Thematic Study of Chetan Bhagat's 'Revolution 2020'

This blog is part of a thinking activity assigned by Dilip Barad Sir. The activity focuses on the thematic study of Revolution 2020 by Chetan Bhagat, a novel that explores the intertwined lives of three protagonists—Gopal, Raghav, and Aarti—against the backdrop of contemporary Indian society.

Revolution 2020 by Chetan Bhagat is structured around four central ideas explicitly foregrounded in its subtitle: Love, Corruption, Ambition, and Revolution. Set primarily in the socio-cultural landscape of Varanasi, the novel situates individual aspirations within the larger machinery of contemporary Indian society. It portrays a generation negotiating educational competition, political malpractice, economic disparity, and emotional vulnerability.

Rather than functioning merely as a romantic narrative, the text offers a critique of systemic inequities embedded in education, politics, and media. Through the intertwined journeys of Gopal, Raghav, and Aarti, Bhagat dramatizes the tension between moral integrity and material success.

This thematic study examines the novel under four clearly demarcated headings: The Theme of Love, The Theme of Corruption, The Theme of Ambition, and The Theme of Revolution: R ƎVO⅃ UTION Twenty20. Each theme is analyzed within its conceptual boundaries while acknowledging their interdependence.

1. The Theme of Love

Overview

Love constitutes the emotional backbone of the novel. At its center lies the triangular relationship between Gopal, Raghav, and Aarti. This triangle is not merely romantic; it becomes the axis around which moral decisions, betrayals, sacrifices, and ideological conflicts revolve.

Gopal emerges as a tragic figure—emotionally intense, socially insecure, and perpetually torn between desire and inadequacy. His love for Aarti defines both his vulnerability and his moral struggle.

Key Developments

Early friendship and love

Gopal and Aarti’s relationship originates in childhood innocence. What begins as companionship gradually deepens into emotional dependence. The narrative suggests an unspoken intimacy marked by shared confidences and aspirations. (Quotation to be inserted from the original text)

Love and rivalry

The introduction of Raghav transforms affection into rivalry. Raghav, academically brilliant and morally driven, represents everything Gopal fears he is not. Aarti’s growing emotional alignment with Raghav intensifies Gopal’s insecurity. Love becomes competitive, intertwined with class mobility and masculine self-worth.

Pain, rejection, and moral conflict

Aarti’s hesitation and emotional ambiguity create sustained tension. Gopal’s internal conflict intensifies when he acquires wealth and influence through questionable means. His love remains sincere, yet his methods compromise his moral standing. The disjunction between emotional authenticity and ethical corruption deepens his tragedy.

Gopal’s sacrifice and tragic resolution

Ultimately, Gopal chooses withdrawal. His final decision—renouncing Aarti for her happiness—positions him within the archetype of the tragic lover. (Quotation to be inserted from the original text) His sacrifice redefines love not as possession but as relinquishment.

Significance

Love in the novel connects directly to ambition and corruption. Gopal’s moral compromises are partly motivated by a desire to become “worthy” of Aarti. Thus, romantic longing catalyzes ethical decline.

Aarti functions symbolically. She represents aspiration, moral clarity, and social mobility. Her choice between Gopal and Raghav becomes a moral referendum between material success and ethical integrity.

The tragic implications are clear: love, when entangled with insecurity and ambition, becomes destructive. Yet it also offers redemption through sacrifice.

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2. The Theme of Corruption

Overview

Corruption in the novel is systemic rather than incidental. It permeates education, politics, business, and media. The narrative constructs corruption as a structural condition of contemporary India rather than as individual moral failure alone.

Key Developments

Gopal’s failure and turn to corruption

After failing competitive examinations, Gopal confronts the brutal hierarchy of India’s education system. His humiliation and economic vulnerability push him toward opportunism. His entry into the education business, facilitated by corrupt political networks, marks his moral turning point. (Quotation to be inserted from the original text)

Role of Girish Bedi and MLA Shukla-ji

Figures such as Girish Bedi and MLA Shukla-ji exemplify institutionalized corruption. They manipulate regulatory frameworks and exploit aspirational youth for profit. Educational institutions become commercial enterprises, detached from ethical purpose.

Raghav’s resistance through journalism

In contrast, Raghav uses journalism as a tool of resistance. His investigative efforts aim to expose political malpractice and educational scams. However, his resistance remains precarious and fraught with danger. (Quotation to be inserted from the original text)

Contrast between material success and ethical struggle

Gopal attains wealth and status, while Raghav struggles financially. This contrast dramatizes the asymmetry between ethical labor and corrupt success. The narrative exposes the moral cost embedded in economic advancement.

Significance

The novel reflects contemporary Indian anxieties regarding the commercialization of education and the normalization of political graft. Corruption is depicted as seductive, efficient, and socially rewarded.

The moral dilemmas faced by Gopal highlight the ethical cost of pragmatism. Idealism, as embodied by Raghav, appears admirable yet vulnerable. The tension between these approaches forms the ideological core of the novel.

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3. The Theme of Ambition

Overview

Ambition operates as a central driving force for all three protagonists. However, the novel distinguishes between material ambition and ethical ambition.

Key Developments

Gopal’s ambition for wealth and power

Gopal equates ambition with economic security. His childhood poverty and familial instability shape his worldview. Success, for him, is measurable in property, influence, and financial autonomy. (Quotation to be inserted from the original text)

Raghav’s ambition for social change

Raghav’s ambition diverges sharply. He seeks reform, transparency, and justice. Journalism becomes his instrument for public accountability. His ambition is ideological rather than material.

Consequences of both paths

Gopal gains financial stability but loses moral clarity and emotional peace. Raghav retains integrity but sacrifices comfort and safety. Ambition, therefore, is shown to carry divergent consequences depending on its orientation.

Significance

The novel critiques societal reward systems that privilege wealth over virtue. Material ambition receives immediate validation; ethical ambition encounters resistance.

The symbolic contrast between Gopal and Raghav represents two models of success in modern India: transactional success versus transformative aspiration.

Ambition intersects repeatedly with love and corruption. Gopal’s pursuit of wealth is partly motivated by romantic insecurity. Raghav’s reformist zeal affects his personal relationships. Thus, ambition destabilizes emotional equilibrium.

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4. The Theme of Revolution: R ƎVO⅃ UTION Twenty20

Overview

The idea of revolution in the novel is both aspirational and ironic. The title itself—R ƎVO⅃ UTION Twenty20—suggests fragmentation, inversion, and urgency. Revolution appears as a promise of generational change.

Raghav becomes the primary vehicle of revolutionary thought.

Key Developments

Journalism as a revolutionary tool

Raghav’s articles challenge entrenched power structures. Media becomes an arena for truth-telling and accountability. (Quotation to be inserted from the original text)

Founding of Revolution 2020

The establishment of Revolution 2020 symbolizes organized resistance. It embodies the belief that youth-led activism can confront systemic injustice.

Violence, resistance, and sacrifice

However, revolutionary efforts encounter coercion and threats. Political actors resist exposure. The cost of dissent becomes personal and dangerous.

Critical Evaluation

The novel complicates its own revolutionary rhetoric. Revolution risks commodification—reduced to branding or symbolic gesture. The title itself carries irony: revolution is stylized, fragmented, and possibly diluted.

Moreover, revolutionary energy is overshadowed by personal love and individual ambition. Structural change remains incomplete.

Significance

The text portrays youth idealism confronting systemic resistance. While hope persists, the narrative acknowledges limitations. Institutional inertia absorbs or suppresses dissent.

Revolution, therefore, emerges not as triumphant overthrow but as fragile persistence.

Conclusion

The four themes—Love, Corruption, Ambition, and Revolution—interact dynamically throughout Revolution 2020. Love motivates ambition; ambition invites corruption; corruption necessitates revolution; revolution complicates love.

The novel critiques contemporary Indian society by exposing:

• The commercialization of education

• The normalization of political corruption

• The distortion of ambition into material obsession

• The dilution of revolutionary idealism

At its core lies a moral tension between success and integrity. Gopal achieves material success but sacrifices ethical stability. Raghav preserves moral conviction but struggles against systemic power. Aarti becomes the emotional and symbolic bridge between these competing paradigms.

Ultimately, the novel does not offer simplistic solutions. Instead, it foregrounds the persistent conflict between aspiration and ethics in modern India. Success, it suggests, demands a reckoning with conscience—and that reckoning defines the true revolution.

References:

Barad, Dilip. “Revolution2020.”https://blog.dilipbarad.com/2021/12/revolution2020.html. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026. 

Barad, Dilip. Thematic Study of Chetan Bhagat’s “Revolution 2020,” www.researchgate.net/publication/388198619_Thematic_Study_of_Chetan_Bhagat’s_’Revolution_2020’. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026. 

Bhagat, Chetan. Revolution 2020 , https://www.boscogroupofschools.in/starstudentbuilder/educational-theory/E-Books/Novels/19-Revolution%202020%20-%20Chetan%20Bhagat_indianauthornovels.blogspot.in.pdf. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026. 

Revolution Twenty20

This worksheet engages with Revolution Twenty20 by Chetan Bhagat using Generative AI as a tool for literary analysis, in line with the pedagogic approach outlined by Dilip Barad (click here for the link). The activities combine visual, textual, and thematic analysis, allowing AI to assist in organizing ideas, creating character maps, and generating infographics or slide decks.

Activity 1: Character Mapping (Remember → Understand)

The map reveals a clear moral geography of Revolution 2020, where power circulates through institutions, while integrity struggles to survive within them. At the centre stands the triangle of Gopal, Raghav, and Aarti—personal relationships shaped by larger systems of ambition and corruption. Gopal’s path shows how education becomes a marketplace, enabled by political patrons like MLA Shukla-ji and legitimized through inspectors and consultants. Power here is transactional, built on compromise rather than merit. In contrast, Raghav’s journalism represents resistance, yet even activism is surrounded by corporate media pressures and establishment control. The map also reminds us of the “common people” at the margins, whose realities fuel the revolutionary rhetoric but rarely gain true agency. 

Activity 2: Cover Page Critique  

1. Expectations Created

1.1 Themes of “Revolution” Suggested

The cover frames “revolution” as a social, emotional, and moral revolution.

The word "LOVE" is boxed inside the word "REVOLUTION." This creates an expectation that the "revolution" isn't just about changing the country, but about how love can be a radical or disruptive act within a corrupt system. 

The subtitle at the bottom — “LOVE. CORRUPTION. AMBITION.” — strongly suggests that the revolution explored in the book is multi-dimensional:

• Emotional revolution through love

• Political/social disturbance through corruption

• Personal struggle through ambition

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1.2 Impressions of Youth, Energy, and Modernity

The silhouettes immediately create a strong impression of youth identity:

• The central solitary figure appears like a conflicted young man—perhaps a deep thinker, burdened with grief or uncertainty, lost in reflection.

• The two smaller figures suggest companionship, friendship, or intimacy. However, their identity remains unclear, creating ambiguity:
  
  Are they real people, memories, or symbolic presences ?

The overall mood feels urgent and restless, reflecting:

• youthful impatience

• moral uncertainty

• a desire for change

The title element “Twenty20” evokes:

• the age of youth (early adulthood),

• a phase of life shaped by aspiration and uncertainty,

• or a personal “twenty-year” moment rather than a broader political revolution.

• contemporary youth culture

• a distinctly present-day atmosphere

Rather than emphasizing pace or innovation, the title appears to frame the novel as a story of a particular generation and its experiences, leaving the idea of “revolution” deliberately open and ambiguous.

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1.3 Marketability and Audience Appeal

Bhagat also actively engages in self-marketing through social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, blogs, and personal websites, reinforcing his visibility and accessibility. Rather than pioneering cinematic book trailers, his early use of video primarily involved direct, informal video messages addressed to readers, which functioned as a tool for audience engagement

Bhagat’s educational background at IIT and IIM equips him with an understanding of branding, marketing, and consumer behaviour. He consciously situates his writing within India’s demographic reality—a nation with one of the largest youth populations, particularly within the 20–35 age group.

Bhagat consistently places youth at the centre of storytelling. The problems he addresses—competitive exams, elite institutions, employment, entrepreneurship, marriage, corruption in education, and corporate life—mirror the aspirations and anxieties of young, urban, middle-class Indians.

The cover design clearly targets:

• young urban readers

• college students

• audiences drawn to fast-paced popular fiction

Key market signals include:

• The bold author name “CHETAN BHAGAT” at the top, placed for instant recognition.

• This market awareness is further evident in:

• Youth-centric diction, including campus slang and familiar metaphors.

  Short, fast-paced narratives, readable in a single sitting.

  Affordable pricing (typically ₹99–₹150), suitable for student budgets.

  Simple, conversational language, requiring minimal literary effort.

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2. Design Elements

2.1 Typography (Font Style, Size, Arrangement)

Author Name

• Large, uppercase, sans-serif font

• Positioned at the top for immediate visibility

• Suggests commercial confidence and strong branding
  
  

Title: “REVOLUTION”

• Stylized with distortion and uneven arrangement

• The fragmentation visually represents disruption

• Interestingly, the sequence “EVOL” stands out inside the word, subtly hinting at “LOVE,” reinforcing the romantic dimension of the story.

“TWENTY20”

• Bold, blocky, modern typography

• The repetition of “20” emphasizes contemporary youth branding

Tagline

• Small, spaced-out typography:
  
  “LOVE. CORRUPTION. AMBITION.”

• Functions like a film trailer hook, delivering quick emotional triggers.

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2.2 Colour Palette (Dominant Colours + Emotional Tone)

Dominant Colours

• Deep pink/crimson/magenta background

• Black silhouettes

• White typography

The background also includes architectural sketches resembling Indian temples or city buildings, grounding the story in an Indian social environment.

Emotional Effect

Pink-red evokes:

• romance

• charm

• compassion

• passion and intensity

Black suggests:

• secrecy

• corruption

• moral darkness

Thus, the palette blends romantic warmth with underlying threat, perfectly matching the emotional tension implied by the subtitle.

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2.3 Symbolism and Imagery

Silhouettes

• Anonymous figures represent universal youth experience.

• The central figure suggests isolation, inner conflict, and deep thinking.

• The smaller pair may symbolize relationships, companionship, or even betrayal or memory

Paint-like Background Texture

• The splashes and stains evoke:

  • chaos

  • instability

  • the messy nature of moral change

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3. Alignment with Popular Literature Aesthetics

3.1 Youth Literature Trends

The cover matches common conventions of Indian popular youth fiction:

• bold title design

• romantic-political thematic blend

• dramatic silhouettes

• high-contrast colour palette

It resembles the visual language of:

• campus narratives

• Bollywood-style emotional storytelling

• aspirational middle-class youth struggles

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3.2 Genre Conventions: Follow or Break?

Follows Conventions

• Romance + social struggle marketed together

• Strong author branding

• Cinematic, poster-like layout

Slightly Breaks Conventions

• The distorted typography hints at darker complexity.

• The lonely central figure feels reflective rather than heroic.

• The two seated figures appear almost like a memory, suggesting emotional depth.

The cover of Revolution Twenty20 presents revolution as a modern Indian youth experience shaped by:

• love

• ambition

• corruption

• inner conflict

It does not specify whether the revolution is political or purely personal, which creates curiosity.

The central figure’s posture—standing, thoughtful, and not visibly happy—suggests that the story may involve hardship, moral struggle, and emotional seriousness rather than a purely joyful resolution.

Activity 3: Infographic from Video Discourse 

Clarification vs. Flattening of Complexity

The infographic succeeds in clearly mapping the central conflict of Revolution 2020 through two contrasting paths: Gopal’s pragmatic climb through corruption and Raghav’s idealistic reform through journalism. For students, this visual division makes the novel’s moral tensions accessible. However, it also risks flattening complexity by presenting morality as a binary—“corrupt pragmatist” versus “pure idealist.” In the novel, Gopal is not simply immoral; his choices emerge from insecurity, poverty, and systemic pressure. 

Reduction of Power to Political Transaction

Power is strongly shown as transactional—flowing through MLA Shukla-ji, education bribery, and media control. While accurate, the infographic leans heavily toward portraying corruption as the sole engine of ambition. It misses how power also operates emotionally, through love, loyalty, and personal desire—especially via Aarti’s central position.

Missing, Distorted, or Exaggerated Ideas

• Missing: The inner conflicts of characters are minimized; morality appears structural rather than personal.

• Distortion: Journalism is presented as a clean space of activism, but the novel shows Raghav also facing compromise and limitation.

• Exaggeration: The “common people” remain peripheral icons, whereas their suffering is meant to be the moral core of Raghav’s revolution.
  

Presentation

Revolution2020 Love Corruption Ambition .pptx

AI  is very efficient at summarizing content and organizing ideas. For example, when I asked it to make slides, it clearly identified key points, themes, and arguments, which helped me orient my own thinking. Its structured approach makes it feel like a helpful collaborator when tackling dense or complex material.

However, I also noticed where AI falls short. In several slides, it adopted a moralistic or overly simplistic stance, presenting ideas in binary terms rather than grappling with ambiguity. For instance, when discussing ethical dilemmas or character motivations, AI often framed them as clearly right or wrong, ignoring the nuances, contradictions, and subtle tensions that give literature its depth. This tendency made me realize that AI’s “insight” is often surface-level; it can tell me what is there but struggles with why it matters or how it resonates. 

AI Use Declaration

For this worksheet, Generative AI tools including ChatGPT, NotebookLM, and Google Gemini were used as assistive resources to organize notes, summarize content, generate visual structures (such as character maps, infographics, and slide outlines), and support the drafting process. All critical interpretations, analytical decisions, revisions, and final arguments were independently developed by the author. AI-generated outputs were carefully reviewed, challenged, and corrected—particularly where they tended toward simplification or moralistic framing—to ensure that the final work reflects sustained human judgment and critical engagement.

References

Bhagat, Chetan. Revolution Twenty20 : Love . Corruption. Ambition. Rupa, 2014.

Review: Coded Bias

Coded Bias - Documentary (2020)

The central problem posed by Coded Bias (2020) is not whether artificial intelligence works, nor whether it is improving in accuracy. The documentary advances a far more unsettling claim: algorithmic systems have become instruments of governance without democratic consent, transparency, or accountability. In doing so, they silently reorganise power—deciding who is visible, who is legible, who is trusted, and who is punished.

Rather than framing AI as a neutral technological evolution, Coded Bias interrogates the political life of algorithms. It insists that automated systems are not merely tools but decision-making infrastructures that increasingly determine access to employment, housing, credit, education, welfare, and freedom itself. The documentary’s argument is that power has migrated into code, while responsibility has evaporated behind technical opacity.

This concern places Coded Bias in direct conversation with George Orwell’s 1984. Orwell did not imagine oppression as the product of sadistic individuals alone, but as something embedded in systems, routines, and information architectures. In this sense, Coded Bias suggests that Orwell’s dystopia has not arrived through overt authoritarianism, but through bureaucratised computation, data extraction, and automated judgment.

The danger, the film argues, is not that machines will rebel against humans—but that humans will increasingly live under systems that classify, predict, and constrain them, while appearing objective, efficient, and inevitable.

Computers, as Coded Bias makes repeatedly clear, do not understand the future. They predict it by mining the past. Algorithms are trained on historical data—data shaped by inequality, exclusion, and structural violence—and are then tasked with forecasting human behaviour. What appears as innovation is therefore often historical repetition at machine speed.

This is the documentary’s foundational concern: when prediction replaces judgment, and efficiency replaces ethics, technology ceases to be neutral infrastructure and becomes political authority. The question Coded Bias asks is not whether AI has “bright and dark sides,” but rather who decides where those sides fall, and on whose lives they operate.

By situating facial recognition, predictive policing, and automated classification within global systems of surveillance and corporate power, Coded Bias argues that contemporary AI does not represent social progress. Instead, it replicates existing worlds, encoding inequality into software while claiming objectivity.

This is where George Orwell’s 1984 becomes analytically indispensable. Orwell’s insight was not merely that surveillance exists, but that power becomes most effective when embedded into systems that feel inevitable, invisible, and rational. Coded Bias demonstrates that algorithmic governance is precisely such a system.

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The Central Argument of Coded Bias: From Assistance to Control

The documentary’s central argument can be distilled into a precise claim:

AI systems have shifted from assisting human decision-making to silently governing it, without public consent, democratic oversight, or ethical safeguards.

While facial recognition is often justified as a tool for preventing attacks or increasing security, Coded Bias interrogates this justification by asking: security for whom, and at what cost? The film does not deny that AI can function efficiently. Instead, it exposes how efficiency becomes the moral alibi for surveillance.

AI has both “bright and dark sides,” yet deployment occurs before safeguards exist, particularly when technologies are tested on poor and marginalised populations. Surveillance infrastructures are rarely trialed on the powerful; they are piloted on those with the least capacity to resist.

Thus, Coded Bias reframes AI development not as public innovation, but as corporate-led experimentation, where:

• algorithms are designed for institutional convenience,

• deployed in socially unequal environments,

• and defended through technical opacity.

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Algorithmic Bias as Political Architecture

Replication, Not Progress

One of the documentary’s most incisive claims—echoed directly in your notes—is that machines are not creating new worlds; they are replicating existing ones. AI systems trained on biased data do not transcend history; they operationalise it.

This is why algorithmic bias cannot be reduced to error. It is the predictable outcome of systems designed within unequal social orders. The problem is not that algorithms occasionally fail, but that they work precisely as expected within unjust frameworks.

Corporate Surveillance and Institutional Power

Coded Bias is explicit: most AI systems are not built for public good but for corporate and institutional efficiency. Surveillance capitalism depends on continuous data extraction, and algorithms thrive on constant monitoring.

• Corporations know what they want algorithms to do,

• but often claim they cannot fully understand or control what those systems actually produce.

This contradiction allows responsibility to dissolve. When harm occurs, accountability is deflected onto “the system,” reinforcing what the documentary identifies as institutional opacity.

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Global Geographies of Surveillance

The documentary’s movement across global locations—China, the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and beyond—demonstrates that algorithmic governance is a planetary condition.

listing Hankou, Huzhou, Philadelphia, London, Cape Town, Washington D.C., and the Soviet Union are not incidental. They reveal how:

• surveillance infrastructures adapt to political contexts,

• yet produce similar outcomes: classification, control, and behavioural prediction.

China’s social credit system is often invoked as dystopian, yet Coded Bias complicates this narrative. As your notes observe, China is at least transparent about surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and are expected to behave accordingly.

In contrast, Western democracies often operate through invisible classification. Individuals are scored, ranked, and separated without knowing it. The absence of awareness does not indicate freedom—it indicates unconscious governance.

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Orwell’s 1984: Power Without a Face

From Big Brother to the Black Box

In 1984, Big Brother is less a person than a symbol of systemic power. Surveillance is not merely visual but psychological. Similarly, Coded Bias replaces Big Brother with the Black Box—the algorithm that decides but cannot explain.

“I have many names. I am Algorithm. I am Black Box.”

Algorithms promise conclusions without reasoning, outcomes without explanations.
How can a system give a conclusion if it cannot tell us how it reached it?

This opacity transforms authority into something unchallengeable. As in Orwell’s world, truth becomes whatever the system outputs, regardless of lived reality.

Recorded → Logged → Analyzed

Orwell imagined surveillance as constant observation. Today, surveillance is procedural:

• actions are recorded,

• data is logged,

• behaviour is analysed,

• consciousness itself becomes a data stream.

This is not speculative fiction—it is infrastructural reality.

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Invisibility, Efficiency, and the Loss of Human Judgment

Algorithms are often described as “better than random,” yet Coded Bias insists this is insufficient when systems shape lives. Efficiency, your notes remind us, is the primary design goal—not justice, empathy, or dignity.

The automation of workers raises urgent questions, but the documentary goes further by asking: who controls the gatekeepers? When algorithms determine access to jobs, housing, or credit, exclusion becomes automated—and therefore harder to contest.

Crucially, Coded Bias exposes how people increasingly understand themselves less than algorithms claim to understand them. When prediction replaces self-knowledge, autonomy erodes.

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Resistance, Ethics, and the Meaning of Being Human

The documentary does not end in despair. Your final notes provide its most human intervention: resistance.

To reject a particular technological future—to protest, regulate, or refuse—is not anti-progress. It is profoundly human. As your notes observe:

• To be human is to be vulnerable.

• To be human is not always to be efficient.

• Sometimes humanity means disobedience.

• Sometimes it means saying no.

Automation performs what it is programmed to do. Ethics begins where programming ends.

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Pathways Forward: Accountability Over Efficiency

Drawing from Coded Bias  meaningful responses must include:

• democratic oversight of algorithmic systems,

• regulation of facial recognition and biometric surveillance,

• transparency mandates for high-stakes algorithms,

• public education to recognise hidden governance,

• and ethical responsibility embedded at institutional levels.

The goal is not to eliminate AI, but to reclaim agency over systems that increasingly govern social life.

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Conclusion: From Dystopia to Infrastructure

Coded Bias reveals that Orwell’s 1984 was not a prophecy of totalitarian spectacle, but a blueprint for systemic, invisible control. Surveillance today does not require overt force; it relies on normalisation, efficiency, and data-driven authority.

The most dangerous aspect of algorithmic governance is not that it watches—but that it decides, quietly and conclusively.

To challenge this is not to reject technology. It is to insist that human values remain sovereign over automated systems.

In an age where prediction threatens to replace freedom, Coded Bias reminds us that the future is still a political choice.

This critique does not position artificial intelligence as an inherently harmful or regressive force. Rather, it challenges the uncritical delegation of social, political, and ethical authority to automated systems operating without transparency or accountability. AI, when governed responsibly, has the capacity to support human decision-making, reduce certain forms of bias, and improve institutional efficiency. The concern raised by Coded Bias is therefore not technological advancement itself, but the normalisation of algorithmic power in the absence of democratic oversight. To question how AI is designed, deployed, and regulated is not to reject technology, but to insist that it remains aligned with human values, legal responsibility, and social justice.

REFERENCES :

Kantayya, Shalini, director. Coded Bias. 7th Empire Media, 2020.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell, Penguin UK, 2004.

Humans In The Loop: Raising Intelligence, Owning Responsibility

 Humans in the Loop: Raising Intelligence, Owning Responsibility

Artificial Intelligence is often framed in extremes—either as an existential threat or as a flawless solution to human limitations. Humans in the Loop refuses both narratives. Instead, it asks a quieter but far more uncomfortable question: if intelligence is learned, shaped, and corrected through human intervention, who is responsible for what AI becomes ?

Humans in the Loop resists the dominant cinematic impulse to portray Artificial Intelligence either as an omnipotent threat or as a miraculous technological solution. Instead, the film grounds AI within a quieter, more unsettling ethical framework—intelligence as something that is taught, shaped, corrected, and socially produced. Structured around three conceptual chapters—To Learn Like a Child, A Child Moulds Like Clay, and The Child and the Bias—the film repeatedly returns to a central philosophical provocation: if AI learns like a child, then humanity is not its victim but its caretaker.

Rather than indulging in spectacle or technological mystification, the film directs attention toward the slow, invisible processes through which intelligence is formed. These processes are inseparable from human labour, cultural context, economic inequality, and ethical responsibility. In doing so, Humans in the Loop offers not a story about machines becoming dangerous, but about humans refusing to acknowledge their role in shaping them.

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I. To Learn Like a Child

 

The first chapter establishes AI as a learning entity whose intelligence is fundamentally dependent on human input and interpretation. Learning here is not presented as neutral data accumulation but as a fragile process shaped by context, selection, and omission. Much like a child encountering the world, AI does not arrive with innate understanding; it inherits meaning from the environments and narratives humans provide.

The Porcupine Scene: Embodied Knowledge and Indigenous Epistemology

The porcupine motif in Humans in the Loop is not framed as a simple allegory for error, fear, or misunderstanding in learning. Instead, it functions as a recurring symbol rooted in Nehmma’s lived environment and indigenous relationship with nature. The porcupine appears as a familiar forest presence—an animal that survives through adaptation, restraint, and coexistence rather than domination.

Its quills do not signify aggression but a form of embodied intelligence that is situational and defensive, emerging from long-term inhabitation of a specific ecology. This stands in contrast to the abstract, decontextualized logic of artificial intelligence systems, which often strip data from cultural, environmental, and relational grounding. The porcupine thus represents a mode of knowing that is experiential rather than computational.

Importantly, the porcupine connects Nehmma’s childhood memories with her present labour and her daughter’s future, establishing a generational continuity that challenges the narrative of technological modernity as a complete rupture from traditional life. The film subtly suggests that older forms of intelligence—indigenous, ecological, relational—continue to exist alongside AI, even as they are rendered invisible within technological systems.

Rather than imposing a metaphor onto AI learning, the porcupine operates as a counterpoint: it asks what kinds of intelligence are ignored or erased when machines are trained solely on client-driven, market-oriented datasets.

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II. A Child Moulds Like Clay

The second chapter shifts focus from learning to shaping, foregrounding the human labour that actively moulds artificial intelligence. By depicting data labelling, annotation, correction, and verification, the film dismantles the myth of autonomous AI. Intelligence here is not self-generating; it is manufactured through repetitive, meticulous, and largely invisible human effort.

These scenes expose a critical contradiction in contemporary AI narratives. While AI is often described as self-learning, its functionality depends on continuous human supervision. The labour involved—often outsourced, feminized, and underpaid—remains obscured behind the sleek language of innovation. it  argues that ethical AI cannot be separated from the labour systems that sustain it.

Nehmma and Situated Knowledge

Nehmma’s role as a data labeller complicates conventional assumptions about who produces technological knowledge. As an Adivasi woman, her engagement with AI is shaped by lived experience rather than formal technical training. The film does not depict her as technologically deficient; instead, it reveals how her understanding of context, ambiguity, and relational meaning often exceeds the reductive logic demanded by datasets.

By intentionally recruiting women from tribal and rural communities rather than formally educated urban professionals, the film challenges stereotypes that equate intelligence exclusively with institutional education. It suggests that tribal life is not disconnected from knowledge but embedded in alternative epistemologies that value sustainability, community, and contextual awareness.

Importantly, the film avoids romanticising indigeneity. Instead, it argues that traditional ways of life are not inherently regressive or anti-modern. Many are ecologically sustainable and intellectually rich, offering insights into data, meaning, and truth that modern AI systems routinely ignore.

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III. The Child and the Bias

The third chapter confronts the ethical consequences of shaping intelligence within unequal power structures. Bias, the film suggests, is not an accidental flaw in AI systems but a predictable outcome of selective data, economic priorities, and epistemic exclusion.

A pivotal moment occurs when tribal women question the nature of their work: “We are labelling the data provided by the client, but we should use our own data and scenarios and share them to get proper context or correct answers.” This statement crystallizes the film’s critique of data ownership and representation. It raises fundamental questions: whose realities are allowed to shape AI systems, and whose remain unacknowledged?

The women’s observation exposes the asymmetry at the heart of AI production. Marginalized communities are tasked with sustaining intelligent systems while being denied the authority to contribute their own experiences as valid data. This form of epistemic injustice transforms AI into a tool of extraction rather than collective knowledge-making.

Drawing again on Mehrotra’s concept of human-in-the-loop systems, the film emphasizes that ethical safeguards are not merely technical interventions but moral choices. When certain communities are reduced to annotators of external realities, AI inevitably reflects the worldview of those who control data pipelines.

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Conclusion: Raising Intelligence, Owning Responsibility 

The closing sequence of Humans in the Loop advances a clear yet unsettling argument: artificial intelligence does not inherently produce biased, insufficient, or harmful outcomes. These failures emerge from the false, incomplete, or prejudiced data humans choose to feed into systems. AI mirrors human values—not because it is powerful, but because it is dependent.

The film challenges humanity’s tendency to fear artificial intelligence while ignoring its own ethical failures. Despite possessing natural intelligence, humans repeatedly evade responsibility by attributing harm to machines rather than confronting the social, economic, and moral conditions that shape them.

If AI learns like a child, then society must take responsibility for how it is raised. Humans in the Loop ultimately asks viewers to reconsider intelligence itself—not as a technological achievement, but as an ethical relationship between those who teach and those who learn.

References 

Sahay, Aranya, director. Humans in the Loop. Storiculture Museum of Imagined Futures SAUV Films, 2025.