“Twelve fours…?” exclaimed my 14-year-old daughter, who had meticulously planned her study schedule for final exams, coordinating her classes and subjects with times and days of the week.
“48,” I replied, busy adding spices to a curry in the kitchen. As I gathered curry leaves, mustard, cumin and fenugreek, I paused to remember that my mother-in-law would have added whole red chillies. The thought awakened my senses, bringing back memories of the pungent aromas that once filled the kitchen.
I remember my mother-in-law standing upright with a towel wrapped around her head after washing her hair early in the morning. She was the queen of her domain. She added homemade dried and freshly ground spices to her curries, creating a symphony of aromas in the kitchen. Her cooking was full of love and lifted the spirits of those who shared this hearty meal.
From the kitchen doorway, I could see my eighth-grader son reaching for his calculator to finish his math homework.
“Hey,” I cried, “leave that alone and use your head!”
He had already typed in the numbers and said slowly and ramblingly, “Why do I have to do the math in my head when I can just use a calculator?”
I struggled to find a convincing counterargument.
My mind was taken back to sunny childhood holidays spent memorizing my multiplication tables. The reward? The coveted 50 paisa coin or a rare note of thanks from my father.
I was always amazed at my dad's talent for mental arithmetic. He would triumphantly recite the answers while we frantically searched through our memories. He would beam with pride as he thanked his schoolteacher for helping his entire class memorize their multiplication tables.
Back then, memorization was an essential part of education. Now, 40 years later, I realize that my memory is useful. Numbers are like fire: they can be a tool that can either burn or help you, depending on how you use it.
I think about the vast repository of knowledge we have acquired through our hard work, available to us at all times. But now, with each passing day, we are surrendering our memories to artificial intelligence. How will my children fare as adults, with many of their most important memories stored in the cloud?
Are smartphones making us less intelligent? Is our memory failing? We used to memorize phone numbers: the phone numbers of our married sisters’ homes, her unmarried friends (if you were her brother), and our neighbors. In the days before home phones, we built good relationships with the neighbors who had phones and used their numbers as our friends’ and relatives’ numbers. We proudly memorized the numbers of our family doctor, our versatile handyman, our grocery store, and our trusted coworkers who could submit vacation requests. Now, I doubt if I can remember more than five. I was shocked and realized that the only two I knew were mine and my husband’s.
During our relationship, my husband's landline number made my heart flutter every night. On cold winter nights, I went out to line up at the STD testing booth. My fingers trembled as I dialed the number, not knowing whose voice would answer the phone: my husband or his mother.
Now, we hand over the burden of numbers and symbols to our ever-helpful digital companions. Anticipating our memory decline, apps promise to locate our glasses, car keys, house keys, and even our cell phone. I think about addresses and routes that once remained in our memory for decades. Some people can retrace places they visited as children 30 years later. But with digital maps, we don't have to remember anymore.
We are creating AI doppelgangers equipped with information we deem not worth remembering, and over the course of evolution, unused features will decay.
I think about the oral traditions that have shaped and passed on human civilizations over millennia: great epics, myths, and histories preserved through the simple yet remarkable capacity of the human mind to remember and share memories.
On our mothers' laps and in our grandmothers' cozy beds, we learned who we are, where we come from, and what our path to humanity is. Through simple stories, our grandmothers spoke of kindness, loyalty, family ties, and community bonds. Their enchanting oral traditions, woven through song, poetry, and music, connected us to our traditions and the energy that gives us life.
The great tradition of transmitting knowledge through memory has fostered rich debates among scholars and philosophers that continue to challenge us to this day. Across cultures, oral storytelling has been revered; elders have passed on wisdom and cultural values, and ensured the preservation of collective memory.
Modern education has come to rely heavily on writing, an acquired skill as opposed to the innate ability to learn by listening. It is through this natural process that we acquire our native language effortlessly, deeply and intimately. Oral traditions are inclusive, and anyone can create, listen and teach. Technology has given us access to vast amounts of information, but it has also brought about what experts call “digital amnesia.”
Think about the place of memory in our lives. Aren't we essentially in a relationship with memory? Wordsworth's “Daffodils” celebrates memory and explains how recollection is a rich source of creativity and healing.
Memory is a great resource available to each of us, individual and collective. And memory is powerful. It is memory that moves us to seek healing, atonement, justice, forgiveness, and reconciliation through peace and love. Artists often transform personal or collective memories into multi-layered stories that resonate deeply with their audience. Frida Kahlo drew from personal pain, while Sadat Hasan Manto based his stories on the shared memory of the partition of India. Interpretations of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata depend on the listener's knowledge and memory.
Can AI, like a poet, turn painful memories into pearls of wisdom?
Memory makes us human, and we must think about how to preserve it: it's a way of claiming our place in the vast universe of things that came before us, connecting with our cultural heritage, and forging our personal identity.
Ganga Mukhi is a Pune-based filmmaker, curator and film educator.
