Bengaluru       First in Delhi, and now in Benglauru, it seems change is all around, but I’m not sure if it’s a sign of the times, or that I’ve been coming to these cities so regularly over the last more than 20 years that I keep seeing the past in the present and vice versa.

We landed in Benglauru after 11pm in the airport’s new terminal completed in 2023.  It seemed expansive with long and wide concourses.  Pretty amazing piece of architecture, especially thinking back to the old airport.  Coming into town, we were on an elevated expressway until we entered the old city.  I couldn’t help but remember the on-and-off route the taxis used to take during the construction when you would be on a highway one minute and riding in the dirt between earthmovers the next.  The path of the new expressway was lit up in neon like climate change was something for other people to worry with.

Delhi had taken leaps and bounds in completed infrastructure as well.  No more subway construction in the central districts around Connaught Place.  Expressways completed to the airport.  Pollution still significant, but the smell of burning fires no longer greets everyone.

I can remember having to connect to email via modems, and the hours it would take every night to answer emails.  Now there’s wireless everywhere.  That’s not to say that everything works, and that’s a mystery.  My web and internet whiz in New Orleans, says the systems may be set on a different serve platform, but it’s all Greek to me.  What I know clearly is that I am not able to access either webmail or Mozilla’s open-source Thunderbird which handles my email.  I thought it was a Delhi problem, but it persists in Bengaluru as well, so what the heck?  Gmail works of course, so critical replies that involve attachments and something serious like an amendment to the FCC, I have to forward from my phone to Gmail, and hope for the best.  This is all a huge problem and inconvenience.

On the other hand, we’re sitting in the Gandhi Institute in Delhi, where I hadn’t been to a meeting since 2005, for the monthly leadership meeting of our affiliate the Hawkers Joint Action Committee.  The meeting is of course conducted completely in Hindi.  My colleague, Ashley Reyns from ACORN Canada, has been on assignment doing community organizing training first in Mumbai, then Delhi, and soon in Bengaluru.  She’s somehow able to follow the conversation somewhat, using Google Translate.  On her instructions, I download the app, and away we go.  Don’t misunderstand me, this is machine learning, and it’s still in elementary school.  On the other hand, it was immensely better than nothing, and made it possible over the two-hour meeting to get the highlights and follow the proceedings.  Interestingly, looking at my phone and Ashley’s phone at the same time, side by side, Google was often offering a different translation of the same things they were hearing.  There were some tics they couldn’t solve.  Town Vending Committees or TVC’s were routinely translated as PVCs, like we were fixing plumbing rather than organizing vendors at market places.

Later meetings planned the long march which will end in Delhi next week to demand more benefits for the poor and informal workers.  There was another meeting back-to-back of the Working People Coalition.  Google translate couldn’t keep up with all of this, but just like it’s possible to make calls on WhatsApp now, find wireless everywhere, even if it doesn’t necessarily work, I can easily imagine five years from now when Google translate will be able to follow it all with a much higher and fluent level of accuracy.  It’s not routine in India yet, but when we were in Brazil with the Organizers Forum two years ago, hotel front desk workers routinely translated Portuguese to English back and forth to handle our questions and provide instructions.

There’s brick and mortar infrastructure, and then there’s the software and AI underneath it all that we quickly adopt, whether we understand it or not.  Change is coming though.  We welcome perhaps too much with open arms.  Let’s hope, like new highways and airports that we can see and feel, that we also understand the harms.