I like chatting to rickshaw drivers about random things – why I am here, in this city, while they want to go elsewhere. Or why they don’t want to go elsewhere, even though they have homes there and family. Where we go to buy khakhra from, and in what part of the city lemons are cheaper, or how long since the last time one of us ate those peculiar biscuits that look like little plump fish, which we see sometimes transported in giant transparent plastic sacks precariously balanced on motorbikes. Lately there haven’t been as many conversations. Sometimes we each wear our earphones and listen to separate music. A few days back the driver watched videos on YouTube, flicking from one to the next while overtaking moving vehicles, to my outraged exclamations and pleas. I wondered whether, if my rating goes down, it will take longer for Uber to find me a vehicle. But when the conversations happen, almost as soon as they begin, a loop starts going round and round in my head – I hope they don’t bring up marriage. I have had that conversation in a million forms. I am perpetually unable (or unwilling) to answer why I will not get married. To veiled conversations about loneliness I respond that marriage is not necessary for that. I can count on the fingers of one hand the instances in which this has not led to increasingly direct suggestions that we could ‘meet’ any time. Sometimes they’re sleazy, often they’re not. It’s not difficult to say “no, thank you”. It’s easier to laugh it off and pretend I don’t understand and I find myself often resorting to that. Sadly, I’ve never had the privilege of anyone other than a cis man driving, so the opportunity to consider a yes has not presented itself.

My journeys are to and from a university campus that puzzles me everyday with the number of faculty members dating each other or married to each other – the students doing the same. When the faculty-student boundary is crossed we agree we’re in troubled territory, though when we talk about it, it’s not as easy to arrive at what is acceptable and what not: a student who recently graduated may suddenly shift from being senior and friend, to wielding more power as a teaching associate and that shift is not just an abstraction, it needs to be negotiated by individuals who know each other. We think of power and consent in relation to these institutional roles, as we should. We think of each role’s responsibility, we even think of age, of who feels they have agency to deny consent in each moment, and where this sense of agency is impossible. In these conversations, I’ve never heard the same ambiguity about, say, an academic and a support staff member; or a support staff member and a student. I’ve never had that discussion with anyone. It is strange, come to think of it, since both categories cut across age and gender. The opportunities, one would think, are endless. And yet they’re not even worthy of conversation or debate. They’re outright unthinkable in most cases. In fact, a comment from a security person suggesting a date would most probably be experienced as an outright violation, betrayal of the implicit trust that desire shall not cross class and caste categories. It is easy for that to feel like outrage to the person on the academic side. It is also easy for action to be summarily taken about it.

If one were to ask anybody whether their desire is dependent on caste and class categories, that question would also trigger outrage. Of a different kind, of course, at the suggestion that such discrimination exists. It is, then, even easier not to see how caste and class may matter to desire, when the people in question are ‘equals’ institutionally. Discussions on desire are then restricted to reinforcing the fact that ‘no means no’, and there doesn’t appear to be need for additional soul- searching. And yet, occasionally, one encounters the same kind of response – not a no, but a sense of bewilderment that the possibility of desire even crossed a person’s mind. It is not that the desire is not reciprocated, as much that it produces revulsion in the first place. There is no space to have a conversation around that, thrash it out, reject, accept, move on. That unspeakable desire taints everything.

There’s nothing new in this, really. Desire crossing caste lines, breaking out of a heteronormative mold and challenging the family that preserves these same caste lines, is an acknowledged ‘enemy’. We might as well admit that things simply don’t change fast enough. But is that it? Or could it be that other changes in our lives make it even more difficult to conceive the desire of the ‘other’, specifically of those with whom we don’t share as many conversations, with whom we’ll soon, I expect, lose entirely the ability to speak?

The delivery person from Amazon, Swiggy, Blinkit – name your pick, if you have one in these – rings the doorbell, hands over the parcel. Their name, occasionally present on the app, maintains the semblance of human interaction, but for that there is no need. At best, an exchange of four numbers takes place before the new soap, broom, pearl barley, Himalayan honey you didn’t even know you needed until yesterday, is here. Ready to be used. One moment of desire, materialised within our homes almost instantaneously. In the process, the grimy traces of labour are erased – no dusty streets and traffic noises (convenience) to go to a speciality shop, no trying to convince the vendor than no, you don’t in fact need bread, dahi, poha along with it (streamlined process reduced to its simplest requirements). No sense of what is ‘in season’ (globalisation), or of whose labour (commodity and experiential both) is packed in sharp-edged cartons, laid softly in a shredded paper bed, and protected by another layer of cardboard. The only kind of labour we’re still familiar with is the kind we practise (white collar) in order to earn the money that allows this luxury. This is the life, one may be tempted to say, if you can afford it – cleaned up of human contact and sweat, sanitised, left guilt-free to desire and consume, desire and consume. In the background incessant production takes place to excess. It fuels the movement of hypothetical future money between bank accounts in economic monopolies, while MNREGA daily wages refuse to increase, the ‘meritorious’ go to school in private universities and the budget for public goods decreases at a speed that only matches the death of the idea of public goods itself. I made the mistake of listening to Varoufakis again, clearly.

Amazon, Swiggy, Blinkit, Uber, Ola, side by side with all the social media we engage with to greater and lesser degrees, play many roles and we have spoken much about them, but one thing they do is this: they make human interaction and exchange outside of the comfort of our circles of similarity unnecessary for the fulfillment of our desires and needs; they save us time that we can invest into desiring more, consuming more and being more and more caught up in the loop and immediate fulfillment of those desires and the aspirations they are linked to. Underneath their mechanisms they hide the labour that produces and delivers the commodities we consume, and along with the labour, they also hide the materiality and personhood, the desires and aspirations, of those who provide this labour. The Swiggy delivery person, who rushed to make the promised 6 minute delivery and dropped the carton of eggs into a giant uncooked scramble in the middle of the road, what does she desire, to what does she aspire? Where is the scope to have that conversation with a person whom we meet once, and never again? If it weren’t for inevitable encounters in places of work, in academic institutions, we might as well be living in parallel worlds, like that speculative story of a folding world in which people of different classes take their turn to live.

And the ability of these delivery platforms to ‘cut the noise’ of that communication is related to something else they do besides. They centre solely our individual, atomised desire or need, removed from any concrete external reality, while they transform the very way in which we desire. This is a way which is now informatised, where we seamlessly interact with and interpret ratings, comparing options and willy-nilly fitting into a pattern of semblance of choice (based on multiple options, taking no longer than a few seconds to make). Not too far removed from the swiping left or right on the most ubiquitous dating apps.

But this is not about dating apps. It would not surprise anyone if we were to say that dating apps change the way in which we interact with desire and humans around us – they transact, after all, in human desire. The point about apps and platforms which purportedly don’t do that is what we’re concerned with here. Because what they then do, in addition to, or as a corollary to everything above, is to effectively obfuscate and erase the materiality of the human ‘other’ behind the informatised process with which we interact, and through which we become consumers of a different kind than we think. We become consumers who produce at the same time the commodity that we consume, because this commodity is no longer just the T-shirt, gym equipment, or the curry leaves we require urgently for the dinner cooking on the stove as we speak. Part of the commodity we buy (and feel entitled to) is the experience of ‘humanproof’ efficiency in delivering it on the doorstep in 6 minutes flat – and without a giant scramble on the road – or on the ‘same-day’ (subject to Prime membership). We make the commodity by this constant participation in (read ‘surveillance of’) the process that is rendered ‘transparent’ through the little bike winding its way along the mechanical streets of the Swiggy app, the little rickshaw taking a couple of seconds to leave on the Uber app. It could well be an Internet blip but it takes additional active thinking to think of it like that, and not as a personal affront to our consumer ‘rights’. When the human ‘other’ is an unwieldy cog in the otherwise seamless informatised machine delivering to us the kick of the commodity which we ‘manifest’ through the power of our selection, one-click payment and tracking, the only relationship between human and human can be one of suspicion. ‘They’ are bound to be out to get us.

Is there something, then, that links laughing off the discomfort of a rickshaw-ride conversation that suddenly turned sexual, to not even thinking of the possibility of desire between 19 year olds performing different roles on the same campus, and to the various platforms that cater to and shape our fast evolving desires? I would argue there is, and if we allow the comfort and convenience of this lack of dialogue to grow, the future looks a little bit grim.

Cover Image by Daniel Eledut on Unsplash