It’s 8 o’clock in the morning in the middle of a hot summer month in India. Mrs. Behera, a high school Mathematics teacher in a public school in Bhubaneswar, an ancient spiritual destination that has seamlessly blended into a modern city, thanks to German architect Otto Koenigsberger. All is set for the start of the online class for students of Class X from Mrs Behera’s school.

In ordinary times, this would have been the month when the entire school would have taken a break for the summer vacation. These, however, are extraordinary times, requiring extraordinary measures. Remote learning, apparently, is the only saviour for an academic session stalled abruptly—especially for the batch of students that are preparing to graduate after taking a federally designed pan-India competitive examination.

Actually this scene could typically have played out from most places on earth these days, and more than likely from the Silicon Valley in California—a place where I firmed up my technological moorings during four separate stints in the USA. For now, though, we are in the unusually quiet city of Bhubaneswar, widely considered the software capital of south-eastern India.