India, May 18 -- Are your stainless-steel thalis and katoris a bore? No, heavens, no! Don't throw them away. Let me tell you why. They may have an engraving that says a name, dot-graven discreetly, of your ancestor, or someone who gifted it to your forbearer. In any case, imagine the generations of meals that have been served in and polished off them! They hold the memory of our foods and fads, our eating wisdom, or our gluttonous foolishnesses. Brass tumblers, copper ladles, cracked but defiantly holding out, old china, spoons now twisted and tarnished but with enamel work on them, blackened kadhais in which succulent curries have been made over the decades, (remember the old brass vessels which kalai-walas used to refresh for you?), brazen tavas on which an endless stream of rotis have been made, sharp-toothed coconut scrapers, knives of different widths and lengths which have sliced or chopped vegetables, fish, perhaps meat, those old coffee-bean grinders with handles that have turned the gashed, blackish berry to aromatic brown powder, the old four-wedge wooden butter and ghee churner - hug, don't junk, them! All these belong to an endangered species. They are a genre of kitchenware that is being overtaken by modern accessories that work on electricity, dangle on wires, have to be serviced, and when pronounced unserviceable, have to be junked. Likewise, old saris of cotton and silk fibre worn to threadbare-ness, dhotis, kurtas and leg-wear, hand-knitted sweaters, mufflers, and gloves with gaping holes, do not discard them. Keep them, or at least some of them. They are just old, not dead, and can be repaired by darners if not by your deft fingers. Have you seen a darner at work? Rafuwalas are restorers of the first order, teasing out threads from the rims of the tear, linking their points. They are surgeons of fabric, their needles being surgical instruments. Watches, timepieces, and clocks have been a great casualty of time's passage. Old time-holders are now difficult to maintain, their spare parts almost all extinct. As are the old-style watch-repairers who, with magnifying glasses that would fit into their eye-sockets, would fix the many wheels within wheels, and miniature rods and bars inside them. They were like ophthalmic surgeons, who knew the retinas, corneas, and irises of the time-holders. In the Hindi belt, they were known as ghadisaaz. Do not cast the old time-holders away. They hold in themselves the impulses, second by second of time spent wisely or squandered prodigally. Their successor, the digital horrors, throws the time onto your face in various permutations of the numeral 8 electronically displayed, with a scary colon between the hour and the minute, the minute and the second, as if to say "Your time is almost up." And books! The older, the more precious. Not just because they are likely to have been authored by great writers but because they have been read by eyes now closed, held by fingers now gone to another world, with the joy of what they saw, and felt in their minds and hearts. They might, if sold for a few rupees to the raddiwala, get torn up by wrapper-makers, or, if they are lucky, find their way to second-hand bookshops where discerning collectors of old books may well find them, and the names written in them, irresistible. Be your own second-hand bookshops, your own antiquarian bookshelf. Then there is music. Slow-moving records gave way to LPs which were replaced by cassettes, which then gave way to CDs. Now, we do not need any of these. We have only to turn on our laptops, mobiles, or Bluetooth devices! But please hang on to the old music stores. They will soon be priceless as the repositories of true music, the real Beethoven and Bach, the true Amir Khan, Ravi Shankar, Begum Akhtar, and MS Subbulakshmi. They will be priceless when the market is serving up as Beethoven which sounds like, or even better, than him but is not him, that sounds like MS but is not the nightingale of India. Where, you might ask, is the space for all this real, original, true stuff? We are now becoming nuclear families, moving from houses with several rooms to flats with no more than two bedrooms (and a hall and a kitchen). How do you expect us to keep old things because they are lovely when we barely have space to keep what is just plain useful? This is where I would like to clarify that much as I would like us to preserve these old objects, I am citing them here as metaphors for what is real. A related word - related to real - is organic. Here again, by organic, I do not mean the fruit, vegetables and cereals that have not been doused in chemicals. Those organic purchases are wholesome and we need them. But what I am talking about is what is organic in our AI times - something more important. It is that which is real to one's inner being, that speaks as one's inner voice - in other words, that which is true. In our AI times, we need to make choices that are organic, that are real, that are true. Along with its amazing benefits, especially in medicine and education, AI leaves us choices - 'to AI or not to AI'. But, very soon, that choice is going to become merely academic. The choice will not be to AI or not to AI but between this AI and that AI. AI should neither be worshipped as a new God nor seen in terrorised fright as Faustian. It should be kept in its place. AI should not be the one making our choices, we should make our AI choices. The 'real and the organic' versus the 'artificial and wispily overpowering' is about being AI's boss, not its serf. And it is about where we see what AI offers and not offer ourselves to it. In warfare, AI is going to make mass devastation totally easy. Will we let AI choose that apocalypse or will our organic intelligence choose to shun and outlaw such collective suicide? It is intelligent to be artificial and wise to be organic. It is smart to be artificial; it is bright to be organic. Metaphoric organic intelligence is, plain and simple, the power to know and eat food, not food-alikes, to drink real stuff (good old spirits not excluded), not fizz and foam. To be organically intelligent in the times of artificial intelligence is to be modern, even post-modern - but as a truly modern man/woman/child with choices, not a robot clunking at the knees and beeping at the eyes to the tunes of a machine we do not see, do not know, and certainly do not control....