Corvus and Other Companions
Every once in a while some memory jumps out from nowhere. Not a big one. Not a life-changing one. As if it had been waiting patiently behind some door in the mind. This time it was Corvus — a short story by Satyajit Ray I had read in The Illustrated Weekly of India. Years ago. I must have been in the 5th or 6th Standard. Nothing dramatic in the story. No twist. Just a man fascinated by a crow. Back then it was not an interesting read nothing more nothing less. No morals just a simple story. Why did I remember it ? A few days back I read an article while looking at use cases of LLMs (AI) — the kind of article that looks innocent until it flips your perspective. Some researchers fed crow sounds into an AI model. The model, free from our assumptions and arrogance, found structure. Rules. Patterns. Recursion. What we comfortably call “language”. It didn’t surprise me. Crows have always seemed like they are in on a secret. (Think about the collective noun for them and th...