The eponymous story in this book by writer-journalist Samanth Subramanian is the very last one, astonishing in the breadth of its detail into the web of seabed cables that power the Internet. From the laying of those cables in oceans to how they creep overground from sand, and converge within surprisingly and deliberately drab cabins; to the men involved in the exercise, from the pioneers and the prosaic to the ‘Meta’ rich; to the perils posed by both an interconnected and an increasingly disparate world to this, yet, vulnerable infrastructure on which rests the future of the modern world; to the aftermath of a volcanic eruption that leaves an island more isolated than it has been in over a century — nothing escapes Subramanian’s storytelling arc.
However, it is in the chapters preceding this one, especially the ones right at the start, that Subramanian really impresses with how he prises out the not-so-obvious webs and waves of routine news events. A compilation of articles written by him, which have appeared in various publications over the years, these do not neatly fall into one book, but they are telling in the ground Subramanian covers and, as journalism is boxed into “micro attention spans”, in the space he has for it.
The book starts with ‘Midnight’s Grown-Ups’, in which Subramanian connects with a group of then 20-year-olds who appeared in a 1967 film called I Am 20, meant to mark two decades of Independence. Subramanian writes that he chanced upon the 19-minute film on YouTube in 2013 — towards the end of the Manmohan Singh government — “a dispiriting season for India, a season vacant of cheer or promise.”
As Subramanian chases the members of that group — many of whom have moved abroad, including the ones who seemed unlikely to do so in the summer of 1967 — he concludes “the true comforts were (those)… who could be excited and idealistic about our country’s future eleven as they remained worried and uncertain about it.” This wasn’t a “contradiction”, he writes, “it was an absolute necessity.” Not unlike the Gen Z who rocked a mighty government with some slogans and videos from Jantar Mantar; or the inspired Gen Alpha who are taking the same route now. In ‘The Confidence Man’, Subramanian charts the sparkle and sophistry of Lalit Modi, writing that the “audacity” of IPL’s success “depended entirely upon Modi”, that “this tide of money could be disguised as a tide of cricket, guaranteed to wash over an Indian audience that is forever willing to diagnose itself as cricket-mad.”
In ‘The Vultures’, Subramanian’s writing truly takes flight as he links a bird saved from extinction to how it evolved differently in the New and Old Worlds, and occupies a crucial space in different Indian religions. His descriptions of people and places are sterling but, even so, this stands out: “Standing near a carcass, the long-billed vulture looks like a morose undertaker who has doffed his hat but refuses to take off his two-tone overcoat.”
In ‘Breach Candy’, Mumbai, which most of us know for the hospital by its name, Subramanian takes on its swimming pool, shaped like the map of India. “In building the pool… the British were emphasising their ownership of India… After 1947… the club insisted that it would continue to restrict membership to Europeans only”, he writes.
The pushback started in the 1960s but came to a head in 2012. “There were rumbles of fraud and corruption, of a mania for land and of politicians flexing their muscles… until we appeared to be talking not of the Breach Candy Club but of India herself, the country once again in perfect congruence with the pool… Even Indians, it appeared, wished to be insulated from India.”
In a neat bit of irony, Subramanian returns to the theme in ‘The Rich vs The Very Very Rich’, where a quintessential English club is fretting over its takeover by a Chinese magnate. In ‘Lifetime Opportunity’, Subramanian writes about real-estate marketing, of the kind where properties have names such as ‘Empire Estate’, which “sounds like a manor where Cecil Rhodes might have retired after saving the Crown.” He writes about visiting model bedrooms with books “so widely out of the mainstream that they felt like genuine personal choices.” Examples: Tom Bedlam by George Hagen, and Wanting by Richard Flanagan.
He writes about the sprouting of apartments in Gurgaon and Noida, and visiting a development “that was not really a development, next to a racetrack that was struggling to become a racetrack, opposite a night safari that was years away from looking like a night safari, in an aspiring township that was still mostly fields and disputed land.” The estimated timeline for completion of all such townships: “three years.”
In ‘Hold Your Tongue’, Subramanian traces the life’s work of Ganesh Devy, the ambition and problems with his documentation of India’s languages, many of them dying — a man talks of “speaking to stones” to keep his alive — as part of which he speaks with other linguist scholars across the world. In Devy’s view, Subramanian writes, “the coexistence of languages has long allowed Indians to ‘accept many gods, many worlds’ — an indispensable trait for a country so sprawling and kaleidoscopic.”
The chapter repeatedly goes into how this is under threat in the current ruling dispensation’s monotheistic worldview. Subramanian quotes Friedrich Max Muller. “It is said that blood is thicker than water, but it may be said with even greater truth that language is thicker than blood.” On another note, Devy’s close associate Jyotirmaya Sharma tells Subramanian: “When many languages thrive, there is the possibility that the smallest language, the most innocuous dialect, might contain the potential of saying that all-important word: No.”
Subramanian will lose readers over the next few chapters as he delves into the self-confessed micro world of quizzers like him, Singapore’s quest for land, Nigeria’s Jews, and cricket — writings that are more indulgent, less indulging. But then, he comes to Sri Lanka and its Easter Sunday terror attacks, and brings together the many strands of history and geography, and a religion besieged, to give us a story that can belong anywhere. As it does, with alarming regularity.
A chapter full of surprises follows, on the decades-long duel between paper towels and dryers on which does the job better, in ridding hands of unwanted moisture — especially in public loos. As machines expand hold on our lives, Subramanian writes: “The wipe of a hand upon a square of natural fibre is an astonishingly ancient action… The hand dryer’s essential ambition is to break a human habit tens of thousands of years old, and to persuade us that the few times we dry our hands daily… warrants a machine. It dares us to submit to its idea of modern life.”
Modern life is what Subramanian finally deals with in ‘The Web Beneath The Waves’ too, talking about, “a paradoxical wrinkle in the world of undersea cables.” “At a time when many wealthy governments are growing increasingly jumpy about their sovereign control over data infrastructure, poorer nations find that if they want better Internet at all, they must relinquish some of their sovereign control to Western tech giants.”
This, Subramanian writes, is “the liquid medium of the modern world” and — as has always been the case — it is difficult to gauge its depth. This book is a good effort.
Writer-journalist Samanth Subramanian's The Web Beneath the Waves. (Generated using AI) 
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