Sometimes books happen in the middle of a crowded place and that is what happened to him, said Avishek Parui, founding chairperson of Indian Network for Memory Studies.
His book, Culture and the Literary: Matter, Metaphor, Memory, that explores the human mind and the way technology influenced it was launched on Wednesday virtually by V. Kamakoti, director of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. The human mind was unique in that it can process and store information and with the same ease it can also forget information, said Mr. Parui, a student of literature. He used his understanding of literature with examples of fiction and non-fiction work to explain how cultural codes develop people’s perspective of the world.
The author was an assistant professor in the Institute’s Humanities and Social Sciences Department.
In his address, Mr. Kamakoti recalled the chess player Gary Kasparov who played chess against 100 computers and won. An effort that proved the uniqueness of the human mind, he said.
“The book covers medicine, culture, technology, history, memory and forgetting. I see it from a Computer Scientist’s point of view. This book will open up a special understanding of artificial intelligence from human perspective,” he said. At a time when the world is exploring the idea of autonomous vehicle such books opened up the field of responsible artificial intelligence, he said.
Mr. Parui said the book was conceived in the crowded airport of New Delhi and concluded during the peak of COVID-19 in a room devoid of any human presence.
Jyotirmaya Tripathy, Head of HSS department; Catherine O Leary, director of Cultural Identity and Memory Studies Institute at University of St. Andrews, Scotland; Hanna Teichler, stand-in President, Memory Studies Association, lauded Mr. Parui’s work at the event.
