Heart to Heart

                     “Graveyard is just another place” We are a devoutly religious nation. Religion runs in our veins, dwells in our marrow, reigns over our neurons, lords over our day-to-day actions, tickles our hearts, resolves our existential dilemmas, guides our destinies and oversees our peaceful journey to the grave with a hope for a berth in heaven. We breathe religion, we sing religion, we shout religion, we fight religion, we live religion, we die religion. The politicians flaunt religion, weaponise and glorify it by building bhavya edifices (while we need world-class schools and hospitals) at taxpayers’ cost and use them as their ‘brahmastra’ to polarize society, bulldoze opposition and win elections.   Religion has its vile cousin too. We call it superstition. Both are in fact conjoined twins often impossible to tell apart. They gel and blend like water and milk. This unwholesome ‘opiate’ breeds fake babas, god-men and gurus who exploit the vulnerabilities of the gullibl

  Watch out!   ChatGPT comes sneaking “I think; therefore I am.” This profound Descartes’ quote is fast losing its gravitas as AI-inspired ChatGPT sneaks its way into our computer-savvy world. Not just essays, articles, speeches and text messages but the new technology can churn out even serious research articles that are indistinguishable from those produced by the thinking human mind. And, writers of all hues beware!:   existential crisis for you is at hand. With ChatGPT at beck and call there won’t be any need to rack one’s brains to stitch together a plot and then, burning mid-night oil, weave a tapestry of words and inject emotions, satire, pathos, suspense, melodrama, horror into a laborious writing endeavour. Thanks to ChatGPT, the PC will deliver a sizzling story or a novel in a matter of minutes. So each one of us could be her/his own Shakespeare, Keats, Manto, Premchand or Mahadevi Verma! No wonder that ChatGPT has already made its way into the hallowed corridors of law c