Fixed Form, Live Attention: Learning in the AI Era

Are my cognitive skills going down because I use AI too much? This question has been doing the rounds in my peer circles for some time now… and it usually leads to a bigger one. If AI can answer most (if not all) of our questions, do we still need formal classes? Isn't AI a better disseminator of knowledge than most lecturers?

It is a fair question. In many colleges, the lecturer still walks in with notes and reads them out while students furiously copy them down. Book sales, I am told, have dropped sharply because information is available aplenty. Content now comes in every form, and moves easily from one form to another. Upload a PDF on any topic to an AI notebook tool such as NotebookLM, and within minutes you can draw out summaries, flashcards for an exam, multiple-choice questions or a mind map. And when you tire of these, you can turn the same material into an audio podcast, a debate, a presentation, or even a video… The list is endless.

So, what is the role of the educator? And, more importantly, are rote learning and knowing the fundamentals still relevant?

This is where I think we can take a leaf out of Kalaripayattu.

A tradition carried by the voice

Kalaripayattu, one of the oldest martial art forms, was once a serious method of warfare and of settling duels, especially among the chieftains who ruled the region we now know as Kerala. Under British rule, the practice was suppressed in the early nineteenth century  and it went underground, to resurface almost hundred and forty years later. Practitioners credit the vaithari (the spoken commands, called out by the master, that set the order and pace of each routine) with carrying the sequences through that dark period.

The art was, and still is, taught in four stages:

1. Meythari: body exercises that build flexibility, balance and agility
2. Kolthari: training with wooden weapons
3. Ankathari: training with metal weapons
4. Verumkai: bare-handed combat

The order matters. The student first becomes conscious of their own body. Weapon training then teaches them to focus, to be present in the present. And finally, the weapon becomes an extension of the body itself. Phillip Zarrilli, who studied and taught Kalaripayattu for decades, takes the title of his book from this ideal: the state in which the body "becomes all eyes" (Zarrilli 1998).

What the theater saw

Eugenio Barba, founder of Odin Teatret, describes the same phenomenon from the stage. In A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology (Barba and Savarese 2006), he separates the techniques we use in daily life from the "extra-daily" techniques a performer trains, which put the body in form before it expresses anything at all. In his own company, actors improvise, then fix the improvisation and repeat it until every detail is absorbed. At first, the actor feels stiff and mechanical. Once the actions are fully absorbed, though, the performance becomes spontaneous again (Barba 1986). The actor, therefore, is now ready to improvise.

Choreographed, but never mechanical

It is exactly this kind of preparation, I believe, that sharpens cognitive skill.

Most of the movement in Kalaripayattu is choreographed. There is a vaithari for every practice session, even for the urumi (the flexible sword). Unlike karate, there is no free sparring. In my view, the reason is the risk: the training aims at the vital spots, so even an accidental blow can do serious harm.

And yet, it is not mechanical. Two sparring partners have to be totally aligned and aware of each other's movements. When the stick does not come up in time to block a strike to the head, the striking partner has to sense it and stop the stick mid-way. With metal weapons, this becomes even more pronounced. The sequence is fixed; the attention is live. Movement scientists have a lovely phrase for this, which goes back to the Russian physiologist Nikolai Bernstein: "repetition without repetition" (Bernstein 1967).

From tacit to explicit, and back again

In Knowledge Management, we see the same journey in how knowledge moves from tacit to explicit, and then back to tacit again: the cycle that Nonaka and Takeuchi described in The Knowledge-Creating Company (1995). The master's skill is tacit. The vaithari and the sequences make it explicit. Through years of practice, the student absorbs it until it becomes tacit once more, this time as his own, ready to be reshaped into his own version.

An old Zen saying, attributed to the Chan master Qingyuan Weixin, puts this beautifully. Before study, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. With some learning, they cease to be. And with true understanding, mountains are mountains again, and rivers are rivers again.

There is a catch, of course. This only works if the student knows what is happening: he has to internalize the explicit knowledge and make it his own. That part cannot be outsourced.

So, where does AI fit in?

The early research gives me some pause, though it is too soon to call it settled. A study of 666 people in Switzerland found that heavy use of AI tools went hand in hand with lower critical-thinking scores, especially among younger users (Gerlich 2025). A survey of knowledge workers by Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon found that the more people trusted the AI, the less critical thinking they reported doing (Lee et al. 2025). Neither study proves that AI causes the decline. They do show a pattern worth watching.

The most telling result, for me, came from a small study at the MIT Media Lab (Kosmyna et al. 2025). Students who wrote essays with ChatGPT showed the lowest brain engagement, and struggled to recall what they had just written. But those who first wrote on their own, and only then turned to the AI, did well. Body first, weapon later. Meythari before kolthari!

The role of the educator, then, is less that of a reader of notes and more that of the gurukkal (the Kalari master): designing the sequence, calling out the vaithari, and watching closely for the moment a student is not ready.

That, in essence, is my answer. I do believe AI has a real role to play in education, going forward. But students still need to hone their own cognitive skills. Remembering and understanding, the lower rungs of Bloom's taxonomy, are now what AI does best. Examinations, and a student's preparedness, will increasingly be judged by the ability to analyze, evaluate and create. More importantly, even when using AI, students need to know when and why a decision was taken, and when it must be handed back to a human.

Like the sparring partner who stops the stick mid-air, the real skill lies in sensing when not to follow through.

Carrying a Load of Wood - From PISA Scores to the Modern Gurukulam

 

sthāṇurayaṃ bhārahāraḥ kilābhūd adhītya vedaṃ na vijānāti yo’rtham |

He who studies the Veda but does not understand its meaning is like a post – a mere bearer of a burden.

– Yāska, Nirukta 1.18

A few days ago, I came across a thought-provoking post on LinkedIn by my BITS classmate, Manas Chakrabarti. Writing about the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA, as it is popularly known), Manas wondered why countries like Finland and Iceland have seen unexpected declines in their scores, while others continue to do well.

His post stayed with me. It touched a raw nerve in how we, in India, think about learning.

What does PISA actually test?

PISA is not a board examination. It does not ask a 15-year-old to reproduce a memorized formula or write out a textbook chapter. Instead, it tests what one might call application literacy: can the student read an unfamiliar data table, weigh two competing arguments in an ambiguous passage, or use a basic scientific principle to solve a real-world problem?

In other words, it tests the upper floors of Bloom’s taxonomy – analysis, evaluation, and synthesis – rather than the ground floor of recall.

India’s brief brush with PISA in 2009 (two states, Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh, took part) was, therefore, an uncomfortable mirror. Even our better students struggled once the questions were stripped of the familiar textbook templates. We had built an extraordinary capacity for retention; what we had not built was the habit of reasoning from first principles.

The misunderstood Gurukulam

When we look back at India’s classical tradition of education, it is easy to assume it was simply a culture of oral memorization. Memorization (kaṇṭhastha, learning “by throat”) certainly existed. In an age without printing presses, it was the library and the index rolled into one. It was, however, never the destination.

The tradition itself cautions against learning by heart without understanding. Yāska’s line at the top of this piece says it bluntly: the one who recites without grasping the meaning is a post carrying a load of wood.

Real scholarship was dialectical. Students were trained in Tarka-śāstra (the science of reasoning) and Vāda (formal, good-faith debate, as set out in the Nyāya Sūtra). The method was demanding:

It is this discipline of steel-manning the other side before answering it that makes the classical method so modern. In fact, it maps remarkably well onto the very competencies PISA sets out to measure. That this was the norm at centers of learning like Nalanda and Takshashila is often said; that it was the norm in the śāstric tradition is beyond doubt.

Can the NEP bridge the gap?

The National Education Policy 2020 diagnosed the rote-learning problem with remarkable clarity. Its prescription – Competency-Based Education (CBE), and board examinations that include case-based and analytical questions – is a long-overdue roadmap.

Changing an entrenched classroom culture, however, is a different matter. As long as entrance examinations such as the JEE and NEET remain hyper-competitive elimination sieves, the classroom will, therefore, keep defaulting to pattern-matching and speed drills. Teachers teach to the test because parents and students demand it. The policy intent is sound; the journey from rote execution to genuine inquiry has only begun.

A bold experiment: Ayurveda after Class 10

Against this backdrop, an interesting experiment is taking shape. The Central Sanskrit University (CSU), working within the framework of the National Commission for Indian System of Medicine (NCISM), has opened a residential, Gurukulam-style pathway to the BAMS degree for students who have just finished Class 10.

The idea is to step outside the lecture hall. Instead of learning Ayurveda only through translated textbooks and borrowed pharmacology templates, students begin with a Pre-Ayurveda foundation: the Darśanas (the philosophical systems, including the logic and natural philosophy on which Ayurveda rests), the classical texts read in Sanskrit, and clinical observation alongside a teacher.

The promise

If it is done with rigor, this model could bring back the observational acumen that this kind of medicine demands. Diagnosis in Ayurveda is not a checklist. Whether it is reading the pulse (Nāḍī Parīkṣāor reading a patient’s daily routine, it calls for years at the bedside, a mentor at one’s elbow, and the ability to reason in context.

The pitfalls

Any such venture also carries real risks:

a)        The first danger is swapping one kind of rote learning for another: graduates who can recite verses in perfect meter, but who falter when an actual patient walks in. That would be Yāska’s post all over again, merely carrying a heavier load.

b)       The second is drift. The study of logic and natural philosophy needs clear boundaries, so that it sharpens clinical reasoning instead of turning into a broad, unfocused course in culture.

c)        The third is isolation. A Vaidya who cannot read a lab report, or work alongside a modern hospital, risks practicing in an intellectual silo. The patient, after all, does not care which system the insight came from.

Looking back to look forward

Does this mean we must return to the forest schools of antiquity? Nostalgia is no substitute for an education strategy.

The real opportunity lies in combining the best of both. Digital simulations, data analytics, and interactive tools can do the heavy lifting of carrying information to students. That frees the teacher to do what the Gurukulam did best: long mentorship, honest debate, and the patient application of first principles.

Reform, thus, does not ask us to choose between tradition and technology. It asks us to stop producing cooks who are lost without a recipe – and to start producing students who can think, question, and, yes, heal.

What do you think? Have you seen a classroom, ancient or modern, that genuinely teaches students to argue the other side first? I look forward to your comments.

Ever since Mahabali allowed Vaman to measure three paces of land, Indians have had a torrid time establishing proof of their presence in this world.  If you don’t believe me, go and get a passport for yourself...no touts, agents or brokers permitted.  Twenty years ago when I still had the patience to stand in a mile-long crowd after I had taken a 9.30 appointment to present myself to the passport officer, I took for granted that this was quite normal, in a country that had close to a billion people.  Now, who would expect an organization like TCS to come along and queer the pitch even more?  Now, you need to go through a whole series of steps, which is typical of any system that has been automated by computer professionals.  And like the endless loop that I would subject my ‘Pascal’ programs to, I find myself back to square one every time the authorities determine that I have not proven beyond doubt, that I am an Indian by birth, have a valid address, have no criminal record, or any of the endless reasons they can find to deny you a passport.

While I still do not have a passport, I feel quite elated at having been able to submit my passport application and have it accepted by the people at the Passport Seva Kendra.  And well, the Police Department will, I am sure, have their own little fun at my expense, and so,  the ordeal is not over yet...or as they say, until the fat lady sings.

 So, in case you are planning to get yourself a passport, or renew it...here are some practical tips (and applies to those in Chennai mainly):

1.       Fill up the application form – by far the easiest part in this whole process.

2.       Get an appointment – If you are a regular train traveller, you are probably familiar with this part...like the Tatkal tickets your window of opportunity is roughly about 3 minutes.  I have been informed by reliable sources that it is easier to get an appointment at the PSK at Saligramam.  Get all your friends and relatives involved so at least one of you might manage to bag that elusive appointment.  Unlike IRCTC, they don’t stop you from logging on from more than one session with the same user id.

3.       Where possible, get an appointment for the early hours...it is quite likely you will be sent back and forth for various documents...so make sure you provide yourself with enough time to run around for those documents.  If you miss their 4PM deadline, chances are you will be sent back...and you have to take another appointment.

4.       Don’t go by what the Document Advisor tells you – you will need at least three documents to prove that you are a resident Indian and your address is what it states it is.  Here’s the tricky part – it needs to be exactly a year old...to old...and they suspect you might have changed residence...to recent, and they are sure you have fabricated proof of residence.

a.       If this is a renewal, then the old passport copy, of course.

b.      A driving license is also acceptable proof.

c.       A Bank statement – this needs to be signed by the bank.  Your bank statement needs to show your transactions for the last one year.  They go through it like you have gone to them with the statement to ask for a loan...not as if you are producing proof of residence.  So, make sure there are sufficient transactions (at least one every month for the preceding 12 months).  Also, make sure the statement has transactions till the day preceding your appointment.

d.      Electricity / Gas Connection – You need to submit receipts which show that you have been in the same place for the last one year.  If you are one of those people who don’t retain these documents, start collecting them right away...you should be ready in a year’s time to visit the passport office.

e.      Income Tax challans – same story – show your latest tax returns.  If you are going around April, then make sure you include an older statement too.

f.        Not to worry if you don’t have any of these – just get a letter from your local MP or MLA vouching for your proof of residence.  This overrides any other defects your other documents may have.

5.       If this is a renewal, make sure your passport is in extremely good condition.  Else go armed with Annexure L – self-acknowledged that it has been damaged.  You will find dozens of typists near the PSK ready to give you a notarized letter for a fee.  It amazes me that the PSK is willing to accept a letter from a Notary, who does not even know of my existence, but has signed a blank stamp paper, on which this typist who sits right outside the passport office is willing to put my name on...for a mere Rs. 300.  So much for authentication and verification!

6.       Again, if this is a renewal, and any detail has changed since the last time you took a passport, make sure that you are covered...this includes change of residence, marriage, you or your parents getting divorced... I’m afraid I can’t help you with the entire list here...but just be aware there is one universal remedy for all these states – a notarized letter!

7.       Record of your Criminal History (or rather the lack of it).  This is the clincher...the passport office should have had a record of that from the last time they collected your data...but sorry, we were not so computerized then...and we don’t have your data.  So, could you please get another notarized letter saying you have not committed any theft, larceny or violence since the last time you got a passport?  Annexure – I – the solution to this problem.

8.       Now, that you have all the documents in place, make sure you make copies of them. Make sure you have signed on the copies too.  Now you are ready to get into the endless loop.

9.       Get the documents verified – pray you don’t find a document checker who has woken up on the wrong side of the bed...or thinks he is more loyal than the king.

10.   Clear? Now wait to get called where you then move to Counter ‘A’.  They take your photograph, scan the documents you have produced as proof, collect the fee and assign you with a token number.  Tricky part – they just might decide that they will not scan one of the proofs you have brought.  Seemingly harmless...just wait until you get to Counter B.

11.   So, when your token number flashes on the dashboard...hurry to counter B.  Hopefully you will not meet the big bad wolf who is now dressed up as the granny.  It is near 5 PM, and she is in a hurry to leave... the flimsiest of reasons is sufficient to send you back on a document chase...

12.   If you can make it through Counter B then hopefully Counter C should not be a problem...of course, always expect that they will ask for an Annexure which you do not have...if it is not yet 4 PM nothing to worry...you just need to run down and get a notarized copy...

13.   Oh wait, did I say nothing to worry...if you fail any of the steps in the process...your endless loop begins...you will be sent back to Counter A.   That, of course means you could trip up on any of their whimsical reasons again!

Fortunately, “Went to Passport Office” is a valid excuse for missing a day’s work...even two.  So, you may not really have to be worried about missing a day’s pay. 

I dread to think of the day when I only have an Airtel Connection, Gas and Electricity privatized, and a Private Sector Bank which only offers Online Statements...or more importantly how does someone who does someone who does not have all of this, manage to submit three documents for proof of residence?!!

May be when you are born, along with the birth certificate they ought to give you three paces of land...which you can call your permanent address, which will be returned back to the government when you die.  And that should be sufficient proof that you exist, are an Indian, have a valid proof of ‘residence’....not just some useless self-attested notarized existence!

Like I said, my ordeal is still not over...wait for my update...when the policeman knocks on my door! J