Organic intelligence in the time of artificial intelligence

To be organically intelligent in these times is to be artificial intelligence . even post-modern-but as a truly modern man/woman/child with choices, not a robot clunking at the knees and beeping at the eyes to the tunes of a machine we do not control.

Are your stainless-steel thalts and katoris a bore? No, heavens, no! Don't throw them away. Let me tell you why. They may have an engraving that says a name, dot-graven discreetly, of your ancestor, or someone who gifted it to your forbearer. In any case, imagine the generations of meals that have been served in and polished off them! They hold the memory of our foods and fads, our eating wisdom, or our gluttonous foolish nesses.

Brass tumblers, copper ladles, cracked but defiantly holding out, old china, spoons now twisted and tarnished but with enamel work on them, blackened kadhais in which succulent curries have been made over the decades, (remember the old brass vessels which kalai-walas used to refresh for you?), brazen tavas on which an endless stream of rotis have been made, sharp toothed coconut scrapers, knives of differ ent widths and lengths which have sliced or chopped vegetables, fish, perhaps meat, those old coffee bean grinders with han dles that have turned the gashed, blackishberry to aromatic brown powder, the old four-wedge wooden butter and ghee churner-hug, don't junk, them!

All these belong to an endangered species. They are a genre of kitchenware that is being overtaken by modern accessories that work on electricity, dangle on wires, have to be serviced, and when pronounced unserviceable, have to be junked.

Likewise, old saris of cotton and silk nbre worn to threadbare ness, dhotis, kur tas and leg-wear, hand-knitted sweaters, mufflers, and gloves with gaping holes, do not discard them. Keep them, or at least some of them. They are just old, not dead. and can be repaired by darners if not by your deft fingers. Have you seen a darner at work?

Rafuwalas are restorers of the first order, teasing out threads from the rims of the tear, linking their points. They are sur geons of fabric, their needles being surgical instruments

Watches, timepieces, and clocks have been a great casualty of time's passage. Old time-holders are now difficult to maintain. their spare parts almost all extinct. As are the old-style watch-repairers who, with magnifying glasses that would fit into their eye-sockets, would fix the many wheels within wheels, and miniature rods and bars inside them. They were like ophthal mic surgeons, who knew the retinas, cor neas, and irises of the time-holders. In the Hindi belt, they were known as ghadisaaz Do not cast the old time-holders away. They hold in themselves the impulses, sec ond by second of time spent wisely or squandered prodigally.