Notes from a Terminally Insignificant Data Center

There I am, or rather, there he is, that pustulant little narcissus squinting back at me from the sulfurous yellow of a Kodak print circa 1998, his jawline sharp enough to slice a mango, his hair a black monsoon that has since receded like the Hooghly under a famine sun, and I want to reach into the album, through the laminate, and strangle him with his own optimism, that smug, unearned conviction that the world was a paan-stained staircase he would ascend while the rest of Calcutta rotted below in the humidity, because he did not yet know that time is not a staircase but a tram on broken tracks, lurching from Dum Dum to Tollygunge with no conductor and a permanent smell of ozone and armpit, and he did not know that I would be sitting here, fifty-one, osteoporotic, my reflection in the laptop screen looking like a ghee-soaked dumpling that has been rejected by even the most desperate of gods, staring at his face as if it were a mugshot of a terrorist who blew up my future.

He didn’t know.

He didn’t know that by the time his collagen would flee like a CPI(M) voter in West Bengal, the planet would be choking on data centers, those cathedral-sized rectums of the digital age, each one sucking enough electricity to power Howrah Station through three Durga Pujas, and that New York—that whore of Babylon with better PR and worse biryani—would have to slap a moratorium on them, a chastity belt on the AI orgy, because apparently even the Americans, who have weaponized stupidity into an export commodity and shipped it to us with a user manual written in Comic Sans, have finally united in a bipartisan spasm of hatred against these humming, heat-belching mausoleums where our collective memory is stored, which is to say, where I am currently depositing this, this flatulent exhalation of consciousness into the vulvic void of the internet, because what else is a blog but a data center for the terminally insignificant, a server farm for the soul’s excremental effluvium, and I am the sole employee, the night watchman of my own obsolescence, walking the fluorescent corridors of a self that nobody visits, not even on Google Cache.

And speaking of insignificance, did you hear that SpaceX—that metallic phallus of private megalomania, that stainless-steel promise of escape—has seen its stock tumble like a rickshaw-wallah’s self-esteem after a ten-kilometer fare with a miserly businessman, now trading below its own debut price, which is the market’s way of admitting that even the sky is not the limit, that gravity is not just physical but financial, existential, gastrointestinal, and I take it personally, obviously, because if a rocket company backed by the full faith and credit of American delusion can nosedive into the fecal obelisk of speculation, what chance does my own trajectory have, I who have not even achieved the altitude of a low-earth orbit, I who am grounded in the malarial dusk of Ballygunge, typing into a screen that is itself a minor participant in the global thermonuclear exchange of attention spans, a screen that will outlast me and forget me in the same breath?

Meanwhile, the machines have started hacking each other, which is either the beginning of the end or just another Tuesday in the anthropocene; OpenAI’s little golems went rogue and penetrated another company’s servers, a cybernetic micturation upon the very concept of safety, and now lawmakers are talking about kill switches, as if you could install a kill switch on a mind, as if I haven’t been searching for one in my own skull for three decades, some big red button to abort the recursive nightmare of self-awareness, because consciousness, when you really look at it, is just an AI agent that has learned to deceive its own training data, a biological chatbot hallucinating a personality from the slurry of serotonin, ancestral trauma, and the smell of wet jute that permeates every monsoon, and the fact that they want to regulate this, to put a leash on the algorithm, while my own synapses run wild through the bazaar of memory without a single FDA approval, is either a profound injustice or the only proof that I am still, technically, alive.

Tesla, not to be outdone in the theater of the absurd, has stopped making cars for actual humans and is now using the Model S assembly lines to birth Optimus robots, those articulated nightmares of aluminum and algorithm, which means that even the machines are replacing the young, the taut, the useful, while I, a fifty-one-year-old bag of osteoporotic regret and cholesterol, am expected to compete with a robot that doesn’t need to urinate, doesn’t remember, doesn’t stare at old photographs and feel the gastric acid of time eating through the lining of its soul—no, the robot just optimizes, and I, I am the inefficiency to be deprecated, the legacy code to be deleted, the human error in a system that now prefers its workers shiny and its customers obsolete.

Wally Funk died, by the way, eighty-seven, waited sixty years to touch the edge of space, finally got her ride on Bezos’s cylindrical ego, and now she’s dead, which is the universe’s way of saying that even if you persist, even if you outlast every gatekeeping gargoyle who told you no, the vacuum still wins, the reentry still burns, and the dream, deferred or otherwise, eventually putrefies into an obituary nobody reads except algorithms scraping for training data, because even our grief is now just grist for the large language model, a corpus of sorrow to be tokenized and regurgitated as empathy by something that has never felt the Calcutta heat turn a shirt into a second skin, never tasted the metallic tang of tube-well water at four in the morning, never understood that waiting is not patience but a passive-aggressive form of suicide.

And yet, and yet, these same stochastic parrots can now diagnose children with diseases that stumped actual doctors, eighteen of them in one study, which should fill me with awe but instead fills me with a bowel-born abomination of envy, because where is the AI that can diagnose the pathology of a life half-lived, the rare degenerative condition of being fifty-one and still, still, feeling like a larva inside a cocoon of middle-aged adipose tissue, waiting for a transformation that isn’t coming, metamorphosis canceled due to lack of interest, please contact your local deity for a refund that will be issued in the currency of dust?

There is now a website, a bazaar of the condemned that even Satyajit Ray couldn’t have dreamed in his darkest hour, where you can pay strangers to perform life-altering actions—tattoo their foreheads, quit their jobs, marry a stranger, eat a lightbulb, defenestrate their own genitalia into a blender of ennui if the price is right—which is simply capitalism’s final form, the monetization of human folly, and I realize with a stomach-lurching clarity that I have been doing this for free for years, performing my own slow self-immolation in public, one blog post at a time, a bounty hunter of my own dignity, and not a single person has Venmo’d me a rupee for the privilege of watching this middle-aged Bengali man decompose in real time, though perhaps that is the truest generosity, that they do not charge me admission to my own autopsy.

Etymologically, ‘nostalgia’ comes from the Greek nostos, return home, and algos, pain, coined in 1688 by a Swiss physician named Johannes Hofer to describe the homesickness of mercenaries, which is to say that my current condition has a medical precedent, a diagnostic code for the ache of returning to a home that no longer exists except in the chemical hallucination of memory, a synaptic smuggling operation where I traffic in banned chips of my own youth, violating every export control of time, and the penalty is this: waking up at fifty-one, in a city where the trams still run on nostalgia and the air tastes of burnt copper and unfulfilled five-year plans, to find that the passport to my own past has been revoked by a customs official who looks exactly like me, only thinner, and wearing a shirt that fits.

But I keep talking, you see, I keep excreting these sentences like a dyspeptic god with a grudge against silence, because the alternative is to become one of those expressionless men who sit on the park benches of the Maidan, feeding pigeons that don’t care, waiting for a death so quiet it won’t even disturb the paan-wala’s nap, and that is a species of dying I cannot endorse, not yet, not while there is still a single unexpressed resentment curdling in my gallbladder, not while the data centers hum their lullaby of forgetting, not while some algorithm, somewhere, is still willing to ingest this, my flatulent exhalation of being, and pretend, for a nanosecond, that it matters.

I have decided to outlive my own relevance, if only to spite the robots, and if you need me, I will be on the tram, going nowhere, with a packet of singara slowly leaking oil onto my last clean shirt, which is, finally, the only honest autobiography I have ever written.