Look back in curiosity

Geeta Patel Author, Mumbai

When we imagine technology, we usually think about it as the Internet or as instruments such as the phone. How do we see technology and intimacy coming together? There have been many stories about technology's role in face-to-face relationships with people. In these narratives, technologies such as the mobile can produce one of two outcomes- either make things and people more readily available or ruin relationships.

You find someone through an app or the phone comes between you and is more exciting than your date. The questions I often ask my students in Delhi-who do you imagine yourself becoming when you extend your being through technological processes in this way?

Are you becoming more unreserved? What most of them end up saying is that technology allows them more freedom, greater expansiveness, a wider canvas through which they can live. But I don't think that's true. I feel that young women are not necessarily any more bold and courageous than they were when I was growing up in Mumbai in the 1960s-70s. They're considerably less adventurous and tediously so.

In some ways, we're producing a generation of women who live in a fantasy of a progress narrative-think of themselves as braver, more enlightened than the generations that preceded them. By not recognising the contradiction in which you think of yourself as brave even as you live a cautious life, you're thrust into a problem.

You're always faced with funny contingencies and you're constantly cobbling decisions together. We need to open up possibilities using technologies other than machines. Workshops for instance, in which we speak about and teach people how to live through the prospects offered by fantasy. Indians are the best purveyors of fantasy in the business, after all. We have a long lineage of composing poetry, whether it's Sanskrit Kavya, Tamil Sangam, Urdu and Punjabi shairi; these poetic traditions are about wonderful, whacky, playful fantasy. We ought to reinhabit the fantasies around desire that were once so necessary to the pleasures of the flesh.

This is precisely the kind of lineage that's dropping out of the picture for a lot of young children. A lot of people say we need to reoccupy Hinduism. And this might be one way. We need to ask what we are losing if we don't manage to revive these lyrical lineages as everyday practice. It'll be curious to see what we can do if we do.

Looking back via poetic fantasies could be powerfully invigorating and offer enormous pleasure. The way forward could then be driven by looking backwards in the most radical and spacious way possible, especially for women and queers.

As told to Moeena Halim.