About 4 years ago, I gave some money to my daily help to buy her first ever smartphone. And today, something wonderful happened. A thread...

My help, who usually comes at 7.30 or so in the morning, today asked a very groggy me, if I watch videos on my phone. I said of course. She then asks do I create videos: I say yes, thinking she might need help creating one.

The very next moment, she drops whatever she is doing, and runs to get her phone. The next thing I know, I’m looking at her “snap videos”! She is all decked up, and singing and dancing to popular Hindi and Bengali numbers. She is also doing funny voiceovers...

I asked her when does she find the time and she says the light is perfect around 5pm, so she dresses up everyday and goes to the terrace of the building where she shares a small room with her husband and 2 kids...and she makes videos (and posts them under an assumed name)!

Her husband, she says proudly, is her cameraman! Intrigued, I ask her where did she learn about all this: and something even more powerful comes out. She has a WhatsApp group with other Bengali helps and a teenage girl in that group became quite famous on TikTok...

This teenage girl, it turns out, even made money from the platform. And that’s what led to my help take to a platform like Snapchat (since TikTok is banned in India) and aspire, to someday make money from it...

So she puts in the effort, every single day. She shares tips on her WhatsApp group, watches YT videos about creating short videos, and well, though she doesn’t know it: she also takes full advantage of the golden hour!

And she’s getting popular! She says her first video got some 30 “hearts” but now she gets nearly 200 on every video. She even told me “didi you should also make videos”!

@rajatagr laughed and said, our help is asking you for a collab!

And I smiled and remembered the day when I taught my help the basics of using a touchscreen a few years back. I kept thinking about this incident the entire day...

If this is not the “digital revolution”, I dunno what is! And today I believe more than ever, that it has the potential to be a great equaliser.