A confession

A confession The Right Side of the Sky I will confess that in my initial judgment I was wrong about artificial intelligence. When I first heard of these applications, the ones that summon information in seconds, smooth a sentence, fill a page, or draw an inference, I felt the natural resistance of someone who has believed that words are earned through attention, loss, love and suffering. But lately I have observed more carefully, discerning its use with care. There are things it does remarkably well. It curates, retrieves, organises, explains, with a speed and patience that can put even the well-stocked library to shame. In the realm of logic, analysis, and structured thought, it is formidable. I will not pretend otherwise. And yet. I know that sometimes I can produce a word that feels alive. But I give the entire credit to Divine Grace. There is something that a creative process does: it transmutes the ordinary into something rich and strange. I have asked AI to attempt a similar miracle. It tries, but it falters. Not because it lacks words or grammar. It has those. It can even produce something that resembles a poem at first glance. But something essential remains absent. It does not know what the words cost. It cannot produce a line with the pathos of Keats, the force of Shelley, the depth of Shakespeare. It cannot carry the metaphysical ache of Ghalib, or underline an inspiration like Prasad, or summon life from the marrow of history like Dinkar. Not because it lacks vocabulary or form. It has absorbed their patterns and studied their structures. But it does not know the weight of a silence after a particular word. It cannot feel how restraint itself becomes emotion, or how an image acquires force from the life standing behind it. Poetry, in any language, asks not merely for linguistic competence but for a pulsation within. A machine can graze its surface. It cannot reach its ground. This brought me, in a roundabout way, to a podcast and to a memory I carry quietly. Dr. Sharat Chandra, who heads Neurosurgery at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, was speaking about the human mind. He is not, for me, a distant expert seen only on a screen. In March last year, my wife was suddenly diagnosed with a meningioma. We were all distraught. It was Dr. Chandra who operated upon her. He did so with a precision and composure I can describe only as grace. But what remains with me is not merely his skill. It is his humanity. His voice never hurried itself. He listened before he spoke. There was a stillness about him that felt almost spiritual. And despite spending a lifetime literally inside the human brain, he spoke with striking humility about the mind itself. Very little, he said, is truly understood. The deeper one goes, the larger the mystery grows. He also said something I have not been able to set aside: that the world is desperately short of good listeners. Most of us, he observed, are too occupied with our own chaos, what we want to say, what we fear, what we lack, to truly hear another human being. Watching Dr. Chandra through those difficult days, I came to understand something else. He used both sides of his mind in perfect measure: the analytical precision required for surgery, and the human presence required by a frightened and rudderless family. Reason and empathy, not in opposition but in harmony. That, perhaps, is among the highest forms of human achievement. Not the triumph of one side over the other, but their quiet integration. But not all of us are capable of that balance. Not all of us are called to it. And perhaps that is all right. If we must err, let us err on the side of feeling. The world has never suffered from an excess of empathy. It has suffered, endlessly and in every century, from the opposite, from reason without conscience, logic without love, efficiency without mercy. A world with more empathy and less cold efficiency would not be a weaker world. It would be a more liveable one. What we really miss now is not someone who knows all facts, but someone who can walk into a room of grief and know what not to say. The person who can calm what is inflamed. The person who can write a line that makes someone feel less alone at two in the morning. No algorithm reaches there. I do not believe any ever will. Human intelligence is not computation with feeling added as an afterthought. It is reason and emotion together, inseparable: memory, imagination, suffering, restraint, speech, silence. It is made as much of sighs as of sentences. A machine may learn the grammar of consolation. But grammar is not grief, prediction is not love, and simulation is not experience. Human beings know the difference because we feel it. I am not a perfect writer. This is not a perfect essay. There are sentences here that could be tighter, arguments that could be sharper. I know this. But what I am trying to say comes from somewhere real. It comes from watching a quiet surgeon listen to a frightened family in a hospital corridor in March. It comes from sitting with a poem that refuses to yield to logic but sometimes yields, in the early morning, to something else entirely. It comes from the conviction that the most important things we are capable of cannot be outsourced or automated without being lost altogether. My heart is in the right place. I say that not as a boast, but as a confession, the kind one makes after walking a long distance and wanting to be certain one has not drifted too far from oneself. The left sky is being blown away. Let it go. The right side of the sky, where poetry lives, where compassion breathes, where silence still carries meaning, that is ours to tend. That is the sky I have been trying to reach, charioted by these words and their eloquent spaces. No machine will ever go there, because that territory is not a limitation of technology but a definition of the human. And I believe, with some certainty, that it is where my last breath would want to rest. Ashutosh Agnihotri A serving IAS officer from Assam