In 2022 I read an article titled "Human Touch" by Karishma Mehrotra about tribal women in Jharkhand working with artificial intelligence as data annotators. Annotators ‘label’

images, videos and audio in order to improve machine learning algorithms. When exposed to new data, these applications learn and develop by themselves, learning to differentiate

between objects and recognise patterns, much like a child. This provided the inspiration for a civilizational tale—one that explores the interplay between a traditional society and technologies of the future. This provided the inspiration for a civilizational tale—one that explores the interplay between a traditional society and technologies of the future.

While researching in Jharkhand, I came across remnants of colonialism - buildings, arches, institutions, and a painful history of imperialism that destroyed indigenous communities,

dismissing their knowledge as “primitive". The rise of AI, largely shaped by Western perspectives, threatens to replicate this exclusion. This phenomenon, known as "AI Bias," perpetuates human prejudices through limited and biased data that is used to train machine learning models, eliminating the identities and cultural knowledge of the very people who are recruited to label this data.

My mother's work as a researcher in tribal regions of India left an indelible mark on me. It has long inspired me to tell a story set in Jharkhand.​