The Hindu Lit For Life Unplugged: Samanth Subramanian spotlights undersea cables that power the internet

Author Samanth Subramanian described the coming together of his latest book as ‘serendipitous’. 

The book, The Web Beneath The Waves: The Fragile Cables That Connect Our World, published by Columbia Global Reports, which explores the undersea cables that power the Internet and the secret battles to control them, took the centrestage at The Hindu Lit For Life Unplugged event on Friday (December 12, 2025) evening. The Cheroot malt bar at ITC Grand Chola, Guindy, played host to a packed audience for the talk by Samanth, writer and managing editor of Equator magazine, modelled after New York City’s Lectures on Tap movement. 

“In 2011, I read Neal Stephenson’s essay ‘Mother Earth Mother Board’, which delved into the network of undersea cables. I read this piece on my mobile phone then, and it felt like an engaging and entertaining reminder that underneath this immaterial internet or so we think, is a very sort of material infrastructure underpinning it and a lot of it is under the ocean. And this was completely fascinating to me in many ways,” Samanth recalled. 

In 2022, a volcanic eruption damaged the undersea cables of Tonga, an Island country in Polynesia and resulted in an internet disruption to parts of the island which reminded Samanth of the essay again. “I started wondering about how the materiality of the internet has changed since Stephenson’s essay, what the undersea cable networks look like today, how it has changed, and who was going out there and repairing Tonga’s undersea cable. I then pitched a book on this and worked on this over the next two and a half years,” Mr Samanth recalled.

The book took Mr Samanth all over the world; to the Ivory Coast, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, Madrid, Cornwall and California, and enabled him, he said, to meet a cast of exciting characters. “There are roughly 900,000 miles of such cables under the ocean, and these transmit 95% of all international data traffic,” he said. 

Undersea cables, he said, soon also started becoming a geopolitical flashpoint.”It seemed like suddenly, there were a host of bad actors around the world who started to realise that to cripple parts of a country, or its economy, or corporations, an effective way to do this was to cut its undersea cables,” he said, of the geopolitical urgency to the book. 

Mr Samanth further emphasised on how despite satellites improving, cables would still hold its place of prominence.  “Satellites cannot handle the volume of Netflix we stream, or the Whatsapp messages, emails and many other things we do with the internet. For the foreseeable future, cables will be the way the world at large recieves its internet,” he added. 

The Hindu Lit For Life Unplugged is presented by The all-new Kia Seltos in association with CHRIST (Deemed to be University) and NITTE Meenakshi Institute of Technology. Associate Partners are Orchid International School and Akshayakalpa Organic, bookstore partner is Crossword and venue partner; The Cheroot. 

In the run up to The Hindu Lit For Life on January 17 and 18, 2026, watch out for more events as a part of Lit for Life Unplugged. Follow @hindulitforlife on Instagram for more updates.