Quotidian Tales

A photograph is just a moment captured. It is alive in its stillness. Be it a place, a person, an emotion or an event, a photograph is the only way to cling on to it, physically or otherwise. O ur friend who furnishes photographs for our articles is, by profession, a wedding photographer. But as any creative space cannot be constricted within the confines of common understanding, so is hers too. Her shared album of photographs is an alluring array of instants that exhibits existence in its entirety. It was on a leisurely evening as I was going through her album, I perceived, almost impetuously, the potency and the promise of a photograph. What is a photograph? Just a moment captured. A tick thought beautiful and worthy by the photographer and turned into truth. The little while, as a matter of fact, exists only through the photograph. The link to the past and the license to the future. A medium that enables you to travel through time. Take a look at the above photograph...

Engaging your child with artwork can be more effective than you ever thought. It is emotive and expressive at the same time. A ugust was an assault of activities. We were moving. To pack my world into boxes and bags was itself a challenge. More daunting than the previous time. On top of that, it was vacation time for my kids. With an explorer on the loose and a terrific toddler in tow, working my way through was barely feasible. I was running out of resources to fittingly engage my little one when a proposal popped up to my rescue. I was wrapping the goodbye-gifts for our near and dear ones. I called my son. I asked him if he too would like to make ‘little somethings’ for whosoever he wanted. Just tokens of love to be presented before he parted. He considered the suggestion for a while. After all, it meant relinquishing his extraordinary exploits in favour of sedentary and organised occupation. Somehow he seemed convinced. I think it gave him a sense of importance. Little di...

Teachers and parents have their work cut out to shape our kids for an AI world. C hildren are the future. Shaping them, along with their parents, are their teachers. But when Sophia, the world’s first humanoid, grabbed headlines three years back, it threw a challenge to the teachers of today. Among the various areas where Sophia could be of use, forecast by creator Hanson Tech, education was one. Artificial intelligence (AI), of which Sophia is one of the finest examples, is permeating every sphere in our lives. Its expanding reach is shrinking the scope for human employment, through automation. Teachers could soon find themselves replaced by AI. IBM’s AI tech, Watson, is famed for being able to beat human intelligence. AI’s appeal lies in being super-fast with 100 per cent accuracy, an enormous memory and malfunctioning that is logically deducible, unlike a capricious human temper. People will have to come up with new ways to add value to their profession to stay on th...