Book Review: The Many Lives of Data in India The book 'Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India', edited by Sandeep Mertia, delivers a fantastic range of meditations on how data lives, and how we, as individuals and collectives, are shaped by it. File photo of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) collecting data from a citizen for Aadhar. Photo: Reuters. Tech06/Feb/2021 About a decade ago, the CEO of a data analytics firm I worked for in Bangalore vied for the data that would be produced by Aadhaar as it was expected to connect to a series of other datasets that practically governed our life. His repeated request to the representatives of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), at a presentation which the latter made on the companyâs premises, was simply to hand over the data to him. For a company whose main line of work was to interpret data for âintelligenceâ, which is to mine data for pointers on how to proliferate business, the gigantic volume of data produced by Aadhaar and its affiliates was manna from heaven.