I have been reading an English translation of the Kathasaritsagara—The Ocean of the Streams of Stories—composed in Sanskrit by Somadeva, a Kashmiri writer of the eleventh century. Organised into eighteen books, it is less a conventional book than an immense reservoir of narratives. Stories arise from within other stories, branch into still more stories and then disappear back into the larger current from which they emerged. The celebrated twenty-five tales of Vikram and Vetala are embedded within this extraordinary ocean. 

What fascinates me is not merely their antiquity. It is their survival. I can vouch that when I read them now in my seventies, I loved them. I could enter the tales almost effortlessly—as easily as one gets wet while walking in the rain. Something in them traverses geography and time. Or perhaps they resonate with something already present deep in the human psyche.

 Increasingly, I have come to believe that we do not merely tell stories. We live through them.

When we watch a movie or read a novel, we willingly enter a deliberately streamlined version of life. Irrelevant moments have been removed. Characters have motivations. Events lead somewhere. Cause and effect become visible. A good screenplay rarely says, “This happened, then this happened, and then this happened.” Its deeper grammar is closer to: this happened, therefore that happened; however, something intervened, therefore events took another turn. 

Real life is far messier. Yet when we remember it, we instinctively impose some of the same order upon it. 

We remember the song played when we had dinner with a friend, but often forget the food. We remember why we left a job, why a friendship ended, why somebody betrayed us, why a particular decision changed everything. Years later, the ‘event’ may feel perfectly coherent not because our memory retains the whole event, but because it retains the meaning we constructed from it—and perhaps the emotion we felt. The mind loses details while preserving much of the interpretation.

During the past two decades, neuroscience has begun to illuminate parts of this narrative machinery. Researchers studying people watching films and listening to stories have found that the brain naturally segments continuous experience into meaningful events. It also draws upon familiar ‘schemas’—mental structures representing situations such as entering a restaurant or passing through an airport—to understand new experiences. Higher-order cortical regions appear capable of representing an event’sunderlying structure even when its surface details differ.

In other words, we possess mental scaffolds for the kinds of stories life repeatedly presents to us. 

One famous experiment made this dramatically visible. In 2004, neuroscientist Uri Hasson, now a professor at Princeton University, and his colleagues placed five people in brain scanners while they independently watched half an hour of Sergio Leone’s film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Their brain activity showed striking synchronisation across viewers—not merely in elementary visual and auditory regions but across substantial areas of the cortex.

 Five separate brains, watching the same unfolding film, showedsignificant correlated patterns of activity in several respects. A film made decades earlier produced synchronised patterns of activity in their brains as they watched it. 

The brain, of course, is not a film studio, but the analogy is hard to resist. It selects scenes, identifies characters, predicts intentions, recognises familiar situations, marks transitions, and stores some experiences while letting countless others vanish.

And more than that, the brain does naturally what the storyteller does deliberately: it searches for patterns.

Perhaps this is why humanity’s oldest stories remain recognisable. The Mahabharata, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Epic of Gilgamesh and countless oral traditions across civilisations repeatedly return to a surprisingly persistent repertoire—love and jealousy, loyalty and betrayal, courage and fear, ambition and sacrifice, justice and revenge, wisdom and folly, mortality and the desire to transcend it.

The familiar saying, “there is nothing new under the sun,” from Ecclesiastes, one of the wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible, resonates because of precisely this recognition: circumstances change enormously, while certain human patterns keep returning.  

This is also why stories are powerful—and dangerous. 

For a story to persuade, it must resonate with structures already present in the listener. Every culture therefore develops master narratives about success, duty, family, nation, honour, gender, wealth, heroism, failure and happiness. We inherit many of these long before we can examine them.

Then something subtle happens.

We keep living stories, fitting our experiences into parts of the template. Storytelling is therefore not merely entertainment. It is one of the mechanisms through which cultures reproduce themselves—and occasionally transform themselves. 

And now enters artificial intelligence.

When I decided to attempt ‘my’ retelling of Vikram and Vetala, I gradually began to see that AI could become a new-age Vetala.

The ancient Vetala never lets King Vikram walk peacefully towards his destination. Hanging over his shoulder, from inside the corpse, Vetala tells Vikram a story, presents a dilemma and compels him to answer. If Vikram remains silent, despite knowing the answer, he will die; so he responds, and Vetala escapes back to the tree.. Vikram must return, lift the corpse once more and begin again. 

It is a magnificent recursive structure. 

So, I decided to call my retelling Out of the Box. The ‘box’ is not simply conventional thinking. It is the invisible architecture of assumptions through which we organise reality.

Here AI becomes interesting.

Used lazily, AI can strengthen the box we are already in. Ofcourse, AI itself has boxes of its own, shaped by the information, patterns and assumptions embedded in its training and design, as well as by the information supplied in a particular interaction. It can tell us what we already believe, reinforce our prejudices, generate comfortable explanations and surround us with endless variations of familiar ideas. Recommendation algorithms can go further, repeatedly serving material similar to what has engaged us before. A machine that can predict our preferences can easily become an extraordinarily efficient manufacturer of intellectual comfort.

But that is the least interesting use of AI.

Its greater possibility is precisely the opposite.

 We can ask it: What am I missing? What assumption have I made? Argue against me. Interpret this event from another person’s position. Show me evidence that would overturn my conclusion. What would a historian see here? A scientist? A child? An adversary? What if the person I regard as the villain were telling the story?

Suddenly the machine becomes Vetala.

It pokes. It prods. It contradicts. It asks another question just when we think the matter is settled.

The greatest challenge in life is to free oneself from conditioning—to overcome fears, doubts, habits, compulsions and prejudices. Friedrich Nietzsche made ‘self-overcoming’ central to his philosophy: human beings must continually confront and transcend inherited limits rather than merely inhabit them. If human life is understood as an expansion of embodied consciousness, this becomes especially significant. Growth requires not merely acquiring more information, but seeing through the conditioning that shapes how information is received, interpreted and acted upon. True freedom begins when we can observe the forces shaping us without automatically obeying them.

For most of human history, such interrogation depended upon finding an exceptional teacher, philosopher, wise friend—or a story.  

Today, we can enter sustained dialogue with an artificial intelligence that has access to an extraordinary range of human knowledge and perspectives.

So, what next? Where do we go from here?

Perhaps towards a new kind of literacy.

The essential skill of the AI age may not be learning how to obtain answers from machines. It may be learning how to use machines to question the stories through which we ourselves operate.

 We must learn to recognise the narrative we have constructed, separate event from interpretation, distinguish memory from reality, invite alternative explanations and remain willing to revise the script.

 Let AI be Vetala, not Vikram. Use it to question and provoke; let itchallenge you. 

But we must remain Vikram—the one who walks, listens, decides and bears responsibility for the answer. For perhaps the purpose of every great story is ultimately not to tell us what happened to somebody else.

Is not the purpose of all learning, experience, travel and meditation ultimately to make us discover the story from which we ourselves need to escape?