My dad flew to India just ahead of my birth. He was actually flying in the wrong direction since my mom was labouring in Canada. She was rightly pissed, so she refused to tell him about my birth for a few days. Instead of suspecting the worst, he assumed that I was a baby girl, since that would culturally require much less fanfare. But I was indeed a boy.
When he finally got the news, it was by telegram. This was 1989 and the sole telegraph for hire in his village was the fastest link with the outside world. In 2021, when he died, I livestreamed his funeral to all our family back in that village. In 32 years, his village went from looking at dots on paper in a shared hatti1 to watching live events across the world in their bedrooms.
This chain of technological miracles took longer the first time around, in the United States. In 1844, Samuel Morse transmitted the words “What Hath God Wrought” from Washington DC to Baltimore in his eponymous code. In 1995, the first notable livestream was of a Yankees game. That’s 151 years for the US to go from telegrams to live video. It took my dad’s village 32 years to catch up.
Of course, neither trajectory was a straight line. Both were meandering paths up a shared tech tree. In video games, tech trees are abstractions of technological progress. You often play as a nationstate, competing with rivals on advancing your technology ahead of theirs, or playing catch-up to not get stomped. These abstractions are shaped like trees, with a core trunk of inventions (speech, fire) fractaling off to represent the disparate domains of modern science (telecommunications, aerospace).
A well designed tech tree accounts for a few variables:
- Inter-tech Dependencies - You can’t build a telegraph without electricity
- Research Time - The first telegraph took centuries of prototypes, beginning with signal towers along the Great Wall of China
- Economic Cost - You need a sufficiently advanced civilization to make the electricity to power telegraphs
A tech tree from the game Civilization 5.
Counter-adapting this game concept to real life sheds light on why it took my dad’s village so little time to catch up. In our networked world, technologies transfer between nations rapidly. The transfer vector has changed from colonization to globalization over time.
As the first mover, the United States climbed every rung in succession. This can be over-simplified to look like; telegraph, telephone, pager, email, cellphone, video-chat.
In India, for a long time, the slow pace of village meant telegraphs were sufficient. My dad left India in 1985. Outmigration was limited but set to explode soon after. This must’ve been a driving force to improve the communication tech at hand. This adaptation cascaded across India later than America. After all, India holds the honour of sending the world’s last telegram in 2013.2
When conditions were met, many Indians leapfrogged from owning no telecom technology to owning a cell phone in one step.
This leapfrogging is modelled in games too. In the exploration game Europa Universalis 4, technologies unlock quicker if your nation shares a border with another that has it unlocked already.
I lived this leapfrogging as I flew back and forth between Canada and India while growing up.3 On each successive trip, I had to climb down the tech just a bit less.4 5 On a late night arrival in Delhi airport, we called my uncle on a payphone and told him when we expected to arrive in Ludhiana, strategically delaying our departure so we’d arrive curbside in the daylight. We had limited means of getting a hold of him after that. When the time came, we hustled with other NRIs6 to catch an aging bus northbound. The trip would take 9 hours along the 2,500 year-old Grand Trunk Road. The bus quickly broke down just outside of Delhi but was brought back to life by a jug of well water poured into the radiator. It broke down again and this time the pitcher didn’t cut it. As we filtered off the kaput bus, a day-drunk sardar7 slapped the driver so hard his turban flew off.
When I returned years later, the airport was brand new. Continuously communicating with my uncle was as simple as swapping out SIM cards. The highway to Ludhiana was now elevated and the drive-time reduced to 6 hours. The buses were modern with AC and lie-flat seats. All of this in less than a decade.
Living between these two social contexts helped me see the closing tech tree gap clearly. But what does it mean for you going forward? I don’t think this all culminates in a stasis of technological parity. This positional offset will continue in new, unexpected ways:
- The leader and follower may swap places in certain domains, or overall
- The leader’s progress may accelerate with AI adoption
- Anti-globalization forces may slow technological transfers between nations
For those in similar contexts, be prepared for how your life will be uniquely disrupted compared to your friends only playing at one height on the tree.
Footnotes
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Punjabi word for a corner store, with Sanskrit. Surprisingly, not related to the Germanic word hut. ↩
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The last message read “Taar Zindabad” or “Long live the telegram.” It’s cool that the first message was and English bible phrase and the last was in Hindi in the other side of the world. ↩
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Canada and the USA are conflated in this essay as shorthand for the western world. ↩
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Early in my life, we were still getting long handwritten letters in the mail from India. Our relatives were short on sentimentality and these letters instead functioned as dispatches of village intrigues. My mum and dad would curse at the latest villain swindling land from their NRI siblings. ↩
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By the time I had consciousness, the village hatti’s telegram had been replaced with a telephone for hire. My parents shouted to be heard clearly on the other end. This habit has stuck with my mum as she now yells at her sister’s face over Whatsapp. ↩
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Non-resident Indian - these days, a catch-all term for any generation immigrant from India to an another country. ↩
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Persian word for leader, used in this context for a turban wearing Sikh man. ↩