India, Sept. 29 -- The world's AI bookshelf has long spoken with an American accent. In an eight-volume series, IAS officer Dr Manish Ranjan gives the machine age an Indian voice - and gives the anxious general reader what has been missing all along: clarity

A strange weather has settled over our conversations. In drawing rooms and departmental canteens, in coaching centres and boardrooms, the same two questions circle endlessly: What exactly is this Artificial Intelligence? And what is it going to do - to my work, my children, my country? The buzz is everywhere; the understanding, almost nowhere. Between the salesmen of the future promising paradise and the prophets of doom promising apocalypse, the ordinary Indian reader has stood unat...