In The Machine Is Learning Solanki places his characters at the heart of the man-versus-machine debate. His protagonist Saransh Malik is tasked with a confidential project to automate the jobs of 552 employees of Bansal Life Insurance Corporation (BLIC). To do so he must travel to various branch offices and interrogate the very people his AI machine is to replace. Within this ethical conflict, Solanki adds Jyoti, Saransh’s ex-journalist girlfriend, and Mitesh, his colleague. Between Jyoti and Mitesh, Saransh is drawn out of his apolitical, amoral vacuum and is forced to confront the consequences of his actions. Through him, Solanki elucidates the struggles of being a corporate drone, of being torn between the thrill of solving a problem, corporate success, and the guilt of its implications. The peak is where Malik faces an Oppenheimer moment of sorts gazing at the horror of his own creation.
What is evident from The Machine Is Learning is that Tanuj Solanki is a master of the déjà vu question. His characters point out the same little niggling concerns we all have. In this latest novel, the protagonist stands outside the branch offices of his employer Bansal Life Insurance Company (BLIC) ruminating over how financial hubs ‘happen’, starting from a cluster of homogeneous offices initiating a cycle that feeds on itself. This is a question all of us have, at some point, languorously asked: “Why do similar offices cluster around an area?” Then we toss it away in the spirit of corporate weariness. Solanki’s characters echo that meandering mental interrogation rather succinctly. It is a joy to pick up on his grasp of Indian corporate culture in the novel. He creates a Holmesian mechanism - a description of events that puzzles and intrigues the reader followed by a revelatory explanation, an explanation that the reader feels she should have been able to deduce on her own. Take the case of the lunch with branch manager Veera that Saransh and Mitesh manage to escape; the reader is then told that lunch is a good excuse for local bosses like Veera to squeeze information about their bosses from Head Office reps like Saransh and Mitesh.
Solanki’s protagonist is doomed to explore the vagaries of his intellect as he reluctantly soldiers on at work. Through Saransh, the author captures so well the contradictions we acknowledge rather begrudgingly in our logical processes, the contradictions often caused due to emotions and morals. This is crucial as it foreshadows one of the biggest arguments in the man-versus-machine debate. A machine that is capable of pure logic, of tolerating zero logical inconsistencies, wouldn’t it make better decisions than any of us? Solanki pulls this off rather elegantly as we watch Saransh’s compartmentalization between work and morality crumble in the face of Jyoti’s interrogation. At a key juncture, Saransh goes, “What else can I say? I’m doing my job, man. There is no reason to be emotionally attached to this or that.” He musters this with the naivete of an employee who believes emotional detachment is a Zen-like quality to aspire to.
{{/usCountry}}Solanki’s protagonist is doomed to explore the vagaries of his intellect as he reluctantly soldiers on at work. Through Saransh, the author captures so well the contradictions we acknowledge rather begrudgingly in our logical processes, the contradictions often caused due to emotions and morals. This is crucial as it foreshadows one of the biggest arguments in the man-versus-machine debate. A machine that is capable of pure logic, of tolerating zero logical inconsistencies, wouldn’t it make better decisions than any of us? Solanki pulls this off rather elegantly as we watch Saransh’s compartmentalization between work and morality crumble in the face of Jyoti’s interrogation. At a key juncture, Saransh goes, “What else can I say? I’m doing my job, man. There is no reason to be emotionally attached to this or that.” He musters this with the naivete of an employee who believes emotional detachment is a Zen-like quality to aspire to.
{{/usCountry}}In The Machine Is Learning Solanki presents us with a coming of age story of the Indian who lives in a bubble. His insights into the confusion and angst of middle-class India when confronted with its hypocrisy is reason enough to read this novel and keep it close. Few can critique capitalism for its flaws when their own measures of individual success are key to its existence; it is hard to strip down that which has made you what you are today. During the course of a single lunch, Saransh sees Mitesh’s hypocrisy when it is pointed out by Jyoti. The same Mitesh who ridicules BMW owners for using the housing society’s clean water to wash their cars then launches into a rant about the unfair demands of his domestic help while employing them at low salaries. This contrast cuts to the heart of Indian morality for Mitesh considers himself a fair man. The thrust of Solanki’s debates is the ‘vulgarity’, as Saransh terms it, that arises from our selective biases. These are the product of the company we keep and the information we consume.
Solanki uses some recurring tropes of contemporary Indian fiction including the humanities girl-meets-MBA slave. The wheel turns and the same spokes appear again. The same flimsy defences of the system are employed - the hopelessness of trying to stop progress, the ubiquity of the system, and how non-participating leads to feelings of inadequacy, “if I don’t, someone else will”.
Through the pairing of Saransh and Jyoti, Solanki makes his characters politically and morally conscious without being swept up in waves of tokenism and armchair activism. It is quite telling that Saransh realizes he is in love with Jyoti immediately after she calls him ‘a decent man’. Perhaps that is the best any of us can hope for, to be decent people.
Percy Bharucha is a freelance writer and illustrator with two biweekly comics, The Adult Manual and Cats Over Coffee. Instagram: @percybharucha