Outside IIT-Delhi last month, after a young student’s death, protesters noticed a man who filmed everything and photographed nothing. No press card, no lanyard, only a phone held with the studied carelessness of someone pretending not to hold one. Word moved through the crowd in the efficient, unreliable way rumours do: Plainclothes police, collecting faces for a file somewhere.The students did not convene a seminar on privacy. They raised their own phones and filmed him back — 40 small black mirrors turned upon the watcher. By the time they met the administration, every chair had acquired its own cameraman. What might once have been a conversation became a production with 40 directors, each certain that his recording would contain the truth.AdvertisementAlso Read | For well-being at IITs, we must ask: What do we owe students beyond teaching and testing?A few hundred kilometres south, at IIT-Bombay, a quieter version of the same story arrived this week: A student caught by a lens mid-exam, allegedly borrowing an answer from a chatbot because his own supply had run short. By nightfall, the exam was the least of it. Within hours, he had taken his own life — the fourth such loss on that campus in a single year. By morning, his phone was in an evidence bag and the hostel’s cameras were being replayed, frame by patient frame, reconstructing where he had gone and what he had done. The invigilator’s eye had been quick enough to catch a stolen glance at a screen. No comparable instrument existed for the distress underneath it. We have built formidable surveillance for small dishonesties, and almost none for the larger unravelling beneath them. The lens is exquisite at proof. It has never once been any good at care.Both will be filed, eventually, under procedure — a disciplinary hearing, a departmental enquiry, a line in somebody’s record. Filed there, both will be filed slightly wrong. Delhi wasn’t really about a plainclothes man, and Bombay wasn’t really about a chatbot. In both places, the camera had become more than a witness. It had entered the event itself.I thought of an old hostel mate from IIT-Kharagpur who spent years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory working on imaging technology related to the sensors that would eventually transform the mobile phone. He still holds patents connected to that work. Such sensors were refined partly so cameras could travel aboard spacecraft and look at distant planets. Their greater consequence was here on Earth: They made human beings look constantly at one another.AdvertisementThe camera used to appear on occasions — weddings, holidays, a child beside a birthday cake, all of us standing stiffly before the Taj Mahal. You performed briefly for it and then returned to life. The phone camera reversed the arrangement. Life now appears briefly between performances.Meals cool while being photographed. Accidents acquire spectators before they acquire help. Children learn their good side before they learn long division. The police record protesters, protesters record police, and everyone records himself recording everyone else. Memory, once private and notoriously inaccurate, has become public evidence — still inaccurate, but available in high definition.We Indians had understood the danger of concentrated attention long before Silicon Valley gave it a valuation. We called it nazar. The black dot on a baby’s cheek and the lemon and chillies above a shop carried an old social intelligence. To be looked at too intensely, by people whose intentions you could not know, was a form of exposure. Attention could take something from you.The aunty at the window also watched, of course. The neighbourhood gaze was nosy, disciplinary and occasionally cruel. But it was human in one important respect — it forgot. It returned to its tea, found a new scandal, forgave by Tuesday. The digital gaze has an employer and unlimited storage. It reports to the state when trained on a protest, to a platform when trained on a teenager, and to the crowd when trained on somebody’s worst 10 seconds. Shame wanted to keep you within the community. Surveillance wants to keep your file.Jeremy Bentham imagined a prison in which one unseen watchman might be looking at every prisoner. We have built the opposite architecture and reached much the same destination. Everyone is visible, everyone is watching, and nobody knows who occupies the tower. We arrange the table because a photograph may be taken. We adjust the face because a video may survive. We begin experiencing ourselves from the viewpoint of an audience that has not yet arrived.you may likeA second self now stands just outside us and asks how the moment will look. That self can protect us: Without a camera, authority owns the only version of events. The students at IIT-Delhi were right to film the man filming them. A watched species eventually grows an eye of its own, if only for the dignity of saying, “I saw you seeing me”.But an eye grown for defence does not close when the danger passes. It follows us home, to dinner, into grief. We film the concert instead of hearing it, the funeral instead of mourning, the child instead of watching him become himself. The sensor was built to extend human sight towards worlds we may never visit. Its deepest effect has been here: it has made ordinary life behave as though it may later be called as a witness.We once photographed what we wanted to remember. Now we photograph because we are afraid of what others may say happened. Somewhere between Mars and the IIT courtyard, the camera stopped being an instrument of memory and became a negotiation over reality. Forty phones rise. The watcher becomes watched. Everybody has proof. Nobody, quite, is present.The writer is a senior advisory professional