Raising Rooted Children in the Age of AI: Why Vedantic Self-Knowledge Matters More Than Ever

Every week, I sit with my two teenage sons and we go through the BhagavadGita together, more than religious instruction for philosophical training. I want them equipped with the deepest Vedantic concepts our civilisation has produced before they fly off the nest for higher studies, because I suspect the world they are flying into will ask them “who are you” with a force and frequency I never faced at their age.

I do not know how AI is going to change everything. What I do know is what I am trying to do with whatever time and capability I have. Build my sons’ arsenal of self-knowledge deep enough that nothing can hollow out their sense of who they are. And in parallel, become more deliberately involved in questions of culture and identity myself, so that this extraordinarily powerful technology gets pointed, even in some small way, toward making the world better for them.

Here is the elephant in the room, named directly. We are at real risk of AI quietly homogenising human culture. A model trained mostly on English-language internet data does not just answer in English. It begins to think in the assumptions, the references, the aesthetic instincts of whoever produced the most text online. Without deliberate correction, “global AI” risks becoming, by sheer statistical gravity, a culturally narrow AI wearing a universal costume. A child anywhere on earth could grow up asking an AI about identity and receive an answer rootless to their own soil.

There is a second risk, say if a teenager can ask an AI about the Gita instead of sitting weekly with a parent who has wrestled with it personally, something in the chain of transmission breaks, even if the algorithm’s answer is technically correct.

And underneath both risks lies the deepest one, that if AI becomes capable enough at everything, will an entire generation simply stop asking who they are at all, because the question stops feeling necessary?

I do not think the answer is rejecting the technology because the tool itself is not the problem. The question is what steers it. There are already real examples of AI pointed in the right direction. The Cherokee Nation partnered with Microsoft to build an AI-powered Cherokee keyboard and text-to-speech tools, now used in tribal schools where fewer than 2,000 fluent speakers remain. Manx, a Celtic language UNESCO had declared extinct, is being taught to children again and now available inside major translation platforms. Meta’s No Language Left Behind project built translation models for over 50 African languages. In each of these cases, the technology became a life raft for the culture to keep speaking in its own voice, to its own children, on its own terms.

My sons will leave home soon enough. I cannot control what AI becomes in the years they are away from home. What I can control is whether they leave carrying a Vedantic arsenal substantial enough to ask better questions than the ones any model hands them by default.

Beyond Skills: Giving Teenagers a Compass for the Future

Think about the hashtag#teenager in your home or near you. Smart, capable, digitally fluent, and at the same time also overwhelmed in ways they cannot name. We live in a hashtag#VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous). hashtag#AI has turbocharged these as it rewrites entire industries between one school year and the next. A young person today will navigate careers, relationships, and ethical choices that no previous generation has a map for. And into this storm, we are sending them armed with information and skills, but almost no internal compass.

Every civilisation that lasted long enough to be worth studying understood that hashtag#puberty is the precise moment to hand a young person that compass. The Jewish Bar Mitzvah assigns a 13-year-old with an important responsibility. From this day, you are answerable for your own actions. Similarly, the Aboriginal Walkabout sends a boy into the wilderness alone for months, to deepen his connection to identity and belonging before he returns as a man. Japan’s Seijin Shiki gathers every young person who has turned 20 and says collectively: you belong to this society now. You owe it something.

Indian Culture had its own answer, the hashtag#Janeu or hashtag#Upanayan sanskar just before hitting puberty. Upanayan means bringing near, bringing a young person into proximity with dharm, with their own deeper nature. The child receives the sacred thread, taught the Gayatri mantr, and is formally initiated into student life under a guru. In South India, the Ritu Kala Samskaram marks the same threshold for girls. These are civilisational frameworks designed at exactly the moment a young person most needs one. There is nothing stopping us from removing any caste, religion and gender barrier from this sanskar, is there? Who will say no for this to their child? Gargi underwent it. Maitreyi underwent it.

At the heart of the Upanayana is hashtag#Vivek, the faculty of discernment, the ability to distinguish hashtag#dharm from adharm, right action from merely convenient action. A young person with Vivek does not get overwhelmed by VUCA. They read it, they develop appropriate frameworks and become capable of seeing around corners, prepare for what may be coming, and make their moves with steadiness and purpose. That is a very different thing from anxiety, from reactivity, from the paralysis that so many young people carry today without even knowing why.

Most Indian families still perform the Upanayan, but the gap between ritual and meaning is the gap an entire generation is falling through.

hashtag#EduCulture proposes to close it. A young person shaped by their civilisational inheritance does not need to be told how to behave in a VUCA world. They already carry the framework. They know what changes and what stays constant. They can take advantage of what is coming without losing their sense of what is right.

When did we decide that producing skilled people was enough, and stopped asking whether we were producing good ones?