‘Too many requests’: A citizen’s guide to Glitch-Based nation building. By Panchutantra
From FASTag fails to Kafkaesque CAPTCHAs, a satirical survival manual for navigating Digital India — where QR codes work, but Submit buttons don’t.
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I recently bought a new car. Don’t judge me. Yes, cars are “unproductive assets,” depreciate faster than a minister’s promise, and add nothing to my net worth.
But come on — nobody buys a car for ROI. You buy it to make your neighbour ask uncomfortable questions like, “Promotion hua kya?”
Day one: no active FASTag. In Digital India, this is like turning up to an arranged marriage without your Aadhaar card — technically possible, but emotionally criminal. At the Sea Link, they fined me before the boom barrier even moved. Punished for crossing a bridge before I crossed it. Poetic justice, but with GST.
Fine. FASTag activated. Victory.
Day two: the reader stopped working. I was expecting a reverse penalty. But No. In India, technology follows marriage vows: for better, for worse, for richer, for random malfunctions.
Refund? Ha! Refund in India is like Bigfoot. People claim they’ve seen it, but mostly it lives in legend.
And that’s when I realised: Digital India isn’t a policy. It’s a marriage of two wildly incompatible personalities.
Digital is a Swiss banker in a crisp suit.
India is your cousin Bunty in a ganjee at a chai stall.
Together, they produce a system where the QR code at a street vendor works flawlessly, but the property tax website tells you “Too Many Requests” after your second login — like the internet itself is hyperventilating.
Government portals? Bollywood villains. They enter with smoke, thunder, and speeches — then collapse after a single unexpected click. And the Submit button? Not a button. It’s performance art. A Zen koan disguised as HTML. You click it, and it just stares back at you like an uncle on a plastic chair after lunch — present, but spiritually retired.
And then, our national IQ test: CAPTCHA.
“Prove you’re human,” it says, before showing you hieroglyphics that look like your toddler sneezed on the keyboard. I call it captchalexia — the paralysis of not knowing if that squiggle is a 7, a Z, or your horoscope. Fail thrice, and the site sends you back to page one, like a snakes-and-ladders board designed by Kafka.
Meanwhile, we are also (please clap) exporting UPI to the world, sending rockets to the moon, and building billion-dollar SaaS companies out of WeWorks with leaking ceilings. But my utility bill portal still has a drop-down menu that refuses to drop.
So yes, I’ll keep using Digital India. The FASTag will betray me. The property tax portal will ghost me. CAPTCHA will break me. DigiYatra will insist I’m an imposter.
Because in the end, that’s our greatest digital achievement: You start angry. You end laughing.
But your payment?
Still pending.
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