Welcome to the Southasia Review of Books Podcast, where we speak to celebrated authors and emerging literary voices from across Southasia. In this episode, Shwetha Srikanthan speaks to the multi award-winning journalist, editor and writer Vauhini Vara about her new book, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Harper Collins India, June 2025).
In Searches, Vauhini Vara explores how big tech companies have shaped and exploited human language and communication for their gain. We let this happen, she argues, because we also benefit from the convenience of these products. It’s an exchange that makes us complicit in technological capitalism: we’re both victims and beneficiaries. Vauhini also enacts this through her own digital footprint: from Google searches, Amazon reviews to ChatGPT dialogues.
Searches is a meditation on how language can be reclaimed: how we use it to assert ourselves, to resist, and to imagine alternatives beyond the interests of power.
This episode is now available on Youtube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts
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Episode notes and further reading:
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara (Harper Collins India, June 2025)
‘ChatGPT may be polite, but it’s not cooperating with you’ - Vauhini Vara (The Guardian, May 2025)
‘One Year In and ChatGPT Already Has Us Doing Its Bidding’ - Vauhini Vara (The New York Times, December 2023)
‘My Decade in Google Searches: A Decade of Distrust’ - Vauhini Vara (The New York Times, December 2019)
‘Ghosts: I didn’t know how to write about my sister’s death—so I had AI do it for me’ - Vauhini Vara (The Believer, August 2021)
‘Confessions of a Viral AI Writer: Despite my success with AI-generated stories, I'm not sure they are good for writers—or writing itself’ - Vauhini Vara (Wired, September 2023)
‘Is Amazon Creating a Cultural Monopoly?’ Vauhini Vara (New Yorker, August 2015)
The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara (W W Norton & Company, May 2022)
Between big data and big brother: Why the overwhelming control over data by governments and large corporations doesn’t bode well for democracy - Anita Gurumurthy (Himal Southasian, February 2020)