This is satire. The events, characters and quotations in this story are invented.
TAMIL NADU — In a wholly invented neighbourhood, a student refreshing an exam-results portal was interrupted by the woman next door, who already knew his marks, class rank and three suitable career options.
‘The website was down, but the balcony was working,’ she explained, crediting a network of tuition parents, terrace conversations and one extremely active vegetable-shop queue.
“The website was down, but the balcony was working.”
The student’s father had planned to check the results quietly. That plan ended when a neighbour from the next street arrived to offer a detailed comparison with a child nobody in the house had heard of.
Experts at our entirely imaginary Institute of Street-Level Information say the network operates with zero latency whenever the information is somebody else’s business.
The student has asked for a privacy setting. The neighbourhood has agreed to discuss the request on every balcony this evening.