India, April 5 -- In 2024, Big Brother is watching, listening, reading DMs, tracking link clicks. He is a pair of eyes that never turns away, but is usually hidden from view.

Our world may look different from the bureaucratic dystopia of George Orwell's 1984 (published in 1949), but the book's key themes - totalitarianism, mass surveillance, the manipulation of truth -remain sadly universal.

It wasn't always this way. There was a time in the 1980s (ironically) and '90s when the transparency and interconnectedness made possible by new technology sparked such exuberance that many retellings took the form of comedy and spoof, as even BBC poked fun at the idea of a technology-led dictatorship. (More on those works in a bit.)

In the 75 year...