The Beautiful and the Damned (16 page)

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 academic 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.’

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.

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.