby and smiled. ‘It’s like the movie Men in Black. From the outside, the place looks very normal, just an IT firm.’ He started chuckling. ‘In secret, we do other things. We’re all members of the brotherhood here.’

  8

  Chak’s brotherhood was, in itself, relatively benign. It was no doubt self-involved – navel-gazing, unwilling to look too deep into questions of justice and inequality, but it was clear that its circle was limited. It was one of the many cults in modern India claiming a separation from both low context and high context while depending on the structure and economy of the low context. But there were other gurus who were far more global and powerful than the Master.

  Just outside of Bangalore was the Art of Living Foundation, run by a man called Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. He had been a disciple of the sixties guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who had attracted the Beatles, among others (until that relationship went sour and resulted in the song ‘Sexy Sadie’), but Shankar was a corporate guru, perfectly attuned to the millennium and therefore possessing no hint of the counterculture. He was equally popular among Bangalore’s engineers and among Manhattan socialites, a man who gave lectures to the poor to be happy with their fate, presumably because this kept them closer to God. He was also, in spite of his combination of New Age mumbo-jumbo and management speak, close to militant right-wing Hindu groups that have less interest in spirituality and more interest in violence against minorities, especially Muslims. These right-wing brotherhoods include the Bajrang Dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), and the oldest and most notorious of them all, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), whose origins go back to colonial times, when it modelled itself on M
ussolini’s Blackshirts and the Nazis. It was the RSS that sent an assassin who killed Gandhi in 1948, for which it was banned by the government for one year. The fortunes of the RSS improved vastly from the late eighties, when the organization and its allied groups saw their political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) becoming increasingly popular among the Indian upper classes and running a national government from 1998 to 2004.

  Bangalore, for all its talk of cosmopolitanism and modernity, was part of that loop of right-wing Hinduism. The BJP had emerged as the largest party in the state of Karnataka (of which Bangalore was the capital) in the 2004 state elections. By the time I was there, it would form an unwieldy government in coalition with other parties, and in another year, in 2008, it would win the elections in Karnataka to form a government on its own. There were other Hindu formations in this software city, as evident in the red tilaks smeared on the foreheads of some auto-rickshaw drivers, but my brush with right-wing Hinduism happened, in a particularly Bangalore way, because of the Internet.

  At the beginning of my stay in the city, I had got in touch with many people about engineers they might know. One of them, an acquaintance in Delhi, posted a request about this on an online discussion group. He had told me, in passing, that it was a ‘libertarian’ discussion group, but this was a detail I didn’t give much attention to except to note, in passing, the sheer absurdity of being a libertarian in India. I had forgotten about this posting when, some weeks later, I received an email from a man called Kartik. He had an engineering degree and although he had never worked as an engineer, he would be happy to meet me. ‘I have seen enough of s/w engineers and would be willing to supply dope about them,’ he wrote in the email.