As a kid, it was with great affection that I used to say that my favourite authors begin with the letter R. RK Narayan, Ruskin Bond, JK Rowling, Rudyard Kipling and Arundhati Roy. Nobody got me more emotional than RK Narayan. Be it Swami’s relationship with his grandmother or the scene of grandeur during the wedding he described in his version Ramayana. During different timelines of life, I have often found myself immersed in pages of The Guide. The subtle mix of elan, joy and wit inspires one through the tough times of life. With Rusty, the Himalayas were a common force between us. I have always used this phrase from his book, ‘Mountains in my Blood’. He had said it in the context of missing them while being in London. For me it came soothing when our family packed our bags to move to Delhi. I had laid my hands on an omnibus by him and realised that he is not a children’s writer alone. Which is when I first read The Room on the Roof. It is an excellent and most brilliant depiction of love and friendship. He wrote it when he was 17. The hidden hero in me wanted to break this record. But on a serious note, since then, it was a yearning to meet him each time we visited the hills. I’m sure I’d find the marvellous Uncle Ken returning from a badminton game hopping through the cedars.
For many millennials, J.K. Rowling took an entire generation on a flight of imagination. Perhaps the last time readers went this smitten by a fantasy world was with Alice in Wonderland. Before the internet set in in every household, we had read the first few of the series and for a boy of 11 the magic was enthralling. When the first website of Harry Potter was launched as a pre-cursor to the movies, we were all hooked on to the monitor checking if Quidditch was as we had visualized it to be? Around the same time, the poem ‘If’, which I have as my phone’s wallpaper became my life’s iChing or Geeta. Rudyard Kipling, while a poet has brought out the highest degree of motivation. About Arundhati Roy, I will be candid; it was only the way she described the moments that remained with me. Her graphical yet romancing vision could make it haunting enough to find ourselves in that incidence. I will always want to write or tell scenes like her.
I wasn’t just fixated to the R’s. I love Mark Twain, Vikram Seth, George Orwell, O Henry, and many others with an almost equal affection. I write this because each author above for their personality has touched my heart and my mind. They have become the reason why I perhaps prepared my own personality in those adolescent years. While someone gave me the power of curiosity, someone gave me the perspective of looking at life, someone ensured that I never back down and for someone it was always about keeping the humor intact. And this brings me to my WIP – Dilemma that is, what happens when Artificial Intelligence encroaches the minds of the writers of the day? Will there be space for inherent innocence? Or what happens to the readers when everyone starts writing for vanity? Will cultural appropriation be rampant? Or will only metrics mean how brilliant an author is? Will withstanding the test of time rule out? Or will the pleasure of imagination be compromised? Will the wildest centaurs and unicorns be visualized on Grok and Mid-journey?
There is something missing when a paragraph feels like it could have been written by anyone, anywhere. Our English is starting to sound the same. The small oddities that once told us a real person was on the other side of the page are quietly ironed out. I doubt if the AI style of writing inspires readers with the same alacrity as in the pre-AI years? AI-generated text, tends toward a sameness that may be informative, but is hard to fall in love with. Beyond the plot, reading was always a quiet, private revolution of the self. Something shifted inside us as if we were awakened. It is these words that lead to a beautiful provocation to create or change. With AI, we risk losing it when the struggle of writing is outsourced to a command prompt.
I know that across India, as a society we are embracing AI with speed. Companies are putting in a lot of efforts for AI to become accessible. There are certifications and masterclasses offered by a battery of institutions and opinion leaders. I am personally looking forward to the vernacular disruption and I expect a lot of unique ideas to take shape. I believe in the coming years, there will be an equilibrium achieved which will be the start of a knowledge society. As humans we will then eventually strive for excellence at each phase of life. But that’s if everything goes well, and there is utopia. When that happens, I simply hope that we keep one small corner of our language non-negotiably human. And that we can still have the luxury to ‘be ourselves’ without having to optimize.
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