Every newborn should come in a box.
White. Minimalist. Premium.
On the front:
HUMAN
Designed by two people. Manufactured locally.
And on the back, in very small letters:
HANDLE WITH CARE.
Because that is exactly what we do.
The child arrives naked, confused and screaming.
No Gorilla Glass.
No IP68.
No warranty.
No cloud backup.
And absolutely no replacement policy.
So we begin protecting it.
Blanket.
Mosquito net.
Sterilised bottle.
Baby monitor.
Corner guards.
Car seat.
Good school.
Better tuition.
Safe neighbourhood.
Safe friends.
Safe career.
Safe marriage.
Safe mutual funds.
By the time the child is 25, we have spent a quarter-century installing one gigantic parental screen protector between them and life.
“Beta, careful.”
“Beta, don’t climb.”
“Beta, engineering kar lo.”
“Beta, startup risky hai.”
“Beta, uske saath mat ghoomo.”
“Beta, log kya kahenge?”
We call it love.
And it is love.
That’s what makes the problem complicated.
Then We Buy a ₹1.5 Lakh Phone
Years later, we walk into a phone store and repeat exactly the same behaviour.
We buy the thinnest phone ever made.
Then immediately make it fat.
₹2,999 protective case.
₹1,499 tempered glass.
Camera protector.
Insurance.
Extended warranty.
Cloud backup.
Find My Phone.
Maybe someday:
Find My Phone’s Emotional Wellbeing.
The manufacturer spent billions making it beautiful.
We put it inside plastic before reaching the parking lot.
Because God forbid it gets a scratch.
Three years later, you remove the case.
Wow.
Pristine.
Not one scratch.
Absolutely magnificent.
You lovingly hand it to the exchange counter.
He examines it.
₹23,700.
Congratulations.
You spent three years protecting your phone…
for its next owner.
Unfortunately, Children Also Leave
The child is more expensive.
You spend 20–25 years protecting this one.
Food.
Education.
Doctors.
Coaching.
Advice.
Connections.
Money.
Emotional airbags everywhere.
Then one morning this beautiful human being whom you created, protected and upgraded looks at you and says:
“Papa, I’ll manage.”
Excuse me?
YOU’LL MANAGE?
हमने इतना manage किसलिए किया?
And then they leave.
Another city.
Another country.
Another career.
Another person becomes the most important person in their life.
Bloody betrayal.
You created the product.
Someone else gets the premium subscription.
But then comes the uncomfortable realisation.
That was the objective.
If your child cannot live without you, perhaps your protection worked too well.
A parent’s greatest success may actually look suspiciously like redundancy.
And Sometimes You Simply Lose the Phone
Airport.
Cab.
Restaurant.
Gate 23.
You touch your pocket.
Nothing.
Other pocket.
Nothing.
Bag.
Nothing.
And suddenly the object you casually called my phone becomes:
MERA PHONE!!!
Find My Phone opens.
The family emergency protocol activates.
For three years you protected that phone from every possible scratch.
But there was one thing the ₹2,999 case couldn’t protect it from:
leaving you.
And that’s when the joke becomes uncomfortable.
Maybe ownership itself was temporary.
Phone.
Job.
Company.
House.
Body.
Children.
People.
We spend enormous energy protecting things whose final relationship with us is eventually:
separation.
Which Brings Us to AI
Human beings apparently looked at thousands of years of evolution and said:
“Life mein difficulty bahut hai. Iska bhi screen protector bana dete hain.”
And we invented AI.
Don’t struggle to write.
AI will write.
Don’t struggle to research.
AI will summarise.
Don’t struggle to draw.
AI will generate.
Don’t struggle to decide.
AI will recommend.
Don’t struggle to communicate.
AI will draft.
Don’t struggle through an interview.
AI will prepare your answers.
The interviewer will use AI to prepare the questions.
HR will use AI to shortlist the CV that AI wrote.
Eventually two AIs will conduct the entire interview while both humans wait outside.
One will receive a rejection email.
Also written by AI.
Very efficient.
Nobody involved will know why anybody was rejected.
But productivity will be up 37%.
AI May Be Our Greatest Protective Case
And that worries me more than AI taking our jobs.
Because perhaps AI’s biggest danger isn’t that it becomes too intelligent.
It is that we become too protected.
Protected from blank pages.
Protected from bad ideas.
Protected from awkward sentences.
Protected from not knowing.
Protected from looking stupid.
Protected from making mistakes.
Protected from thinking for ten uncomfortable minutes before finding an answer.
We spent decades protecting our children from the world.
Now we have invented something that can protect adults from struggle itself.
And struggle has terrible branding.
Nobody wants it.
There is no:
Struggle Pro Max.
But unfortunately, almost everything interesting about a human being seems to come from it.
John McClane Never Had ChatGPT
Imagine Die Hard with AI.
John McClane enters Nakatomi Plaza.
Hans Gruber takes over.
John opens his phone.
“Give me a step-by-step plan to defeat twelve armed terrorists while barefoot.”
AI:
“I understand this is a stressful situation. Here are five conflict-resolution approaches…”
Movie over.
Twenty-three minutes.
No sequel.
The reason John McClane is interesting isn’t because he knows what to do.
It’s because he doesn’t.
He improvises.
Gets hurt.
Makes bad decisions.
Bleeds.
Gets angry.
Tries again.
His vest goes from white to something archaeologists would struggle to classify.
By the end, John McClane is definitely not in mint condition.
That’s the movie.
Imagine if he had spent the entire film preserving the vest.
Bollywood Knew This Too
Our great movie heroes rarely came with screen protectors.
Vijay didn’t emerge from Deewar emotionally bubble-wrapped.
Rancho didn’t become Rancho by following the safest career path.
Bhuvan didn’t ask for historical cricket win probabilities before accepting the challenge in Lagaan.
And Jai and Veeru’s risk-management framework in Sholay was basically:
coin toss.
Terrible governance.
Excellent cinema.
Because stories require uncertainty.
A hero who knows everything, predicts everything and avoids every mistake is not a hero.
He’s a PowerPoint presentation.
Maybe We’ve Misunderstood the Purpose of Humans
We increasingly behave as if life’s objective is to reach the end in perfect condition.
No failures.
No embarrassment.
No heartbreak.
No bad career moves.
No stupid investments.
No rejection.
No scars.
Now AI can potentially remove some intellectual scratches too.
Fantastic.
One day perhaps we will arrive at 80:
Perfect CV.
Optimised career.
AI-managed finances.
Algorithm-approved spouse.
Personalised nutrition.
No risky decisions.
No embarrassing emails.
No original opinions.
Battery Health: 91%.
Condition: Like New.
Life lived:
Barely Used.
And perhaps that is the real tragedy.
HANDLE WITH CARE…
…is excellent advice for a newborn.
For a while.
It is excellent advice for a new phone.
For a while.
It may even be excellent advice for ourselves when we are hurt.
For a while.
But Handle With Care cannot be a life philosophy.
At some point the child must fall.
At some point the phone gets scratched.
At some point you make the wrong decision.
At some point somebody rejects you.
At some point you don’t know the answer.
At some point ChatGPT should remain closed and you should stare at the bloody blank page.
Because perhaps intelligence is knowing how to avoid mistakes.
But wisdom?
Wisdom is mostly the database of mistakes you survived.
D (AI) HARD
Maybe that is our next human challenge.
Not learning how to use more AI.
We will all learn that.
Maybe it is learning when not to use it.
When to remove the intellectual screen protector.
When to allow ourselves to struggle.
When to write badly.
When to think slowly.
When to be wrong.
When to call somebody instead of generating the perfect WhatsApp message.
When to let our children fail instead of quietly clearing the road ahead of them.
Because the purpose of a protective case is to protect something until it is ready for the world.
Not to protect it from ever experiencing the world.
Your phone will eventually leave you.
Your children definitely will.
Your career might.
Your money might.
Your body certainly will.
There is no protective cover strong enough to change the ending.
So perhaps the objective isn’t to arrive without scratches.
Perhaps the scratches are proof that you actually took the thing out of the box.
HANDLE WITH CARE.
Absolutely.
But then…
take the bloody cover off.
Get scratched.
Get rejected.
Get lost.
Lose something.
Create something without asking AI whether it is good.
Raise children strong enough to ditch you.
And when life eventually asks what condition you are in, hopefully the answer isn’t:
“Like New.”
Hopefully it is:
“Heavily used.Some damage.Original parts mostly intact.Fantastic stories.”
That’s not Die Hard.
That’s D (AI) Hard.
Handle with care. Live without the cover.
