A reflection on cultural blindness — in AI and in us.
RSVP is a short way of saying “répondez s’il vous plaît”, which is French for “please reply.” It is used on invitations to ask guests to confirm whether or not they will attend an event.
An intimation says: this is happening, we are letting you know. Do what you must. Generally one member of family or couple attend the event. It is a social duty.
An invitation says: we are hosting something, please confirm your attendance. Please come. Often ‘with family’ appended for precision. It is a participation in a celebration of joy. It has to followed by phone call. That is a must.
In India an invitation without a follow-up phone call is almost an insult. The written or printed communication is just the first layer. The real invitation is the phone call. Sometimes two or three calls. The host calls, the elder calls, the mutual friend calls. Each call adds warmth and weight to the invitation.
RSVP assumes the written communication is sufficient and the recipient responds. In India the flow is completely reversed. The host keeps reaching out until the guest confirms. The burden of follow-up sits entirely with the inviting side, not the invited side.
Thus, an intimation is no invitation. What happens if RSVP is appended to an intimation of prayer meeting to end the grief?
The Sticker that Unsaid
A man dies. His family is grieving.
Someone in the house, overwhelmed and exhausted, opens a phone. They type the details of prayer meeting into an AI tool. A WhatsApp sticker is generated. It looks clean and professional. It carries the date, the time, the venue.
At the bottom, it says: RSVP.
The sticker is forwarded across family groups, colony groups, friends circles. Hundreds of eyes receive it. Nobody notices. Or nobody says anything. It reaches people as an invitation to a mourning gathering that was always meant to be an intimation.
That one word ‘RSVP’ changed everything about the communication. And almost nobody caught it.
What Is an Uthala
Uthala is not an event. It is not a function. It is a gathering for prayers. That sticker is no invitation. It was an intimation of an event.
In Punjabi and North Indian tradition, it is held after a death, on the third, tenth, or thirteenth day depending on family custom or convenience. People come to sit with the bereaved family, join the prayers for the departed person, and mark the formal close of the initial mourning period.
The food served after the Uthala tells you everything about its spirit. A salad is not tossed together. Onions sit in one bowl. Tomatoes in another. Cucumber in a third. There is no decoration, no garnish, no presentation. It is deliberate plainness. The food is saying what the occasion requires. We are not celebrating. We are grieving. We are nourishing the community that has gathered, but without festivity.
Gajar ka Halwa will not appear. Moong Dal Halwa will not appear. Those are sweets for weddings, for festivals, for joy. After a simple meal, a simpler sweet is served, enough to honour tradition, not enough to suggest celebration.
This is not written anywhere in a rulebook. It is absorbed. Through attendance, through observation, through being genuinely present at such occasions across years of life.
The difference from other celebratory festivals is not technical. It is emotional. It is cultural. And a WhatsApp sticker with RSVP at the bottom collapsed that difference entirely.
The Hindi Sticker Did Not Fix It
The family tried again. This time in Hindi. Perhaps, someone thought, the language barrier caused the problem. Perhaps AI understands mourning better in an Indian language.
The sticker was composed. It was correct in grammar, accurate in details. And then it closed with this line:
“आपसे विनम्र अनुरोध है कि हवन एवं ब्रह्मभोज में उपस्थित होकर अपनी शुभ सहभागिता दें।”
Shubh. Auspicious. Blessed. Celebratory.
It is the word you use at a wedding. At a new beginning. At a festival. It carries light and festivity in its syllables. In the context of a death ritual, in a sentence asking people to attend a Havan for a departed soul, it is not just wrong. It is a quiet disrespect. It is unintentional, but real.
The AI had switched languages. It had not switched its cultural register. It carried the same blindspot across, wrapped now in Devanagari script.
A correct line would have been something like:
“आपकी उपस्थिति से परिवार को सांत्वना मिलेगी।”
Your presence will bring comfort to the family.
Comfort. Not auspicious participation. That is the right emotional register for grief. However, traditionally it would be avoided. Again it is an intimation and not an invitation. It will not emphasize doing. It will tell the event.
The Host Who Did Not Notice
The person managing all of this was 45 years old.
By 45, most people in North India have attended dozens of such gatherings. Uthalas, Havans, mourning prayers, Antim Ardas. The knowledge was always there to be absorbed. The occasions were always present.
But attending is not the same as absorbing. You can sit in an Uthala for an hour and leave having experienced nothing. You can eat the simple food without ever wondering why it is simple. You can listen to the prayers without letting them land.
This is not cruelty. It is not stupidity. It is a kind of sleepwalking. Life continues around you, rituals unfold in front of you, and you are present but not truly there. Decades pass this way.
The host was too busy to check the sticker before it went out. That is understandable. Grief is exhausting. Logistics are overwhelming. But the deeper truth is that even without the exhaustion, the errors may not have been noticed. The cultural vocabulary was simply not there.
He is not alone. He represents something wider.
A Generation that Attended Everything and Absorbed Nothing
Urban life in India has quietly eroded a certain kind of knowing.
Joint families gave way to nuclear families. Communities thinned. Elders became less present in daily life. Children attended rituals but sat at the edges, on phones, waiting for it to end. Nobody explained the separate bowls of onion and tomato. Earlier nobody needed to. Earlier the proximity to elders and community made the knowledge ambient. You caught it like weather.
That ambient transmission has weakened. And in its place has come something that looks like competence but is not. People can manage. They can organise. They can forward a WhatsApp sticker to hundred people in four minutes. What they sometimes cannot do is read what the sticker says — not the words, but the meaning behind the words.
This is lukewarm living. Not evil. Not ignorant in the ordinary sense. Just never quite awake to the texture of the life being lived.
The dangerous condition is not knowing, rather not knowing that you do not know.
What AI Actually Lacks
AI is not wise. That is not an insult. It is a precise description.
AI has information about Uthala. It can tell you it is held on the third, tenth, or thirteenth day. It can describe the Garuda Purana Katha and the Havan. It can compose text in Hindi, Punjabi, English. It can generate a clean sticker in seconds.
What it cannot do is feel the difference between the room at an Uthala and the room at a wedding. It has never sat in that stillness. It has never noticed that the salad arrived in three separate bowls and understood why. It has never sensed the weight that the word Shubh would carry in the wrong context. It does not know the difference between Langar and Lunch.
Wisdom is knowing which information matters, in which moment, with which emotional weight. That knowing comes from lived experience, from attention, from being genuinely present across many such moments over years.
So RSVP is not just culturally wrong on an Uthala sticker. It is culturally foreign to Indian invitation practice altogether. Even for joyous occasions, an Indian host would never wait for an RSVP. They would pick up the phone and repeat invite.
AI defaults to familiar formats. An event needs a date, a venue, and an RSVP. That is what it knows about event communication. It does not yet know that some gatherings are not events. Some are simply grief, shared.
AI did not just confuse intimation with invitation. It imported a Western model of invitation that does not even map correctly onto Indian invitation culture, let alone Indian mourning culture.
This will improve. AI learns. Within a single conversation, it can be corrected and it will hold that correction. It is educable. That is something.
But right now, in its current state, AI should not be trusted alone with the communication of grief. It needs a human in the loop. A specific kind of human.
The Responsibility of the Awake
Someone noticed the RSVP. Someone saw the word Shubh in the wrong place. Someone knew at twenty what this 45-year-old did not know at forty-five.
That is not a small thing. That is cultural memory, still alive in a person, still functioning.
The question is what to do with it.
Correcting the host after the sticker has gone to hundred people is not useful. But being present before the next sticker goes out may be useful. Not as a critic. Not as someone demonstrating superior knowledge. Simply as the layer of human scrutiny that AI cannot provide and that the sleepwalking host will not provide for himself.
In older times this role belonged to elders, to community leaders, to the person in every neighbourhood who simply knew how things were done and why. That person is rarer now. But they still exist.
If you are reading this and you recognised the RSVP error before I explained it, if the word Shubh made you wince, if you know which sweet should and should not appear at an Uthala, then you are that person in your community.
That is not a burden. It is a form of belonging.
AI will keep generating stickers. People will keep forwarding them without reading carefully. The errors will keep going out to hundred people at a time.
Unless someone is paying attention.
Written in reflection on a conversation about grief, food, language, and what it means to truly inhabit the culture you were born into.
P.S.: Ronde Saare Vyah Pichche is a satire not a translation of RSVP.