The Kothandaramaswamy temple's month-long annual festival began. The elaborate eagle chariot bearing the icons of Rama, Sita, Lakshmana, and Hanuman wound its way around the streets surrounding the temple. This Garuda Sevai is held on the festival's fourth day. As I joined the deities’ procession, I noticed a mechanical crane doggedly following the palanquin. The chariot, for all its grandeur, was made of wood. Fuelling its movement was human labour. There was little chance of the chariot developing mechanical failure. Even if something were to happen to the chariot, there were plenty of eager volunteers to render assistance. To bear god on his way around his realm is considered a blessing, not something to be taken lightly. So why was the crane there?

Before this annual festival itself, during the celebrations of Rama Navami (Rama's birthday), there is a flag-raising ceremony. The standard of Hanuman, Rama's most ardent devotee, is raised to signify the onset of the annual festival in a month's time. This flag, denoting the imminence of this temple's grandest ritual complex, continues to be raised before the Kallar headmen and under the Vaduvur inter-village regional polity's (natu) aegis. In the south Indian context, the extension of ritual honours, and the order of their distribution, is a medium for establishing and publicly displaying rank (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1976; Appadurai 1981: 73; Dirks 1993: 120–126, 289–292; Fuller 2004: 80–81; Dumont 2000: 156, 337). Here, these ritual honours publicly signal the sacerdotal authorities’ (Brahmin caste’s) acknowledgement of the Kallar natu's authority. The Brahmins have staked prior and primary claim to the Kothandaramaswamy temple. They also increasingly appeal to a far-flung Tamil Brahmin diaspora to fund its rituals and subsistence. Kallar villagers mutter darkly about the Brahmin clergy behaving as though the temple is a diasporic project, unmoored from its situation in Vaduvur. Nevertheless, the temple's annual festival cannot commence without the oversight of Kallar headmen. Whatever the actualities of political authority, this is a symbolic admission of Kallar political dominance in Vaduvur. It ritually demonstrates the assumption by Kallar headmen of the royal role of patrons of this ritual and temple.

The procession that usually concludes the goddess Selli Amman's festival was nearly abandoned. In 2007, her newly refurbished temple was ritually consecrated. Meanwhile, the Kallars and the lower-caste Muttiraiyars were disagreeing about the goddess's procession route. At stake was the question of who has the right to offer their sacrifice to the goddess first. The Selli Amman temple is another natu temple. A Kallar, of the Vandaiyar clan, was the first to initiate a festival for Selli Amman. However, the temple itself is located in the Kondaiyur hamlet, which is numerically dominated by the Muttiraiyars. The Kallars reside only on two streets. Customarily, the goddess's procession had stopped thrice. First, it stopped at Vandaiyar Street so that the exclusively Kallar congregation could offer sacrificial worship. Next, it stopped at two Muttiraiyar streets – Vemban and Mela – where the Muttiraiyars sacrificed to the goddess. Several years ago, three Kallar families had moved into the hitherto exclusively Muttiraiyar Vemban Street. According to Kamban, the Muttiraiyar watchman (talaiyari) of the Vaduvur natu:

The Muttiraiyars pointed out that the Kallars already offered a sacrifice on their own street. Theirs was the first sacrifice to the goddess. The newly arrived Kallars should not expect further privileges. Kamban elaborated:

Fearing this to be the thin end of the wedge, the Muttiraiyars refused. Kamban retorted, ‘We too pay the temple tax. So, we are also entitled to rights in the temple.’

Sevu Vanniyar, advisor to the natu headmen, disagreed. Ever since they moved to the street, these Kallars had been worshipping before the Muttiraiyars. But the Muttiraiyars were only protesting that year. This agitation was about the Muttiraiyars wanting more than the rights they had already been allotted to the temple.

Kavya, an Upputanni lineage-wife, tried cajoling her husband and brothers-in-law to enact a worship during the 2007 sacrificial season:1

Another lineage-wife, Malar, tried shaming the men into action:

They tried to rally their men right up till the very last Tuesday and Friday of the month. But to no avail. The women were disgusted, most particularly with the behaviour of the lineage headman, Ayyakannu.

Again in 2008, the men began to demur as soon as the sacrificial season came around. A lineage-wife again tried shaming the men to rouse them to action.

Sacrifice is an essential part of the ethical covenant between a lineage and its tutelary deity, the withholding of which invites terrible retribution. Sacrificial worship is the very apotheosis of the lineage ritual cult. Along with the funeral, it is through this sacrificial worship that the lineage is made material. Through funeral rituals, the densely woven person is unravelled, and the lineage is posited as the first and most fundamental element of the Kallar self and society.

Chapter 2 examines how the use of “quantified self” as a shorthand for personal data necessarily indexes only one end, rather than the full spectrum, of technologists’ understanding of digitization and their own roles within it. Looking closely at the way digital executives talk about data in forums such as QS, among others, in fact reveals the contradictions, professional obfuscations, and hyperbole that continue to shape the self-tracking sector. Digital professionals may occasionally enfold concepts such as the "quantified self” into promotional “pitch theater” to stage self-monitoring devices as gadgets that produce faithful and objective data. My interactions with practitioners in these settings, however, point to the more varied social, legal, and fiscal advantages professionals reap from representing digital self-tracking and the data these devices produce as both plastic and precise. This chapter argues that the surface impression that technologists relate to data and modes of self-monitoring in reductive terms has to be weighed against ways executives pursue both digital ambiguity and objectivity as a meaningful corporate strategy.

To begin evaluating the interaction of “quantified self,” the concept, and Quantified Self (QS), the collective, with digital entrepreneurialism, it’s necessary to understand the influence of its originators, Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, on this construct’s form and function. Chapter 1 reviews how the two authors have coined the term and established the group as an expression of what Wolf has called the “culture of personal data” (Wolf, 2009). While the founders defer to the explanatory power of culture in situating the collective within the technological imaginary, this chapter examines how their own personal backgrounds as journalists and Wired magazine editors have shaped the semantic meaning of “quantified self” as a catchphrase that refers to the means and outputs of digital self-tracking and especially to QS as a community of technophiles. Although the role the forum has come to play within the commercial self-tracking sphere analyzed in this book does not fully align with its originators’ intentions, the framing they established has set the tone for many of the ways the collective has become socialized in the technological arena as well as how it has come to work within it.

Chapter 6 ultimately analyzes the Quantified Self (QS) as a gateway to the notions of difference that continue to shape the tech sector and therefore the devices that derive from it. As it considers the structural inequality that still constrains technological innovation, this chapter also analyzes QS as a site more specifically connected to the forms of privilege that impact how entrepreneurial extracurricular labor becomes converted into business advantage. It emphasizes that the modalities of participation that have rendered QS a community of tech acolytes unevenly regulate who can benefit from the group’s role as an instrument of professional transfiguration, connection, and access.