How a smartphone changes our modes of thinking, rearranges our priorities
The technology paradox has been that while it has helped transform lives at an individual level, at a collective level it has strengthened the forces of the past, and that too in a shallow way
Santosh Desai's latest book ‘Memes for Mummyji: Making Sense of Post-Smartphone India’ delves into the realm of the trivial
Unlock Exclusive Insights with The Tribune Premium
Take your experience further with Premium access. Thought-provoking Opinions, Expert Analysis, In-depth Insights and other Member Only Benefits
Advertisement
Santosh Desai is regarded as one of India’s leading social commentators. A columnist and a founder at Think9 Consumer Technologies, he is the author of two books on contemporary India, ‘Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India’ (2010), and, more recently, ‘Memes for Mummyji: Making Sense of Post-Smartphone India’ (2025). Desai has been described as “the nearest thing we have to RK Laxman in prose” as well as “the prose laureate of India’s hybrid modernity”. Siddharth Pandey speaks to him on the occasion of the launch of his second book.
SP: While it is tempting to regard your recent work as a sequel to your previous one, I am more inclined to treat them as companion volumes on the contemporary Indian moment. In the Introduction of ‘Memes for Mummyji’, you provocatively write that if your earlier book “tried to understand India through the lens of tradition adapting to modernity”, then here you explore “what happens when that very modernity becomes tradition”. What role does the titular ‘smartphone’ play in effecting this transition?
SD: I think the smartphone is instrumental in enabling this change. Technology has the ability to transform society noiselessly, because it does not appear to be an instrument of culture. But it changes our modes of thinking, it rearranges our priorities, it gives us a voice while implicitly guiding us as to how it can be used, it modifies ideas of the private and public — essentially it has reordered our life. Interestingly, it has still managed to confirm rather than reject our way of life.
SP: I remember a teacher observing long ago that since the contemporary is always in the throes of change, it is also difficult to be made sense of. You deploy the form of the short essay to navigate these changes. Could you speak a bit on the pleasures and challenges of thinking through this form that necessitates both precision and complexity at the same time?
SD: I completely agree with the teacher — making sense of change as it occurs is not only difficult but apt to be misleading because the shape of change becomes clear only retrospectively. The short-form column then needs to be seen as a pixel of change. Its strength is that is places value on the trivial, and if one is lucky enough, a shape appears through the totality of work. But that does mean that there are times when what seems significant in the here and now reveals itself to be a passing sidelight and on other occasions, what one ignores turns out to be significant.
Writing a column helps one to always live in the now; that is both a pleasure and a problem.
SP: It isn’t often that one comes across a social commentator of your depth and wide-ranging interests. This is true not only of the academia but also the corporate world, which you inhabit. How does your professional life rooted in a milieu of brands and businesses inform your writing, and do you see any conflict emerging out of this grounding and your palpably ethical orientation towards the world at large?
SD: I think I was lucky to enter the world of brands and marketing when I did. It was in 1985, when India had just walked its first tentative steps in reforming the economy. One had willy-nilly to perform the role of being cultural interpreters — decoding India for international brands and doing the same for their brands for an Indian one. The good thing about advertising is that while on the surface it is about products, in reality it is about human needs at a collective level.
In a certain sense, nothing is out of the syllabus in advertising. Also, the mental model of brands that I developed saw them as cultural artefacts first, and marketing instruments later. This meant that understanding how India thinks and feels became a central pursuit over the years. And the thing about trying to understanding India (which is a doomed project in any case) is that it cannot be understood piecemeal. You have to try and understand all of it.
I didn’t really feel a strong ethical conflict. I believe that advertising is a lie that tells a truth — it speaks to us as we are, and not as we pretend to be. We are vain, we like to show off, we envy others, we want to prove that we are better than our peers. And we buy things because of all these reasons — and that is a human truth. If we didn’t, market economies would not work.
SP: One defining feature of your writing is its sheer versatility, to the extent that you routinely find something fresh to say about everything from the ostensibly mundane to the overtly political. Could you give us a peep into the process of your selection of topics, and how you flesh them out (individually or simultaneously?)
SD: The selection of topics is what I struggle with most. Because a topic becomes a topic only when I feel I have a slant on it which feels fresh to me. If I don’t have a perspective on a pressing current issue which feels original — one where I think I have seen it in a way that explains something to me — then I don’t write about it. In most cases, something becomes a topic only when I have been thinking about a subject.
Most often, I am thinking about some things and I go — I could write about that. It does happen the other way round, when say someone significant dies — when one searches for what one could say about a given subject, but that is less frequent.
SP: Building on the previous question, apart from reading your thoughts on power, politics and the personal everyday, I have also enjoyed your robust speculations on architecture, space and nature, often in an interconnected manner. For example, while in your first book, you have a whole essay on the poetry of windows, in your second you write movingly about the openness of terraces, now swiftly disappearing. How do you manage this shift between the inside and the outside, so that nothing feels too trivial to be commented upon?
SD: It starts with the firm belief that nothing is too trivial to think about. The trivial is simply a truth we have got used to. I feel that most insights come from rattling the cage of the trivial. Just because something feels unimportant does not mean that it is insignificant. So from my perspective to write about the future of a post-AI humanity one week and the power of the nada (drawstring) the next feels perfectly natural.
SP: It is common for column-writing to deploy sarcasm, scepticism and satire to marshal a point of view. And while traces of these can also be cited in your writing, what sets it apart is a kind of unique warmth and a child-like curiosity that doesn’t shade into sentimentality. How have you trained yourself into furnishing such an orientation, that also retains its critical edge at the same time?
SD: I think again advertising has something to do with this. One needs to have respect for the consumer, to acknowledge their humanity and to give credence to their worldview. There is a strong need to separate oneself from the subject one is writing on, to respect the many shades of opinion that might surround it without necessarily agreeing with them. In any case, my focus is to make sense of the world. I do not believe that I have either the power or the great desire to change it. There are many other people who do that, and do that well. I can admire them without trying to become one of them.
SP: While Cambridge Dictionary chose ‘parasocial’ as its word of the year, Oxford University Press settled on ‘rage bait’. Your book, without alluding to these words, speaks to both ideas. What does this say about the contemporary moment, especially in an Indian context?
SD: It tells us how the primary arena of our lives is becoming virtual. We enact our emotions online, and craft our personae there. Its implicit codes govern our behaviour — for instance, the possibility of relentless self-presentation and its infinite consumption gives rise to the parasocial while the combination of everyone becoming a broadcaster and being able to do anonymously enables rage-baiting.
SP: And finally, I found it quite revealing that if in your previous work, one of your last chapters was titled ‘Media Smoke and Mirrors’, then here you have the penultimate chapter titled ‘Outrage/Media’ (followed by a chapter on righteous belonging), almost as if the two words have become synonymous. Despite observing in the beginning that your book is neither a celebration nor a lament but a “series of attempts to notice the ordinary”, I sense an acknowledgement of a deeply troublesome, fractured and disconnected zeitgeist overwhelming us towards your conclusion. Would this amount to a realistic pessimism on your part?
SD: Noticing the ordinary does not provide immunity against pessimism. I worry about how Indian society desires progress but resists fundamental change. The technology paradox has been that while it has helped transform lives at an individual level, at a collective level it has strengthened the forces of the past, and that too in a shallow way. As a result, the Indian story today is a combination of a surface change that is visible that flounders against a deep-seated refusal to allow institutional change.
The problem today is that our soft infrastructure shows no sign of improving — formal institutions have been compromised over the years, hierarchy continues to govern everyday behaviour, social trust is eroding, and corruption has become a necessary part of life. Politics which was meant to transform society has been irredeemably transformed by it.
— Siddharth Pandey is a historian, cultural critic and artist from Shimla.
Advertisement
Advertisement