Cory Doctorow, nerd, science-fiction novelist, cyberactivist and digital maven, is walking around the Gateway of India on a warm, bright day in September, far from London, where he lives and works, or his hometown, Toronto. He is in Mumbai on the first leg of a journey that will continue onwards to Hong Kong, Beijing, Japan, and then tracks back to London, before he shuttles between Canada and England to celebrate his wedding to Channel 4 producer and gaming guru Alice Taylor, and takes off again, to destinations numerous and far-flung.

Looking at him now, in casual, quasi-backpacker gear, lounging on the warm stone benches overlooking the Arabian Sea, it’s not difficult to understand that this man embodies the modern global citizen. The delightful thing is that he would be just that even were he never to leave his desk. Every day, through a myriad of channels on the Internet, millions of people are connecting with this man. Follow the Doctorow trail on the Web as you would a rabbit-hole in a Lewis Carroll book, if you will. Dive headfirst into the renowned BoingBoing.net, a news and views site that keeps up as a ‘directory of wonderful things,’ which he writes for and co-edits. Browse through an issue of Wired magazine, to which he contributes on issues facing policy and process in the digital world. Here again, his writing appears in Popular Science. The Globe and Mail. The Boston Globe. Flip through 2007’s prestigious Best Of American Short Stories anthology edited by Michael Chabon to find Anda’s Game, his short story about responsibility, disease and childhood, set in a fantasy-gaming cul–ture. Spot him in cult web comic xkcd, which peppers its storylines with guest appearances from ‘Cory Doctorow,’ who appears in red cape and goggles, as the comic’s resident superhero. Leaf through the New York Times, and find his name again, this time in the Bestseller lists for his most recent novel, Little Brother. The backpack, of course, is a laptop carrier.

Conversation, copious and articulate at his end, functions at the level of trivia as well as idea. Doctorow understands how both affect the modern mind better than most: on the Internet, both are inescapable. And what about travel? Well, same goes. He pow-wows with writers and entrepreneurs in Mumbai and Pune, but spends more time walking around the city, watching people at work, soaking it in.

Doctorow is one of the pioneers of that increasing human tribe that lives simultaneously in the digital world and physical reality, each sparking off and flowing into the other to create new meaning, new lifestyles and new laws. To his loyal readers on BoingBoing, he could be anywhere in the world as he updates the blog with news and writing about technology, culture and politics. In some respects, he could actually be anywhere; as he pauses to take in the graffiti on the walls, for example, or stoops to examine the made-in-China curios in the shade of the monument, universal elements of street life for him. India, or at least the city he’s visiting, holds no shadows. He read Indian newspapers online for weeks before he arrived here. Technology being what it is, it meant local news from all over the country vying for his attention. “I read about everything in my RSS feeds,” he chuckles. “I got regular updates on crop yields in Gujarat.”

He’s here to research his latest work in progress, a novelisation of Anda’s Game (available to read online, like all his other work). Doctorow’s science fiction belongs to a new wave of the genre that takes computers, hi-tech, and digital life today at face value, instead of treating them as metaphors for the human condition. Technology, as he sees it, is the human condition, informing every step of our lives and changing the very fabric of civilisation. Over a walk and later, at breakfast, the thread runs through the conversation, which turns from gaming entrepreneurship in India to animation, the right to privacy, developmental economics, and breakfast foods. “I didn’t really talk to anyone in IT-related NGOs in India,” he says. “But what I heard from entrepreneurs in the IT sector made me fear that India’s ISP regulators have allowed a bunch of giant, stupid, dinosauric telcos to cripple India’s capacity to use IT for development.” Yet another stumbling block on the path of progress in a country where, as he’s heard, telecom lines have a history of being damaged by thieves after the copper wire in the fibres. Yet he understands the problems of the high priests of technological development, which, as he describes it, is a question of attitude. He rejects both the determinism of the nerd – the notion that good tech–nology will overcome bad law – nor the fatalism, which leads one to think that there is no place for the intellectual in an irredeemably corrupt political life.

One way forward, then, is going back to the basics in unstructured, creative ways. “I like the One Laptop Per Child scheme,” he says, referring to the international program that aims to give the poorest children in the world functional, low-maintenance laptops to empower education. “One of the object–ions to the scheme is that there’s going to be no supporting infrastructure for the program – no technical support. But I think the beauty of it is in letting the kids figure it out for themselves. They’ll fix their own stuff, and then they’ll help the others fix it.”

It is a vision born of experience, an optimism with roots in his good, long look at the way people and their technology interact with each other. He hops into a taxi on his way to Chor Bazaar at the end of our meeting. Does it mean more queues, more crowds, more strangeness for a first-time visitor? But there’s only one cure for unfamiliarity. “Did you take a bus, or a train?” I ask him of his journeys, later, over email. He’s already moved on to China. “I took both,” he replies.

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