THE UNPLUGGED WORLD

THE UNPLUGGED WORLD is a coming-of-age fiction novel set in a near-future India where, without warning, every electronic device on Earth stops working permanently. No phones. No cars. No internet. No electricity. Overnight, the modern world goes silent. The story follows Aryan Mehta (17), a tech-obsessed teenager from Mumbai, who has spent his entire life glued to a screen — scrolling, consuming, existing online. When the blackout hits, his world doesn't just lose power. It loses meaning. Forced to flee a crumbling city, Aryan's family joins their neighbours, the Khans, on a long, uncertain journey to Rajan Mehta's ancestral village of Ambavane in the Konkan hills. What begins as a desperate escape becomes something far more transformative. In the village, the two families must learn — from absolute zero — how to grow food, fetch water, cook from scratch, and build a life using only their hands, their instincts, and each other. They fail repeatedly. They argue. They break down. And slowly, beautifully, they begin to grow. Through his friendship with the bold and resilient Zara Khan, through the quiet wisdom of his grandmother Nani, and through the humbling honesty of the soil itself, Aryan discovers things that no screen ever showed him — who his parents really are, what he himself is capable of, and what it means to truly be alive. When word arrives that electricity may be slowly returning to the cities, both families face the hardest question of all: do they go back to the world they knew — or stay in the one they've built? At its heart, The Unplugged World is not a story about a blackout. It is a story about a boy who needed the world to go quiet before he could finally hear himself.