The hidden complexities of daily life

From stories about Indian cricket to undersea cables that bring us the internet, a collection of essays uncovers the hidden systems and unseen connections that shape our interconnected lives

The Web Beneath the Waves: And Other Reports from Our Tangled World

by Samanth Subramanian

Published by Context/Westland Books

321 pages ₹799

 

London-based journalist Samanth Subramanian’s new collection of wide-ranging essays brings together 15 years of his award-winning reportage. Spanning politics, conflict, science, technology, sport, language and culture, the essays draw on deeply researched stories from across continents. Capturing the complexities and interconnectedness of the modern world, the book uncovers the hidden systems, overlooked narratives and unseen connections that shape our interconnected lives.

 

From stories about Indian cricket, the Sri Lankan civil war, Nigerian Jews, Singapore’s land reclamation, a radical Indonesian artists’ collective, India’s quizzing culture, corruption, privilege, disappearing languages, scientific discovery to the invisible network of undersea cables that powers the internet, the essays in the book are randomly arranged, and not in any chronological order; further, they are diverse in scope and subject, and not united by any particular theme.

 

 

In 1967, a 19-minute black-and-white documentary called I Am 20 explored how young Indians felt about their 20-year-old country. It had filmmaker S N S Sastry interrogating a host of 20-year olds about their fledgling nation. Interestingly, the outcome comprised thoughts and worries that we continue to hold to date, though captured on film several decades ago. “Complaints emerge about the bribes needed to get into a university, about the swelling population, or the lack of machinery to plough a farm,” elaborates Mr Subramanian.

 

The second essay, penned in 2011, puts the spotlight on Lalit Modi, and the glamour that he brought to the Indian Premier League (IPL), with its celebrity owners and after-parties. The IPL was, of course, an unusual success — “built from nothing, grown to a valuation of $4.13 billion within three years, stunningly profitable, and already a permanent part of the Indian psyche”. He goes on to explain that the story of the IPL’s “mad architect” was positively bizarre — given his “string of business failures, a personality with all the tenderness of a battering ram, and a host of foes”. Ironically, when he was on top of the world, he lost it all just as quickly. “It’s more unusual still for sports fans and the media to speculate about how much a tournament will miss an administrator,” Mr Subramanian reflects.  

 

Later in the book, Mr Subramanian writes that the oldest functioning club in India is the Bengal Club, established in 1827, only three years after the Athenaeum in London. The second-oldest is the Madras Club, founded in 1832, he adds. The Indian subcontinent is filled with many such clubs — “relics of the Raj, institutions that were set up as bolt-holes for the British, where they could retreat to row or swim or play cricket or race horses,” he writes. Talking about how the real estate market today defies the boundaries of logic almost everywhere in the country, Mr Subramanian believes that in India, “the powerful can feel confident of kneading the system to their benefit without overly worrying about public opinion”.

 

In one of the essays, Mr Subramaniam examines various Indian languages, explaining that in 2011, around 19,000 “mother tongues” were registered in the country. “In the world’s most populous country, no one knows how many languages are living, or how many have died,” he writes. According to him, roughly 150 million individual marketing texts — a majority of which are spam — are sent daily to mobile phone users in India. “To buy a database of 100,000 numbers and send each one an SMS can cost just ₹4,000.” While analysing the Indian middle-class aspiration of owning a home, his essay goes on to explore the booming property market in Gurugram and Noida.

 

In another essay, Mr Subramaniam discusses his lifelong obsession with quizzing — starting with inter-school quizzes, Quiz Bowl tournaments at his American university, the circuit of “open quizzes” back in India, quiz leagues and World Quizzing Championships across the world. It was the single constant that he clung to as he bounced between schools, universities, jobs, and cities. “It was a reminder of how my quizzing has not only defined my life but has, in turn, been defined by it,” writes the author, advising that the best preparation for quizzing can be life itself.

 

The book ends with the title essay, the longest piece in the book, which focuses on the importance of the deep-sea cables that physically connect our wireless digital world. Mr Subramanian writes that humans have laid 870,000 miles of such fibre optic cables under the ocean. The fascinating essay, about the ubiquitousness of the world wide web, explores who controls the undersea cables that bring us the internet. “The future of the internet, in part, will entail the weaponisation of its submarine cable systems,” he concludes. 

 

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The reviewer is a New Delhi-based freelance writer