India’s digitalization journey has presented us with two different, but related, notions concerning personal data. On one hand is the recognition of data as extensions of ourselves, which forms the basis of most rights–based discourse today, including our fundamental right to privacy. On the other hand, the promise of ‘big’ data analysis—embodied in advertising, personalization, and Artificial Intelligence—has turned the entire world into a Panopticon the likes of which Jeremy Bentham could only dream about.

But what happens when these two notions clash? What happens when an orthodox and hierarchical society, like India’s, meets large-scale profit-driven digital surveillance? More specifically for our purposes, what do you do when your livelihood depends on being tracked by your employer at all times? What real autonomy do platform workers, particularly the women among them, have in an extractive system that only seeks to maximize their productivity and reproductivity—often at the expense of their lives and liberties? These are precisely some of the many questions that TAAK seeks to answer.

Set in a context of constant surveillance, TAAK (2024) follows Shalini, a middle-aged security supervisor at a bar frequented by the city’s elite. Troubles arise when the company that employs Shalini and her colleagues introduces a watch-based tracker to measure metrics like attendance and working hours, a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly commonplace in both private and public employment. As the film progresses, we see Shalini’s initial acceptance of this all-seeing widget challenged in many subtle and overt ways, including, most prominently, by Komal, one of her younger colleagues who attaches much more value to her right to privacy.

By zooming in on the experiences of and the conflicts between two contractually-employed women, TAAK forces us to confront the realities of what Shoshana Zuboff has described as “surveillance capitalism”. Unlike individualist framings of privacy, it adopts relational and gendered points of view, thereby allowing us to see how surveillance evolves in a culture where information is readily weaponized to benefit and preserve the status-quo. As a result, it holds value not just for workers of the 21^st century, but for all of us whose data feeds the surveillance industry.

To further reflect on the many critical questions the film raises, I sat down with Udit Khurana, TAAK’s writer and director. Among other areas, our conversation focuses on the harms caused by such intrusive technologies to workers’ rights, certainly, but also to the basic dignity that all of us are entitled to. Below is an edited transcript of our chat.

Abhineet: To begin with, what got you working on a film like TAAK, since it covers a topic that many people don’t often dwell on? What were your inspirations, of course, but also how did you arrive at this theme of ‘surveillance in the workplace’? And what were some challenges you faced during conceptualization and creation?

Udit: Growing up in a city like Delhi, with its overzealous (almost authoritarian) Residential Welfare Associations, one feels that the idea of the outsider threat is deeply embedded in our collective psyches. With the growing aspiration of living in gated communities, we have become obsessed with closed-circuit TV cameras (CCTVs) and with the idea of keeping a watch on ‘the other’. Surveillance for security is normalized in our cities to such an extent that statements like “If you don’t have anything to hide, then you shouldn’t have a problem with snooping” or “If you do have a problem, then you must definitely be hiding something”, are commonplace.

I am deeply interested in exploring this feudalistic mindset of the people in this so-called modern city, which is fueled largely by our fears and insecurities.

I am deeply interested in exploring this feudalistic mindset of the people in this so-called modern city, which is fueled largely by our fears and insecurities. During the pandemic, I came across this absurd news that the municipal corporation of Chandigarh was implementing a new tracking device into their systems to ensure worker productivity/efficiency, and all sanitation workers will have to wear a tracking device. As I started following the news, it became clear that the workers’ union was completely against it. The device not only kept a tab on their working hours and GPS locations, but if needed, it could listen to them, and they would have to take an ‘attendance selfie’ using the device every day.

There was a real fear of losing jobs if they were caught even cribbing about their working conditions, and the loudest voice opposing this move was from the women workers who spoke about the internal discomfort that they felt when they were next to this device. It wasn’t referred to by the workers as an “ultra-modern device”, but rather “a bell around their necks.” Although it was initially imagined as a non-fiction piece, its fictionalization in this context seemed to fit perfectly with this timely grant by the Museum of Imagined Futures on stories around responsible technology.

The biggest challenge would come at the research and scripting stage, because surveillance and privacy are themes that have often been told from the victim’s position. We wanted to create a protagonist who has bought into the system; someone who would be of the opinion that if you have a problem with surveillance, then you must have something to hide. It is usually a tough proposition to evoke empathy for a character like that, but I strongly believe that we, as those belonging to the enabler class, must tell stories of perpetrators and/or enablers, if we wish to share those of the victims’ too.

Abhineet: There is this one scene where Shalini commands Komal to wear the tracker by appealing to the unique nature of their work. She says something like, “It is our duty to track other people, so why should we not be tracked?” Building on my first question, what made you choose this profession for your movie, and how did you arrive at the decision of centering women workers over their male counterparts?

Udit: During our research into these tracking devices deployed in Chandigarh, it became clear that the main issue stemmed from a certain feudal mindset and the distrust of the working class, which meant that the privilege and burden of technology will be very much divided on the basis of class and caste. We wanted a character that was at the center of this division, someone who had bought into the imagined reality that the working class cannot be trusted. We wanted a microcosm of the world that we exist in.

At the same time, we also wanted to find a place of work that could evoke the idea of surveillance, and allow the issue of worker efficiency/monitoring to be pivotal to its functioning. Nightclubs are seen as a place of expressing freedom for those who can afford it, but also present in that space are these invisible security workers who need to be constantly vigilant and keep an eye on any miscreants. The space had an inherent irony which could be explored subtly.

In a feudal society, where privacy and autonomy are dictated by patriarchal systems, we wanted to ask a simple question: why is our country so easily accepting of the idea of surveillance?

As for your second question, it is true that women in India traditionally don’t work night shifts. When Nimisha, our primary researcher, started meeting nightclub bouncers, we were rather impressed by the relative autonomy that women in this group enjoyed. One of them, Renu, was extremely generous to allow us into her world, and we witnessed her and her partner working night shifts in Delhi. So while navigating a kind of patriarchal surveillance at their homes that intrudes on their lives, they were also in charge of keeping an eye on others.

In a feudal society, where privacy and autonomy are dictated by patriarchal systems, we wanted to ask a simple question: why is our country so easily accepting of the idea of surveillance? We found that centering the story on women bouncers would allow us to answer this question most effectively, and we could explore the feudal roots of surveillance much better.

Abhineet: In many circles, privacy is often incorrectly presumed to be a concept only the rich care about, whereas TAAK presents a much more accurate picture. Could you talk a little about how you dealt with this question during the creative process, and what are the ways in which movies like TAAK can resist adopting this assumption on face value?

Udit: In 2017, India’s Supreme Court ruled that the right to privacy is inherent in the right to life and personal liberty, thereby making it a fundamental right in the country. But it feels like we haven’t taken much cognizance of that fact. Our collective conscience still considers individual privacy as a matter of the few privileged enough to value that. Keeping that in mind, we wanted to explore and understand the value of privacy in human life. If there is a basic need for privacy—the need to keep things confidential as an individual—what kinds of feelings does that evoke?

Film, as a medium, offers us the time and space to explore exactly that: a feeling, a presence. So we tried to design a film that allowed for a rhythm that incorporated the awkwardness of being put under surveillance. The unnatural eeriness that arrives with the awareness of being watched. Or on the other hand, the curiosity that is awakened in us at the opportunity of watching and/or learning of a private moment. A sort of excitement that is fused with gossip. Our protagonist goes through these aspects in the film, which hopefully allows the viewer to experience the multiple facets of privacy and understand it as a basic human need.

Abhineet: Another scene in the movie—which I was pleasantly surprised with—was when some workers realized that their earnings had reduced because the tracker had messed up. I think that this ‘invisibilization’ of labor is an otherwise very under-represented part of workplace surveillance. How did you decide to include this specific kind of worker exploitation, and were there other such revelations?

Udit: Losing their daily wage on the basis of a technological error was a major fear against the tracking device that was implemented in Chandigarh. The discourse generated by the unions there taught us that, over time, workers have just been reduced to numbers and statistics, in a way that is systematic and slowly strips them of their humanity. One of the characters of the film is, in fact, a direct reference to the discussions that were being conducted at the time. Another interesting aspect that needs recollection here is that modern-day technologies use customized algorithms to cater to individualized user experiences, tastes, and preferences.

So while one’s role as a worker is invisibilized, the data they generate is used to turn them into a product through targeted advertising and spam calling. Indeed, this was also a recurring concern among Chandigarh’s workers, who believed that their personal information was being leaked to incessant spam callers.

Abhineet: While TAAK’s central focus is undeniably on privacy in the workplace, that is not all of it, as is clearly evident from how Shalini perceives Komal’s autonomy even outside the working hours. I am very curious to know about what made you bring in this detail, and how you see this ‘conventional’ invasion of privacy feeding into the more digital kind.

Udit: Shalini and Komal are, essentially, migrants from the same district, which allows the former to easily talk to Komal’s community members to learn more about her past. Conventional surveillance in such areas, while being extremely well-connected, has always functioned to protect the prevailing value systems of a patriarchal and casteist society that often sees women merely as property that needs to be protected. As it turns out, this is not very different from how surveillance capitalism categorizes workers or humans for their worth in a capitalistic society—ideas of freedom and autonomy have found very little space in both cases.

Conventional surveillance in such areas, while being extremely well-connected, has always functioned to protect the prevailing value systems of a patriarchal and casteist society that often sees women merely as property that needs to be protected.

This is where Komal’s character becomes imperative to the link between the two worlds. After a previous traumatic experience driven by ‘conventional surveillance’, she understands the paradigms that restrict her and what she values is her freedom. In the end, she clearly understands the game better than Shalini, who is the more innocent of the two.

Abhineet: Lastly, with data-tracking technologies dominating so much of our lives, the questions you raise in TAAK should bother everyone across the spectrum. However, it is clearly not yet the case. What, then, do you think is the role that movies and popular art can play in building a larger consciousness around these issues?

Udit: Film, as an art form, allows a relationship to develop between the watcher and the ‘other’. For the amount of time you spend with the characters on screen, it is bound to evoke empathy in the mind of the viewer. We can project our fears and aspirations onto this other and through that, probably voice out something that we haven’t been able to, till now. In that sense, we didn’t want TAAK to end with a catharsis or simplistic solutions.

I believe films of today need to play the role of raising difficult questions, especially since we live in an avoidant culture where it is easy to find escape, rather than struggle to find the truth about things.

I believe films of today need to play the role of raising difficult questions, especially since we live in an avoidant culture where it is easy to find escape, rather than struggle to find the truth about things. Our film professor at LV Prasad Chennai, Mr. Hariharan, always insisted that filmmakers are modern-day Shamans. Somehow, that rings true today for me, where I find that we need to project our ailments and fears out loud and allow a collective psyche to find resistance through the unsaid.

TAAK, along with its companion film Humans in the Loop, was incubated at the Storiculture Impact Fellowship 2023, dedicated to bringing narratives of India’s digital societies to a wider audience through film. Both films are presented by the Museum of Imagined Futures (MOIF)—a platform that leverages creative media to explore and mainstream critical topics at the intersection of technology, society, and culture.

TAAK | 39’ | India | 2024 | Hindi

Written and Directed by Udit Khurana

Producers: Mathivanan Rajendran, Ishan Hendre, Shilpa Kumar