Two films show our present is the future we once feared

'Humans in the Loop' and 'Taak' are rooted in real-life premises, where the tech burdens fall on the marginalized

- Poulomi Das

Hindi films often turn to dystopia to grapple with technological dread, then filmmakers Udit Khurana and Aranya Sahay chart a more unsettling course—rooting their narratives in real-life premises.

For Khurana, the starting point for Taak lay in 2020 headlines that detailed how Chandigarh's sanitation workers were being forced to wear GPS-enabled tracking watches under the guise of efficiency.

Sahay's Humans in the Loop, on the other hand, draws from reporting that illuminated the invisible workforce sustaining artificial intelligence: indigenous women employed in data-labelling offices set up by tech companies across rural India.

Both films don't imagine the future as much as reveal the overlooked realities of the present where the burdens of surveillance and automation fall most heavily on marginalized lives.

Since its premiere at Mumbai MAMI Film Festival last year, Sahay's 72-minute feature debut has had an award-garlanded festival run, most recently winning the Grand Jury Prize at Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA) in May.

Set in Jharkhand, Humans in the Loop follows Nehma (Sonal Madhushankar), a tribal woman who returns to her ancestral village after a separation.

In order to gain custody of her teenage daughter and infant son, Nehma—a college graduate—takes up a job as a data-labeller at a nearby centre, effectively feeding information into systems that power an American tech company.

Alongside other women hunched in front of their computer screens, Nehma spends her time labelling images of crops, weed and pesticides.

On some days, she marks parts of the human body—right arm, left knee—so that when the algorithms are eventually shown a hand or a leg, they know what they are looking at.

And on others, she is training it to recognise a football foul or differentiate between turmeric and ginger.