The silence after the fractious meeting stretched into weeks, a cold war within the empire. The Pratyaksha team in Kinnaur operated with missionary zeal, their success a quiet reproach to the consumer division's bottom-line focus. The consumer division, in turn, saw the civic project as a costly, ideological hobby that siphoned resources and talent.
Harsh was trapped in the middle. He was the founder, the visionary, the final arbiter. And he was paralyzed. Choosing one path meant betraying the other, and both were his children.
The pressure found a release valve in an unexpected place: Rohan, the head of the Udaan project. He requested a meeting, not in the boardroom, but in the prototype lab. The walls were covered in children's drawings and early interface designs.
"We've been following the internal debate, sir," Rohan began, his voice cautious. "The Garden versus the Market. The open tool versus the closed product."
Harsh sighed, weariness seeping into his bones. "And what does the schoolteacher think?"
Rohan allowed a small smile. "The schoolteacher thinks you're asking the wrong question. You're asking 'Which one do we build?' Udaan's whole philosophy is based on a different question: 'How do we build tools that teach people to ask the right questions of any technology?'"
He gestured to a wall where they had mapped the "user journey" for a child on Udaan. It didn't end with a finished project. It ended with a reflection prompt: "Who could your project help? Who could it harm? Who owns the data it creates?"
"The conflict isn't between your divisions, sir," Rohan said, gaining confidence. "It's inside every user. Do I use this smart speaker because it's convenient, knowing it listens to my home? Or do I join a community mesh network that's harder to use but keeps my data local? The choice isn't yours to make for millions. It's theirs. But they can only choose if they see the choice."
The idea was a spark in the deadlock. What if the empire didn't have to choose one future? What if it could embody the choice?
Harsh called the warring division heads back. He presented a new directive, born in the Udaan lab.
Project: Dvāra (The Gateway).
It was not a product. It was a platform standard. A set of open-source protocols that any device—whether a Harsh Consumer gadget or a competitor's product—could adopt to become "Kinnaur-Compatible."
A device with the Dvāra standard would have a physical switch or a clear software toggle with two modes:
1. Market Mode: The device operates as a standard, convenient, data-harvesting product. It connects to proprietary clouds, offers personalized services, and functions as sold.
2. Garden Mode: The device flips its allegiance. It anonymizes data, routes it to the local Gram-Disha node (if one exists) instead of a corporate server, and its features reconfigure to prioritize community utility over personal convenience. The smart speaker becomes a local news and emergency alert hub. The health monitor shares aggregate, anonymous data with the Arogya network for public health tracking.
The consumer division would still sell products, but they would be "dual-citizenship" devices. The Pratyaksha team would get a massive, built-in hardware network to grow their Garden. The user would get a clear, tangible choice every time they used their gadget: convenience for me, or resilience for us?
Rajeev from Consumer was aghast. "You want us to build a switch that lets customers disable our value proposition? That's corporate suicide!"
"Is it?" Harsh countered. "Or is it the ultimate brand trust? We are the only company saying, 'We believe you are smart enough to choose. Here are the consequences.' We're not just selling a gadget. We're selling agency."
The Pratyaksha team was intrigued but wary. "What if no one ever flips the switch to Garden Mode?" Bhavna asked over a video link from Kinnaur.
"Then we have learned something sad but true about human nature," Harsh said. "But if even ten percent do, that's millions of devices becoming part of the civic nervous system overnight. And the very existence of the switch is an education. A constant, quiet reminder that technology has consequences."
It was a compromise that pleased no one completely, which meant it was probably the right one. It forced the Market to acknowledge a higher purpose, and it forced the Garden to compete in the marketplace of everyday life.
The Dvāra standard would be a nightmare to engineer, a marketing challenge of epic proportions, and a regulatory minefield. But it was a seed—a seed of honesty planted in the heart of the empire's contradiction.
As the teams dispersed, grumbling but with a new, shared problem to solve, Harsh felt the paralysis lift. He wasn't choosing a path. He was building a crossroads. The future of India wouldn't be decided by him in a boardroom. It would be decided, millions of times over, by a person's finger hovering over a physical switch on a device they owned.
The keeper was not giving up his power. He was distributing it, one switch at a time. And in that distribution, he finally found a way to be at peace with both the Gardener and the Merchant within himself.
(Chapter End)