We are thrilled to announce that we’ll be hosting Vauhini Vara and Radhika Iyengar discussion on Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, Vauhini’s latest book.
Tune in at 8:30 PM on 29th August HERE to learn more about the impact of AI on our lives today.
About the Book
Searches is half memoir, half historical reportage exploring the role that technology has played in Vauhini’s life - how it has changed the way she uses language, from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen, to using social media as the Wall Street Journal’s first Facebook reporter, to testing early versions of ChatGPT, all while adding to the trove of human-created material that Big Tech exploits. Searches illuminates Big Tech’s incursion into our lives, while proposing that by harnessing the collective imagination that taught us to communicate in the first place, we might invent a nobler, freer relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another. It is a book that asks us to examine the boundaries between human and machine all while being strikingly intimate in its approach towards Vauhini’s own life - her sister’s death, her family falling apart and her struggles with technology.
About the Author
Vauhini Vara is a Canadian and American journalist and author. Her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, was published in 2022. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In India, the novel won the Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize and the Times of India Author Award.
Radhika Iyengar is an Indian journalist, writer, and recipient of the 2018 Red Ink Awards in the category of human rights. She writes on arts and culture, marginalised communities, history and gender. In 2023, she wrote Fire on the Ganges: Life Among the Dead in Banares, which won her the Kalinga Literary Award (Youth) and the Gaurang River Literary Prize for Best Non-Fiction.