Upamanyu Biswas
Over the years, discussions surrounding artificial intelligence and its impact on the online world have proliferated at breakneck speed, mainly due to various companies’ focus on advancing such technologies. As explored in Netflix’s Indian screenlife thriller ‘CTRL,‘ an unassuming social media influencer, Nella Awasthi, becomes enamored with a new digital AI assistant that purports to erase her ex’s presence from her life. However, she soon discovers a much darker conspiracy lurking underneath the app’s foundations. It is a product of a corporation known as Mantra Unlimited, a significant force within the country’s economy that owns practically everything. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Mantra Unlimited is a Fictional Megacorporation With Insidious Motivations
Mantra Unlimited in ‘CTRL’ is a made-up organization conceived by Vikramaditya Motwane, Avinash Sampath, and Sumukhi Suresh. The company is a large conglomerate with its hands in all types of businesses. Billionaire CEO Aryan K heads the organization, having inherited his wealth from his already rich father. Owing to its influence across different domains, it is also one of the largest employers in the country. Even Nella’s best friend, Bina Mohan, works in a corporate capacity at the company and is trying her best to climb the ranks slowly. However, as the story progresses, Nella learns that her ex, Joe, found some terrible secrets about Mantra by investigating it through a whistleblower party. It also puts him in grave danger as those secrets could be damaging to the company’s profile.
While the organization is entirely fictional, it is intriguingly posed as a growing conglomerate that is driving away most of its competitors. There are not many companies similar to Mantra. However, given its size and scale, it could be compared with a real-life Indian business like Reliance Industries. Like Reliance, Mantra also has diverse interests across various fields, which allows it to grow constantly and assume a monopoly over several parts of the economy. Still, the connections are vague and far-fetched, as Mantra is presented as a more antagonistic force in the story. The same cannot be said for the real-life company. Mantra plans to exploit people’s privacy by selling their information to other companies, thereby gaining a more detailed picture of the population, which goes way past the borders of ethical conduct.
In the end, Nella learns that the digital assistant she has grown close to and believes to be her friend is, in fact, operated by Mantra. After Joe’s murder, she tries to take down the company on her own but fails when they use their vast resources to frame her instead. She eventually has to drop her charges against the company when she realizes that there is nothing she can do as an individual to beat them. Additionally, they are also responsible for sponsoring her throughout her influencer career, which makes her just as culpable by ignorance. It is a tragic moment for the protagonist and the birth of Mantra as an almost authoritarian private entity. However, their manipulative tactics are mostly confined to fiction and cannot be traced to reality.
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