The Man Who Tagged Everything

The trouble with Prakash Menon began, as most troubles in Bandra West do, with a lost set of car keys.

It was a Tuesday in March — not a particularly notable Tuesday, except that it was the day the Arabian Sea decided to smell worse than usual and the day Prakash's wife, Sunita, discovered that their Honda City's keys had vanished from the brass bowl by the front door where they had lived, undisturbed, for seven years.

"You moved them," Sunita said. This was not a question.

"I did not move them," Prakash said. This was technically true. He had not moved them. He had, however, placed a library book on top of them three days earlier, and the keys had slid, via the library book, off the table, behind the shoe rack, and into the narrow crevice between the rack and the wall — a crevice that would not be discovered for another forty-eight hours, during which time Prakash would disassemble and reassemble the shoe rack, accuse the maid, apologise to the maid, and briefly consider the possibility that the keys had been taken by a very specific and targeted poltergeist.

It was during this forty-eight-hour ordeal that Prakash encountered, via a sponsored post on Instagram that he would later describe as "divine intervention disguised as targeted advertising," a product called ekTAG.

A QR tag. You stick it on your things. Someone finds your thing, scans the tag, contacts you anonymously. No app needed on the finder's end. No batteries. No subscription. Done.

Prakash ordered six tags that night. They arrived on Thursday. By Friday, the Honda City keys had been tagged, the spare keys had been tagged, his laptop bag had been tagged, and his briefcase had been tagged. Sunita observed this activity with the cautious neutrality of a woman who had been married for fourteen years and had learned to distinguish between her husband's phases (the sourdough phase, the cryptocurrency phase, the inexplicable two weeks of daily cold showers) and his actual personality.

"You're tagging things," she said.

"I am implementing a personal asset recovery system," Prakash corrected.

By the following Tuesday, Prakash had tagged: both passports, the emergency cash envelope in the bedroom drawer, each child's school bag, the television remote (which was lost daily and found daily, usually in the same cushion fold), the family's shared iPad, his reading glasses, his driving glasses, his glasses for "looking at the computer without getting a headache," the dog's collar, and — in a moment of philosophical ambition — the brass bowl by the front door where the keys had originally lived.

"You've tagged the bowl that holds the things you've tagged," Sunita observed.

"Redundancy is the hallmark of robust systems," Prakash replied, quoting incorrectly, something he had read about NASA.

The tagging might have remained a domestic eccentricity, confined to the Menon household and the bemused tolerance of Sunita, had it not been for the Incident at Prakash's office.

Prakash worked as a senior project manager at a mid-sized IT services company in Andheri, a role that required him to attend between four and eleven meetings per day, none of which could have been emails but all of which should have been. On a Wednesday in April, following a particularly gruelling sprint retrospective, Prakash left his laptop bag in the cafeteria. Not unusual. He left things in the cafeteria roughly twice a week, a frequency he considered average and Sunita considered diagnostic.

But this time, the bag had an ekTAG.

Forty minutes after Prakash returned to his desk and discovered the bag's absence, his phone buzzed. A message from an anonymous sender, routed through the ekTAG system: "Hi, I found your bag in the cafeteria. Black laptop bag, HP laptop inside? I'm at desk 4B-17, third floor. Come get it whenever."

Prakash retrieved the bag in under three minutes. No PA announcement. No awkward email to the all-staff list. No security escort. No shame.

He stood at desk 4B-17, bag in hand, and looked at the young woman who'd scanned the tag. She was already back at her screen, headphones on, unbothered by the small miracle she'd facilitated.

"Thank you," Prakash said.

She pulled one earbud out. "No problem. Cool tag, by the way. Where'd you get it?"

This was the moment, Sunita would later call it "the radicalisation" when Prakash transitioned from user to evangelist.

Within a month, Prakash had tagged the personal effects of every willing colleague on the third floor. He gave a presentation at the monthly town hall titled "The Frictionless Return: How QR Tags Can Save 14 Person-Hours Per Quarter in Lost Asset Recovery." The presentation included a pie chart, a process flow diagram, and a testimonial from Rajesh in Accounts, who had been reunited with his umbrella after leaving it on the 6:47 Churchgate local. Nobody had asked for this presentation. HR let it proceed because it was less painful than the compliance training that had been scheduled in its place.

Prakash's manager, a sensible man named Sudhir who had survived twenty-two years in Indian IT by being aggressively reasonable, pulled him aside afterward.

"Prakash. The tag presentation."

"Yes?"

"It was... thorough."

"Thank you."

"Please don't do it again."

But it was too late. The third floor had become a tagged ecosystem. Lost items were returned in minutes instead of days. The "Lost and Found" box near reception, a cardboard purgatory that had been accumulating orphaned Tupperware since 2019, was empty for the first time in living memory. Morale, according to the quarterly engagement survey, ticked up by 3%, which HR attributed to the new kombucha machine but which Prakash knew, with the quiet certainty of the righteous, was the tags.

The philosophy came later, as philosophies do, late at night, after the children were asleep and Sunita was reading in bed and Prakash was sitting on the balcony watching the lights of Bandra flicker against the dark bulk of the sea.

He had begun thinking about what a tag actually was. Not technically — technically, it was a QR code printed on durable material, encoding a URL that routed to a messaging system. He understood that. But what was it ontologically?

A tag, Prakash decided, was a declaration of faith. Not religious faith Prakash's relationship with religion was cordial but distant, limited to Onam, Diwali, and those moments in turbulence when he discovered he believed in God after all but faith in strangers. Faith that the person who found your wallet would want to return it if only they could. Faith that the barrier between a lost item and a returned item was not human selfishness but human inconvenience.

Prakash thought about the auto-rickshaw driver who had once driven three kilometres back to return a phone Sunita had left in his vehicle. The driver hadn't been rewarded. He'd been thanked, profusely, and offered money, which he'd refused. "Madam, it's your phone," he'd said, as though the act of returning it required no more explanation than breathing.

The driver hadn't needed a tag. But the next driver might. And the one after that. The tag wasn't for the saints. It was for the ordinary, decent, busy people who'd return your things if it didn't require them to become amateur detectives.

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By August, Prakash had tagged 247 items across his home, office, and the vehicles of six consenting neighbours. He maintained a spreadsheet. (Of course he maintained a spreadsheet.) The spreadsheet tracked item, tag ID, date of tagging, and — in a column highlighted in green — "successful returns." The green column had fourteen entries.

Fourteen times, an item had been lost and returned via a scanned tag. Fourteen tiny stories of human connection: a stranger in a cinema who found his daughter's water bottle; a janitor at the children's school who returned his son's lunch bag; a fellow commuter who found his reading glasses on the Andheri platform.

Each return was a small, anonymous act of grace. The finder scanned, messaged, and moved on. No names exchanged. No social media posts. No performative virtue. Just the quiet mechanics of decency, enabled by a two-centimetre square of printed code.

Sunita, who had watched the entire arc from scepticism to acceptance to something approaching pride, asked him one evening: "Are you going to tag the whole city?"

Prakash considered this seriously.

"Not the whole city," he said. "Just enough of it that losing something doesn't ruin your day."

He looked out at Mumbai — vast, chaotic, teeming, losing and finding itself every second of every day — and thought: That's not nothing.

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ekTAG — For the Prakashes of the world, and the strangers who help them. ektag.app