BENGALURU: As someone far removed from science, I find the mention of Artificial Intelligence (AI) amusing. It began as a boon, and then like a Steven Spielberg thriller – is now being spoken about as a bane. Personally, I am not afraid of AI taking away my job, since I don’t really have one. But amidst all the jobs that AI is threatening to take away, there is one that nobody seems to be speaking about - the local storyteller.
Before computers, the Internet, and endless OTT options, every class had a storyteller who regaled their friends with detailed narrations. These storytellers would risk being beaten up by the teacher ‘for talking too much’, only to bring to life stories that they had experienced. In my class, it was Varun Dixit.
Varun’s parents were liberal and ‘allowed’ him to watch movies, unlike the rest of us in class. And so, he would watch lots of movies during vacations and narrate them all to us in mind-blowing detail. When Tina entered Rahul’s college in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Varun added the details of the dress she wore.
When Karan and Arjun were killed, I was told of the blood dripping from the swords. But he wasn’t limited to movies only. Saas-bahu serials, ghost stories, or mythological sagas he had a knack for keeping us hooked. When I later watched these movies on television, I realised that his narrations were actually more entertaining than the movie itself!
When I left school, I found out that every batch in every school had its own Varun Dixit. Long before content creators, these were ‘content narrators’. They told their stories at their own pace. The first half would be narrated on the bus journey to school, and the second half on the journey back.
As my teachers tried to drill concepts into my head, I was lost in the excitement of the stories. These content narrators would often leave you hanging at a cliffhanger, only to resume the story when they felt like it. Their style of AI was ‘Artistic Interpretation’. Add some masala here, a twist there, and shake it all up with some background music. They had to remember the stories, enact them, and sometimes add background music to enhance the narrative.
The best part? You couldn’t fact-check their stories. This was an era before smartphones, Google, or even basic internet access. If Varun said Akshay Kumar jumped off a skyscraper into a pool of sharks while singing a song, you had no choice but to believe him. There was no Rotten Tomatoes, no IMDB ratings, and no YouTube videos you could check. His word was law. They probably didn’t know it back then, but in their own way, these narrators made a Monday Double-Maths period more tolerable. When we were made to kneel down outside the class, a revenge saga made the punishment bearable.
When I look at children in school buses today, I wonder if the legacy of story narrators still exists to this day. Are there kids who narrate stories to their friends? Are they allowed to add their own masala, or does a kid pull out a smartphone and do a ‘fact check’ on their stories? Today, entertainment is a personalised experience.
Algorithms decide and recommend stories for you. You skip the ads, then skip the intro, and eventually the movie itself. So here’s to them: the Varun Dixits of the world. The ones who made stories larger than life, and who, in their own small way, gave us the cinematic magic that no AI ever can!
(The writer’s views are personal)