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 then you know why - BTW it’s “a murder”)  If you’ve observed them even briefly, their behaviour is too coordinated to be random. They remember who annoyed them. They tell their friends. They collaborate. Sometimes it feels like they are holding a morning briefing before executing the day’s plan. But reading that article triggered a small loop in my head: If crows have language, who else have we been ignoring?

Whales and dolphins are obvious candidates. For years, scientists have said their sounds are complex. Maybe they have been saying the same thing we say during office calls: “Can you hear me?” “What’s happening?” “Don’t trust that guy.” Just in a different frequency. Chimpanzees; They share almost everything with us except our foolishness. Parakeets; extremely chatty, extremely aware. Anyone who has lived with one knows they don’t just copy; they respond. And then… cats. Cats are the diplomats of the animal world. They don’t try to impress you. They don’t need your validation. They observe. They make internal notes. They communicate on their terms. If they had a language model, it would refuse 80% of prompts.

Interestingly, fairy tales figured this out centuries ago. Every witch has two companions — the cat and the crow. It makes you think. People then were more observant than we are now. They didn’t have data, but they had attention. They weren’t afraid to acknowledge that some creatures seemed connected to something deeper, something we couldn’t name. Maybe those stories weren’t fantasy. Maybe they were early documentation; understood through intuition, not instruments.

So why did the memory of Corvus come back now? I’ve been in tech long enough to see the industry change shape multiple times. From instrumentation to IT to AI. From hardware to logic to abstraction. Early in my career I thought intelligence was simple: solve the problem, show the output, move on. But over the years I’ve seen intelligence in far stranger places; in people who never speak up in a meeting but know exactly what is going wrong; in processes that should have failed but didn’t; in stray animals who navigate chaos better than educated humans. And now, AI models are showing us that birds we dismissed as background noise have their own systems. Their own world. Their own “version of us”.

I guess the crow came back into memory to remind me that intelligence is not a ladder. It isn’t hierarchical. It isn’t even exclusive. It’s scattered everywhere; in different forms, different speeds, different intentions. We’ve simply been too busy with ourselves to notice. We have this habit of assuming silence means nothing. But silence may just mean we don’t understand the language. The more I think about it, the more I realise how limited our perception really is. We go through life believing we are the main characters in a play that has been running for millions of years before us. Meanwhile, a crow looks at us with one eye, mildly amused, as if saying, “Finally figuring it out, are you?” Maybe that’s why the story stayed in my head. Maybe Ray was pointing at something we all feel but rarely articulate; that intelligence is everywhere, but awareness is rare. And now with AI, we are decoding signals from creatures who never needed our approval in the first place. Whales. Dolphins. Birds. Even the humble crow sitting on a wire near a tea stall.

It makes me think: What else is out there that has been speaking all this while? What other languages are we surrounded by but too self-absorbed to hear? Perhaps the universe has always been crowded with conversations. Perhaps fairy tales were more accurate than we ever realised. Perhaps witches didn’t choose cats and crows. The cats and crows chose the witches.

All I know is this, the next time I see a crow tilt its head and stare at me with that familiar, slightly superior look, I’m going to stare back and acknowledge it. Not as a bird. But as another equal of a much wider, older, and infinitely more intelligent universe.

C