Ideas travel further than the people who had them.
Essays that follow a few of them forward: Indian thought, history, science, and the machines we now ask for answers.
Featured essay
If AI Does the Work, What Does the Work Do to Us?
Work leaves behind two things: what we produce, and what we become able to do. AI can deliver the first without the second.
More from the library
Recent writing
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Hyderabad Before Hyderabad
A search through inscriptions turned the western edge of Hyderabad, and the place I call home, into a much older neighbourhood.
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When everyone can create, what makes creation ours?
I rebuilt this website by describing it to an AI. It wrote most of the code, and I still hesitate before saying I built it. Where does authorship sit now?
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When machines become oracles
I built an astrology engine and refused to call its outputs predictions. Modern AI raises the same question about what a model can actually see.
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The age of answers, and the lost art of questions
Answers used to be expensive and are now nearly free. If scarcity has only moved rather than disappeared, what became scarce is knowing what to ask.
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The Layered Birth of Gods
One temple accepts only flowers; another remembers blood. Read those differences as fossils rather than local flavour, and the gods start to look assembled.