Nine-year-old Adiv Singh, nearly lives the life of a child from the 1980s. He has nearly no access to screen of any kind—phone, laptop, or tablet. He gets only an hour of TV on Saturdays, and gets access to a laptop strictly for school work, under the watchful eye of his mother, Samiksha Singh. She ensures he stays on the project and does not stray into the Internet. Amazon’s Alexa helps with research for school otherwise,  without the need to drop down the digital rabbit hole. 

Samiksha, a former journalist with Doordarshan, says, “This is why he gets the time to play musical instruments, practise Indian classical vocals, and study music theory. He is also a rank-holder in his class. Because he has never been around screens, his cognitive skills are amazing. He can do high-level arithmetic orally—adding, subtracting, dividing, and multiplying up to 13 digits.”