AI-infused robots as siblings vs adopting an orphan

Note:

• #SiblingStories is a blogging train hosted by Ila Varma in collaboration with the Brand Ang Tatva. Thirty esteemed bloggers from blogging fraternity have joined hands to participate in the Blog train for #SiblingTalk reviving the sweet and tickling hours spent with loving siblings and revive golden memories of the past.
• This post is written by me obviously… Arvind Passey. I write a column for The Education Post besides uploading articles on my blog. Travel and photography interest me and so does art. I have been sketching on my Surface Pro4 but for Inktober I have begun drawing artworks on my sketchpad too. My media kit can be accessed on my blog… search on the right top corner.

For a few moments let your imagination travel to a small town where there are two small kids (both still a few years away from teenage) finishing sucking the mango in their hands while standing on an open gallery on the rear of the first floor of a charming double-storey house facing the fort. The fort, of course, is at a distance and there is a large vacant expanse of land in between. The road in front of the house connects the posh civil lines area with the old city. The mid-sixties are yet to see a rush of cars and most well-off people have Lambretta or Vespa scooters like those one sale at go2scooter.

The two kids decide to throw the mango seeds or ghutli with full force so that it crosses the terrace to land somewhere on the road in front of their home.

‘I’m going to win this time,’ says the younger brother, ‘my mango has a ghutli with less hair and will travel further.’

‘We’ll see,’ says the elder brother, and swings his arms seven times before releasing it.

Siblings have fun_the mango ghutli episode

The boys rush to the front balcony and look down to scan the road. To their shock they see an old man who has parked his vespa bang in the middle of the road, looking up. He shouts, ‘You two. Hey, you two. Yes, you two. Did you just throw these ghutlis on me? Are you trying to kill innocent people on the road? What have the young ones become these days? Demons, I’d say. Ill-mannered. Are you listening?’

‘Yes sir. Sorry sir.’

The man waved his arms aimlessly, saying, ‘No one can save this country now,’ and drove away. The boys had just had a narrow escape. They looked at each other and smiled. I was the elder and my younger sibling said, ‘That was interesting. We must do this again.’

‘Soon,’ I said.

The band of brothers concept

Sibling bonding has a fair amount of pranks making it stronger. It isn’t without a reason that groups of friends in school and college too call each other ‘bhai’… particularly those who think of and put into action all pranks. I remember when I was a Gentleman Cadet at the Indian Military Academy we were divided into platoons and we were like brothers pulling each other up on difficult route-marches and the BPETs (Battle Proficiency and Endurance Tests). There are umpteen of Hollywood war movies where even strangers come together to become ‘band of brothers’ and end up saving each other. The point is that the nurturing of strong bonds begins with the way siblings deal with each other. I wasn’t surprised to read that even Jennifer Aniston wrote: ‘Where would you be without friends? The people to pick you up when you need lifting? We come from homes far from perfect, so you end up almost parent and sibling to your friends – your own chosen family. There’s nothing like a really loyal, dependable, good friend. Nothing.’ So you see, becoming ‘parent and sibling to your friends’ is more than a metaphor and is the base on which every sort of relationship rests.

This doesn’t mean that siblings are always smiling and speaking softly with each other. Far from it. The other day I read something interesting that a friend had shared on Instagram. He wrote:

When I was small, my younger brother was pestering me to give him my pencil. I refused and hit him with a pillow and he shouted, ‘Mummaaaa, bhaiya has hit me with the radio. Help!!!’

Even I recall my telling one of my brothers who was a good ten years younger that he would have massive watermelon trees growing inside him when I saw him swallowing a couple of those seeds. The look of horror on his face has stayed on and makes the three of us smile even now when we talk about the past.

If I were asked to sit down and track all the good, bad, and ugly things that we brothers have done together, I will need weeks to put them all down on paper. Imagine my younger brother running to my Inter-college with my sheets and portfolios to get them signed from the Physics, Chemistry, and Biology teachers because I needed all the time to catch up with the syllabus and the practical tests were scheduled in another two days. Another interesting incident is about the time when I willingly opted to cycle all the way to my college because my brother was getting late for his early morning tuition and wanted the keys to our Lambretta scooter.

All good and fulfilling relationships that prosper have some sort of an umbilical connect with the word ‘sibling’. Billie Eilish compared even his fans with siblings when he remarked, ‘I don’t even call them fans. I don’t like that. They’re literally just a part of my life; they’re a part of my family. I don’t think of them as on a lower level than me. I don’t think I’m anything but equal to all of them. So yeah, they’re basically all of my siblings.’

When families get smaller

What I sometimes worry about is that with so many relationships-tutorials emerging from #SiblingStories and #SiblingTalk we are in for some real-time shock with an entire generation having opted for a single child. Imagine a life without brothers and sisters staying in the same home. Well, we do still have cousins and first cousins but with everyone staying in separate homes even the advantages of poaching siblings from the extended family is now remote.

There are so many lessons that most of us learn from sibling bonding that it does appear to be rather difficult to find a reasonably powerful replacement. I have believed that even making friends is easier when one has learned this art at home and with all the time at one’s disposal.

By definition, the word in modern English has come mean ‘brother or sister’ though in old forms the meaning was more spread out and included relatives. The ‘sibb’ in sibling points towards kinship and has had some sort of a cursory bonding with love and friendship. This word has had its roots coming from Germanic forms and even other languages use the same basic word for sibling, brother, and sister. An interesting derivation in Turkish says that their word for sibling has two parts one of which means the ‘belly’ and so the extension to ‘womb’ isn’t far-fetched. Thus the Turkish translation for sibling would mean a ‘belly-sharer’. But hey, belly sharing is getting rarer now with our one-child obsession. We do not yet know how this is going to affect human relationships in the long term spanning multiple generations… but I guess a lot of fun memories are certainly on the verge of extinction.

We have anyway slipped from having siblings to becoming accustomed to having a sibling… and now if a single child obsession continues, the only alternative is to hope for AI-infused bots to make their entrance.

Specky, my wife, had been reading this last part and couldn’t resist the temptation to give a fairly valid suggestion that I must add here. She said, ‘Why robots? We have plenty of orphans who can be adopted as the second child, right? Sibling fun needs to live on.’

Siblings now vs siblings then

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Blogtrain where more than thirty bloggers write on ‘siblings’ #SiblingStories #SiblingTalk

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Read the next series of #SiblingStories contributed by Alpana Deo
#SiblingStories Blog Train is hosted by #varmaila in association with #angtatva
To reach the starting point of this #blogtrain, hop onto varmaila and follow the linky links to read interesting tales of #SiblingTalk.

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Arvind Passey
09 October 2018