I often wonder how we managed without online maps, particularly in big cities. We stopped a lot and asked for directions, I think – asked other rickshaw drivers or shopkeepers or strangers en route. I remember trying to memorise a few landmarks and checkpoints before setting off on any journey, so that I could make it through the broad strokes of the route and then, once I was in the vicinity of my destination, rely on others. Maybe finding our way was, in a way, always a collaborative process – except, now we rely on our shiny devices, the various GPS detection apps built into Google Maps, Uber, Amazon and Blinkit.And yet, these technologies – their attempts at tracking, making our streets and spaces organised and legible to governments and corporations, fail so frequently. My home in Bangalore, for one, has three different postal codes – one corresponds to my nearest post office in Jayanagar, one is associated with everything to do with my bank, according to which I live in Banashankari, and one is associated with several delivery apps, which have located my building in J.P. Nagar. It’s often frustrating, but also somewhat gratifying chaos: an inability of administrative systems and processes to locate me easily. It is incredibly inconvenient most of the time, but because of this unmappability, finding our way remains collaborative, somewhat. Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyThis may be especially true in Bombay, too, where constant construction and change – and general bustle – make the city impossible to fully document at once. I’ve found ride-sharing apps less useful there as local knowledge of neighbourhoods are crucial. My friend and her family, who all live around Bandra and Santa Cruz, have a casual system of reporting road closures and new path findings to each other as they traverse the city, passively passing information about their home turf. They consult with each other every few days, for example, to check which route to the train station is most recently in use and which lanes have been closed since they last made the trip to the station.In Bangalore, a courier once asked me to send him my address in a chat to help him reach correctly. When I typed it out for him, he called me back and said, “Please send me your exact location. Otherwise the map will not work.” He meant that I should send him my ‘current location’, on WhatsApp. Unfortunately, I was not at the location he needed to come to, so I tried to send him the general location of my building as an attachment. That link took him to a property developer website, confusing us thoroughly. I asked my husband, who was at home, to send him his current location instead; but our actual location when sitting in our flat is far from the main gate of our building, and ad a result, the courier was shown a route from the opposite direction that didn’t actually exist.This rigmarole raised some existential doubt in my mind about what we even mean by “location”. “I am at the location,” I say to the ride share rickshaw driver; or, “Where is the location?” they’ll call me to ask before accepting a trip. The truth is the word means nothing precise at all, other than, perhaps, a point in the digital ether that we may or may not know how to get to.Novelist Hari Kunzru, in an essay for Harper’s, described revisiting London, his birthplace, searching for a city that “didn’t correspond to the official version,” a city that escaped the one where “every location had already been rated and reviewed.” In my hometown, I see this “other world” he’s searching for – our everyday mapping technologies have largely failed to actually capture and describe the actual space that we coexist in, leaving room for the unpredictable, the absurd, the messy. Ultimately, we’re often still collaborating to find our way.Apoorva Tadepalli is a freelance writer, editor and fact-checker.We’ve grown up hearing that “it’s the small things” that matter. That’s true, of course, but it’s also not – there are Big Things that we know matter, and that we shouldn’t take our eyes, minds or hearts off of. As journalists, we spend most of our time looking at those Big Things, trying to understand them, break them down, and bring them to you.And now we’re looking to you to also think about the small things – the joy that comes from a strangers’ kindness, incidents that leave you feeling warm, an unexpected conversation that made you happy, finding spaces of solidarity. Write to us about your small things at thewiresmallthings@gmail.com in 800 words or less, and we will publish selected submissions. We look forward to reading about your experiences, because even small things can bring big joys.Read the series here.