One fine afternoon, a mortifying scene played out in the class of sociologist Shiv Visvanathan, now a professor at O.P. Jindal University in Sonepat, Haryana. His undergraduate computer science students told him they preferred pornography to dating a woman. When asked why, they said in unison: “Girls are unpredictable. Porn isn’t.” Visvanathan, who has studied the connections between science, culture and society, describes the episode as “devastating”. For several years, he has noted the impact of the info-highway on students: A kind of stupor that’s eating into their memory. This highway can give riders a high, the kind a drug might give.