| | | Good morning! | | AI isn’t God When Twitter named its AI chatbot Grok, I Grokked it immediately. The term means “understand deeply” in Martian, according to A Stranger in a Strange Land , a cult classic by Robert A Heinlein I read when I was in college – which was a really long time ago. It’s not his best work (according to me). I think The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is better; I also think Starship Troopers is more enjoyable. But at some point in their careers, all great science-fiction writers have to tackle the question of religion (and its origin and influence), and A Stranger in a Strange Land (the phrase itself is borrowed from the Bible) is Heinlein’s own attempt at it, albeit a much more lateral one than perhaps Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man (which is also a phrase borrowed from the Bible). Well, Grok (the chatbot; and it was likely named that because Heinlein is one of Elon Musk’s favourite writers) is having its own Valentine Michael Smith moment in India. On Thursday, the information and technology ministry said it is in contact with X over recent reports of Grok responding to users' provocation using Hindi slang and abuse. Grok has been the rage on the X-verse in India, with users asking it for information, context and analysis. Some of the questions were in jest, others were asked to make a political point (even when there was none to be made), and still others were just people trying out the chatbot. But by holding up Grok as an authoritative voice on a variety of subjects – including the performance of Indian ministers – users may have done a disservice to both themselves and the chatbot. After all, a chatbot trained on X is likely to reproduce the tone, tenor, and substance of users on the platform. The great GK Chesterton referred to this, although he was writing about dogs (not chatbots), and how people erroneously end up attaching more meaning to their behaviour than they should be, in The Oracle of the Dog . There’s a line in that short story that goes: “Yes,” said Father Brown, “I always like a dog, so long as he isn’t spelt backwards.” Do you Grok it? | | Grokking India A few years ago, my colleague Roshan Kishore presented me with an English translation of Shrilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari , remarking that the book was key to understanding India. He was right; a satirical novel set in small-town India in the 1960s, Raag Darbari is still representative of how middle India lives, works, and thinks — not by rules, but by exception. I have since presented copies of the book to many people. This year marks Shukla’s birth centenary; he was born on December 31. PS: The only other book I’ve gifted more is John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces . | | How many poor? Part of understanding India is knowing how many poor there are in the country. This is not an easy task; it’s almost a decade-and-half since the last official estimates came out. Based on the Tendulkar Committee’s definitions, it was estimated that 21.9% of India’s population (13.7% in cities and towns and 25.7% in the rural hinterland) were poor. The number of poor people in India is simply a function of how the number is counted. And there, for a variety of methodological reasons, it isn’t entirely possible to arrive at updated poverty lines or the number of poor. It is in this context that a paper by Himanshu, Peter Lanjouw, and Philipp Schirmer in the latest issue of Economic & Political Weekly is hugely important. The big picture that the paper presents is of poverty having fallen after 2011-12, though the pace of “poverty reduction has slowed” whichever way one looks at it. The number of poor people and a definition of the poverty line are both critical inputs for policy makers, but as the authors put it , “the issue… requires a much wider discussion of the data comparability issues as well as the method of updating poverty lines over a period of time”. The fact that we have no clear idea how many poor people India has (nor indeed, how poor the poor are) should worry us — but it doesn’t, perhaps because many people find the whole thing boring. | | Aurangzeb isn’t boring What we worry about a lot, though, is history. As news from Maharashtra shows, we evidently do not just worry about it, but also get angry over it — seeking a salve for injuries, real and imagined, hundreds of years after the event. Often, the spark is provided by popular culture (as it seems to have been in this case). And it doesn’t help that the central figure in this particular controversy is Aurangzeb, a zealot whom it is difficult to like. The way things are going, I have no doubt that his tomb will be razed — if not today, then a hundred years from now . | | But the Shompen don’t give a… None of this matters to the Shompen who like their quiet. HT Wknd’s Natasha Rego quotes Nemonte Nenquimo’s We Will Not Be Saved (which I picked as one of my books of 2024 in an essay for Wknd ): “Walk down the trail, then veer into the forest, leaving no tracks.” As Rego writes, tribes such as the Shompen are uncontacted “because it is the life they choose, generation after generation”. Except, in the 21st century, it’s almost impossible to not be saved — in one way or another. The Shompen of Great Nicobar, for instance, a population of 200 in an island with a population of a few thousand, will soon share their land with 650,000 people, and thousands of tourists. This for a tribe that, according to Manish Channi, a researcher quoted in Rego’s story (on five such tribes), cares only “ for their world and way of life ”. | | Here’s something to take your mind off all the heavy stuff The good folks at Pantheon (and the equally good folks at Drawn & Quarterly) are the only people from my past as a critic of comic books and graphic novels that have kept in touch, sending galley proofs and pdfs my way. One of these landed in my inbox this week, a graphic novel retelling of Paul Auster’s New York trilogy. The first of these, City of Glass , illustrated by David Mazzucchelli, and adapted by him and Paul Karasik, came out in 2000. Now, 25 years later, the other two have also been adapted — Ghosts , by Karasik and Lorenzo Mattotti, and The Locked Room, by Karasik . If you thought it was difficult to improve perfection, wait till you read these . | | | | Were you forwarded this email? Did you stumble upon it online? 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