We are a people who keep our word.
Not just to each other. To the land. To the deity of our ‘deva kad’/sacred forest. To the okka. To the ancestors/guru karana. To the next generation we will never meet.
This is what it means to be Kodava.
Comment and share your thoughts on what it means to be a Kodava🙏🏽
A rock has no opinion of you.
Pick one up from a riverbed and it sits in your palm — heavy, smooth, indifferent. What happens next is entirely yours.
You can throw it at someone you hate.
You can set it in a ring and give it to someone you love.
You can skip it across a lake and laugh.
A child can hand it to a parent as a gift, shaped like a heart.
The rock didn’t change. You did.
This is the part of the AI conversation almost no one is having.
We keep asking what AI will do to us, as if it has a will of its own. But technology has never had a will. It has only ever been a mirror. The internet didn’t divide us; it reflected the divisions already inside us. Social media didn’t make us anxious; it amplified the anxiety we already carried. And AI won’t make us less human or more human. It will make us more of what we already are.
If you come to AI with fear, it will mirror your fear.
If you come to it with greed, it will mirror your greed.
If you come to it with curiosity, with care, with the quiet intention to become more whole — that, too, will come back to you.
This is the most important sentence I can offer you about the next decade:
The question is not what AI will become. The question is what you will become while using it.
That choice is still entirely, beautifully yours.
—
From my upcoming book Being in the Age of AI — check out the link in bio.
What does your relationship with technology reflect back to you right now? I’d love to know. 👇
—
#BeingInTheAgeOfAI #ConsciousTech #AIandWellbeing
She helped build women’s studies as a serious field in India — at SNDT, the first Indian university to teach it, in 1974.
Then she wrote the most authoritative book on Kodava women’s lives.
Her name is Prof. Veena R. Poonacha. 🙏🏽
You spend years trying to teach your sons how to move through the world… and then one day you realize they’re becoming men with their own presence, opinions, strength, and path. ❤️
As a father, that’s the strange beauty of time.
You are slowly becoming less of their protector…
and more of their witness.
Grateful for this season.
Grateful for the conversations, the laughter, the disagreements, the growth.
And grateful that despite all the noise of the modern world, we can still share moments that feel simple and real.
Memories with my boys.. @milan_machaiah@jaymachaiah_
Everyone is asking the wrong question about AI.
“Will it replace me?”
“Will it take my job?”
“Will it outthink me?”
The better question is the one almost no one is asking:
What if AI’s greatest gift isn’t productivity — it’s helping us become more human?
More aware of our breath. More tuned to our sleep. More present with the people we love. More honest about the stress we’ve been ignoring.
The same technology being built to optimize ad clicks can be used to optimize a life well-lived. The same models trained to predict the next word can help us predict the next health crisis — and prevent it.
We are not passive spectators of the AI revolution. We are its architects.
The question isn’t whether AI will shape us. It’s whether we’ll shape it back — with intention, with wisdom, with soul.
That’s the conversation I wanted to have. So my co-author @draraoncall and I wrote a book about it.
Being in the Age of AI — out now. Link in bio.
What’s one way AI has made you more human, not less? 👇
In 1948, a Kodava woman from Virajpet became the first woman to clear the UPSC. In 1979, she sued the Government of India in the Supreme Court — and built the foundation every Indian woman in public service stands on.
Her name was C.B. Muthamma. We should know it. 🙏🏽
#kodagu #coorg #nadakodagu
This is a hand that knows things most of us have forgotten.
When to pick. When to wait. How much rain is too much. Which tree is sick before the leaves tell you. How long the coffee cherry has been waiting on the branch.
A century of agricultural knowledge sits in this generation’s hands. Most of it is undocumented.
When this generation passes, what they know goes with them.
What are we doing to learn it before that happens?
#Kodagu #Coffee #WesternGhats #nadakodagu
This is my son Jayan: @jaymachaiah_ (.. I am sure he does not like me tagging him 😃)
Years ago, he drew this picture of me on a whiteboard in my office. Look closely — he didn’t draw me with a face, or clothes, or hands.
He drew me in numbers.
1, 2, 3, 4… 1, 8, 7, 9… every limb, every contour, every part of his father, rendered as code.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or sit down.
Because somewhere between the man I thought I was and the father he saw, a quiet truth had revealed itself: I had become the data I worked with. The numbers I chased. The screens I lived in.
That moment, more than any health report, more than any boardroom, was one of key pivotal points.. I questioned what I had become? And was one of the inspirational moments in my path to writing Being in the Age of AI.
The book is about a question I couldn’t shake after that day:
In a world increasingly run by algorithms, how do we stay human?
Not anti-technology. Not anti-AI. But intentionally, fiercely, joyfully human, using these tools to flourish, not to disappear into them.
Jayan is grown now. The drawing is gone. But the lesson stayed. ❤️
📖 Being in the Age of AI. Link in bio.
Tag a parent who needs the reminder. 🤍
#BeingInTheAgeOfAI #DigitalWellbeing #Fatherhood #AIandHumanity #HumanFlourishing
Kodagu has 1,200+ sacred groves. They have protected our forests for centuries.
Dr. C.G. Kushalappa has spent 30 years proving — to academia, to the government, to the world — that what our ancestors built is real, scientific, working conservation.
Sir, we are grateful for your contribution . Thank you🙏🏽.
Watch his interview on Sacred Groves on YouTube by @meederira_toysi_poovanna :
👉🏽https://youtu.be/OWF0PrQ3X54
FOREWORD
“There is an old story told in our part of India — that a lamp does not ask why it shines. It simply offers its light, and in doing so, illuminates the path for others.”
My mother wrote the foreword to my upcoming book, Being in the Age of AI.
As I reread her words this Mother’s Day, I realized this book is not really about technology.
It is about humanity.�Faith.�Sacrifice.�And the quiet power of a mother’s belief.
She was the first woman in her family from Kodagu to earn a university degree.
As my father’s police postings moved our family across Karnataka, she made sure one thing never changed: my education.
She hand-stitched my textbook covers.�Not sewing paper…�but sewing possibilities.
In 1985, she sold her gold bangles to buy me my first computer.
She did not know what coding was.�But she understood curiosity.�She understood purpose.
�And as only mothers can, she recognized the spark before the world could see it.
When I later told her this book was about “how we remain human in the age of AI,” she said something I will never forget:
“Technology is a tool. The hands that hold it, and the heart that guides those hands, are everything.”
That line may be the real thesis of this book.
To all mothers and women who quietly carry generations forward through sacrifice, faith, and love —�thank you.
Happy Mother’s Day. ❤️
— Poonacha Machaiah
Fide et labore.�Faith and toil.
#mothersday #beingintheageofai
A few weeks ago, I came across the story of a tiny Scottish island called Eigg. Fewer than seventy people lived there, and yet—with the help of thousands of supporters—they managed to do something extraordinary: they organized and bought back their land.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
Because as I look at Kodagu today, I see coffee estates being sold, land changing hands, and a place built over generations slowly becoming an asset class. And the hardest realization I had while writing this piece is this:
The real problem is not that outsiders are buying Kodagu.�It’s that we never built an instrument for Kodagu to buy itself.
No coordinated pool.�No trust.�No system strong enough to respond.
This article is not about nostalgia or outrage. It’s about a practical question:
What would it actually take for a community like ours to organize—economically and collectively—before more of Kodagu disappears one estate at a time?
I wrote this because I believe we are still early enough to act.
The full article is now live on Medium.�👉 /pub/thepoonacha/p/what-a-scottish-island-can-teach
Kodavas won’t sell their land to a fellow Kodava.
The land in Kodagu is not just being lost to outside buyers.
It is being lost because we — our own community — have not built the trust, the structures, or the coordination to keep our own land within our own hands.
Because we don’t have a pool. We don’t have a fund. We don’t have a system.
We have nostalgia. We have WhatsApp groups. We have memory.
We don’t have an instrument.
That has to change.
If you are Kodava and you would consider being part of a community pool to buy and protect Kodava land — DM me. If you are not Kodava and you care about the Western Ghats — DM me. If you have legal, financial, or organizing skills to offer — DM me.
We don’t get a second Kodagu.
#SaveKodagu #Kodagu #Coorg #WesternGhats #Cauvery Kodava NadaKodagu
