The Machine is Learning, Again

My 2020 novel The Machine is Learning, the tech-infused story of Saransh and Jyoti and Mitesh, sees a reissue

Dear Readers,

Some good news before some more good news.

Issue 58 of The Bombay Literary Magazine (TBLM)—an online home for quality fiction, poetry, translations, and visual narratives—went live yesterday. I edit Fiction and Translated Fiction at the magazine. You can check out the all-new issue here.

TBLM also has a Substack newsletter,

Crow & Colophon

, where we post submission calls, issue-release announcements, and the achievements of our contributors and editors. Please head over and subscribe if this sounds like your kind of thing. Each version of the newsletter also carries ‘a writerly essay’, the kind of essay we believe writers would like to read. Yesterday, the announcement for Issue 58 carried my essay ‘Crossing the Viliya’. You can read the announcement and the essay here.

Now for the other good news.

My 2020 novel, The Machine is Learning, released in hardback at the time, is seeing a re-issue in paperback! With a new cover (pasted at the bottom of this post)!

Months ago, when Teesta Guha Sarkar of Pan Macmillan India informed me of the publisher’s decision to reissue the novel, I felt a frisson of validation for a truth I had held privately: that a novel about the relationship between (1) the fetish of tech-led cost-cutting in the managerial class and (2) Artificial Intelligence making it seem that there exist redundancies in the workplace, was more relevant in 2024 than in 2020. After the announcement of ChatGPT in November 2022, AI has moved towards the centre of many of our discourses. Just count the number of AI-related op-eds and articles in each paper every day—the sublime, the banal, and the ridiculous all jostling with each other. Novels shouldn’t hang on the hook of topicality, true, but it harms no novel to be more easily available in its moment. The way the book business runs in India, a novel published four years back can be as good as gone, no matter how germane its subject and storyline. Usually, you won’t find novels older than a year in bookstores. And online, the loop of non-discovery satisfies itself ad infinitum: since nobody talks of what isn’t visible, its discovery becomes impossible, which ensures invisibility.

Even novels reviewed amply and generally favourably suffer this harsh reality. The Machine is Learning belonged to this category (as do numerous other novels that find themselves out of conversation). In his Scroll review at the time, Harsimran Gill noted one of the novel’s key aspects, that it is a workplace novel (and in that sense a thing apart).

Firmly located in the realm of the modern-day corporate workplace, The Machine sets itself apart from most Indian literary novels, which continue to shy away from such a milieu. It’s an omission felt in many other parts of the world as well. The American writer Joshua Ferris tried to explain why this might be so in an interview. “It requires a good deal of actual knowledge and very often experience, and writers are often tending to their craft, the craft of writing,” he said. “They are unlikely bedfellows.”

The novel was longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature 2020, where the jury said the following about it:

This novel is a deep dive into the world of Artificial Intelligence and the lives of the people around it. It takes us into an algorithmic, contemporary universe, all the while shedding light on the social implications and consequences of something so overarching in our lives. Tanuj Solanki takes up the very tough task of writing in the present tense constantly and does it with ease.

Aravind Jayan, author of the brilliant Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors, included the novel in his list of ‘Top 10 stories of modern India’ in The Guardian. His note:

[The Machine is Learning] is less about tech… and more about corporate life and the essence of being a cog in the machine. Even more brilliant is its examination of courage and indifference, and the way they intersect with class.

There is more to quote from other places, but I will stop here lest I appear to be showing off (the book’s Praise section does the job thoroughly). To quell any imputation of braggadocio more conclusively, let me divulge the other reason why I was elated when Teesta told me that Pan Macmillan would reissue the novel. That reason is simply that there were a few errors in the novel. These errors, not more than five or six in number, were of the minutest variety—a comma missing here, an article mentioned twice in sequence there, Gujarat spelled as Gujrat. No reader ever pointed them out, but they tormented me no end (my wife will attest to that). The reissue offered me the opportunity to rectify these errors. If, due to any algorithmic or operational anomaly, the paperback is more expensive on Amazon than the hardcover, it will give me more satisfaction (and deliverance from torment) if from now on everyone were to choose to spend a few more rupees on the newer paperback.

Here’s the Amazon purchase link.

While the novel’s main concern—AI in the workplace—has become more relevant today than in 2020, there are a few ways in which the world of today is irreversibly altered from that time. The full experience of the pandemic and the traumas of the delta wave, for one. Then there is the minor (and technical) difference in how the watchdogs in the Indian financial services—RBI, SEBI, IRDAI—deal with small or large malpractice in the novel and how they deal with them now¹. But the largest shift, one that will make the reader view certain sections of the novel in a completely new light, is the genocide in Gaza. Saransh, the twenty-nine-year-old protagonist of The Machine is Learning is deeply affected by the images of the drowned Syrian child, Aylan Kurdi. He struggles with the stark truth of the child’s death, the images of it, and what the two say about the world. Here’s an excerpt from a pivotal point in the novel (the dialogue is Saransh speaking to his girlfriend, Jyoti):

I look at the sun – red, reddening, about to touch the straight line of the horizon – and speak about how a child’s body is something that we all have memories of interacting with. ‘Pinching the cheeks… or carrying the child such that the hip rests on our arm and our other hand holds the back… like this… or messing with the hair… or holding the small fingers… or having the small fingers hold our fingers. We know the child’s body in comparison to ours – more beautiful than ours, more fragile than ours, needing more care. We know that a child’s body is sacred. On some level, in fact, I would even say that we know it as the only sacred thing.’

The only sacred thing—that’s what my protagonist called a child’s body. And look what the world has done to this only sacred thing. I can’t say how troubled Saransh would be today. It is a relief, sometimes, to know that he and his interiority shall remain confined to the end I gave him in the novel. A (relatively) happy end.

1. In the novel, the insurance company in which the protagonist works is not too bothered by reprimands from regulators, for in those days (2017), regulatory action in most cases used to be limited to imposing symbolic fines. Today, regulators tend to put sanctions on business activities in entirety. Like the RBI barring Kotak Bank from acquiring customers digitally earlier this year, an event which triggered my novelistic imagination a fair bit (check post below). My novel also assumed these watchdogs to be beyond reproach, which is the other thing that has changed since it was first published. Cue the recent allegation on the SEBI chairperson.