Doctors call it burnout. I call it the side effects of teaching. I am Anindita Guha, a beleaguered private school teacher. Have been so for the last 30 years now. A whisper away from retirement. And not a day too soon.

My friends and acquaintances smile and ask me to take a breather when I tell them that children have changed, are changing drastically. They seem to care less and less. I am called a hassled alarmist, a conspiracy theorist. But I see it in their glazed, unseeing eyes. Their calm demeanours. Their lack of beautiful, chaotic mischief. Their calculative manipulation of each other. Their lack of empathy or sympathy for the lesser advantages.

I was jolted into this feeling by an incident on the way to school involving two children from our school. On the way to school, I crossed a busy intersection which was harrowing to cross. I saw a small crowd had gathered at the crossing, holding up the traffic and watching something intently.

I peered to see the students recording something with great interest. A dog's hind quarters had been badly mangled by a car. It struggled to drag its twisted, broken legs across the street to the other side. Eyes glued on and fingers steady on creating the video, the faces of the children registered nothing but curiosity - no empathy, just intent of capturing the moment to create a reel/story, up for consumption.

I was told that I was getting too sentimental about 'the good old days'. Life was about evolution - change was inevitable. The old order was changing, yielding place to the new. A part of me recognised this. But there was a niggling doubt about it in my mind, a worm of an idea wriggled around insidiously. Was I really imagining it? Overreacting because of overwork?

Project NewDawn: Uday was the government's new pet programme. Though hers was a private school, it had to toe the line as the instructions had been sent from the Board. It was a mandatory stricture to be integrated into the syllabus. There was the usual grumble from the staff, but eventually everyone complied. After all, it was being followed countrywide.

"You children have taken to the game format like ducks to water", I said to Rahul, my son. He is a teenager, rather willful. Growing up without a father is never easy. I try to overcompensated but it never seems enough. Usually, when I try to engage him in conversations, he answers in monosyllables or zones out. I calm myself down with the usual platitudes that it will pass with his adolescence.

"It is really helpful, Ma. All my friends and I find it invigorating. The levels are competitive. It tests my abilities and hones my concentration. This is Lifeskill Lesson 2.0." I gasped at him. He said all this to me with a calm, decorous manner. I was impressed and decided to check out NewDawn: Uday more carefully. It was helping my child. It was no longer the add-on that we had to comply with as a mandate from the Board.

AI was a new intrusion into my life. I have always believed that technology and technology - aided pedagogy were all fine if they supplemented learning instilled with the humanitarian values. After all, teachers were training human capital for the future. Rahul was quite taken aback by my zeal to understand NewDawn: Uday and helped me figure out the ropes. I could gauge that secretly, he was tickled about his mother turning tech-savvy. Outwardly, things went on as always. However, he had calmed down after dabbling in this cognitive development programme. His grades, too, had shown a marked improvement. I was grateful for the positive change, and yet something gnawed behind my mind. I sometimes thought about why I felt like this. After a long time, things were better. So why upset the apple cart?

I have been a senior school teacher for a while now. We, teachers, love talking about the 'attitude problem' of adolescent children. We understand that it is just a phase where the children are trying to grow their own personalities. The other teachers are so relieved that the children have quietened down. Lesser outbursts, lesser drama or behavioral issues. "Less Nautanki! Thank God!" Mrs Verma, the Hindi teacher, said with evident glee, the other day.

'Welcome to NewDawn: Uday. We welcome you to this cognitive development programme to optimise emotional regulation, academic productivity and social stability.' I was greeted with this platitude as I logged in. So far, so good. Good packaging of perhaps the same ideas floated the year before that had not gone too well and petered out country wide. Why did the Board waste our time? "Oh, I have to answer these questions. What would I do if, while driving my car I find that my brakes are inoperative? What kind of a question is that? I will just go to the next question. Hello, why can I not access the next question? Rahul, help me out, na?"

"Ma, you have to answer the question. There is a helpbox. It will give you clues to aid in answering. Just use that."

'Will you want to stop the car by ramming into the closed shop on the right or left? Do not fear for personal safety, your car is equipped with Euro 4 airbags that will minimize damage to yourself.'

'Ram into the lamppost. Damage to car- extensive.'

'Detour into the park. Ram into a tree. Damage to car- less extensive.'

'Veer into pavement.'

Huh? Why was the last option given? That was not even viable. It was like the idiotic MCQs they had to create in their question papers. All the options geared towards stopping the car paid little heed to the damage caused to the surroundings and the car. Having chosen the first option, I got a poor rating. Then the next set of ambiguous questions popped up.

"Ma, you have really taken to the game. Isn't it interesting?" Rahul asked me at dinner. I had spent 2 straight hours probing it. The questions had rewarded me with tepid scores and kept encouraging me to think out of the box. When I mentioned this to Rahul, he calmly told me to do the same, almost in the same tone, I noticed.

The next few weeks, I dug deeper. Bloodshot eyes were de rigour in my profession, so no one questioned me. I asked my students about their opinion of the programme and received overwhelming approval from all. A unanimous acceptance was surprising from teenage girls who squabbled about everything. Strangely, the quarrels, bullying, fights, and tears had subsided. Teachers, parents and the administration were collectively heaving sighs of relief.

"You should have helped her up and taken her to the infirmary," I admonished Nishi, a student of Class XI. "You are old enough to know this," I looked at her balefully. A younger student had tripped and fallen on the basketball court, scraping her knees which led to her bleeding badly. I was a little behind Nishi and unable to rush quickly enough to stop the child's fall. I was aghast to see Nishi calmly step over the child and try to walk away without helping her. Nishi looked at me calm or was it cold eyes that showed not the slightest remorse about her behaviour.

"You know how teenagers are." What was the reaction of other teachers in the staffroom? Was I over-reacting? Many tiny incidents swirled around my mind. The incident of the dog. Today's incident. Too many coincidences.

I had reached the 5th level of the quiz/game. There was a different level waiting to be explored. This was more video game format. No wonder the children had taken to it. However, the questions were getting weirder. Morally ambiguous. The choices got tougher. Sacrifices made got higher points and grades. The hair on my nape stands up as I wade deeper into the programme. This is not educational. It is propaganda, a brain-wash to create a manipulated, controlled, emotionally sterile future workforce. This was indoctrination from the grassroots level. The government's overt agenda -' To enhance emotional regulation, discipline, productivity, and national competitiveness' but the covert idea was to engineer human predictability. Anything emotional or that which was a human characteristic deemed inefficient and suppressed, not just erased but optimised out. "Will you report your parents if they stop you from upgrading NewDawn?" Her son had answered in the affirmative. Anindita stared at the response on the screen without blinking, mouth turning completely dry.

The fear was an icy blanket that burnt and branded her soul. All that she stood for was being systematically annihilated. Teaching was meant to produce sorted-out human beings, not soulless robots. Not a moment could be lost. She feared that maybe it was too late. She feverishly gathered as much data and evidence as she could manage. She updated her own tech-knowledge on a war footing.

She remembers the day she broke the internet with all the evidence she had gathered to incriminate the programme. She had leaked it on the dark web. It has spread like wildfire. She had taken utmost precautions to ensure that she could not be traced back.

"This is a disgrace. AI manipulation of children's minds by the government! How low will the powers stoop?" Screamed the bucolic journalists on the net, and the headlines ran stories around the clock. This was the father of all scandals.

"The Opposition is spreading these scurrilous rumours in this election year!" The government's representatives pontificated online.

"Our children are back to being distracted and emotionally volatile. Maybe the programme wasn't so bad, after all," whined the parents.

"We want Uday back," raged the students, facing an unprecedented withdrawal system, a cold turkey in their brains.

Despite having taken precautions, the media got wind of Anindita's role in the falling apart of Uday. She had prepared for this eventuality but not for the barrage of rage and hate that followed. She escaped from her own home after she heard her son, Rahul, calmly talking to someone about turning her in to the authorities, being a threat to society.

The knock on the door of her OYO room could mean only one thing. They had come for her. Rahul must have ratted out. This was like a knife being twisted in her heart. Otherwise, she did not mind having her life snuffed out. She believed she had acted in defence of humanity. Her fervent wish at that moment was that, before another NewDawn surfaced within the next few months with more advanced dynamics for brainwashing, human children would have a little time to cleanse and rejuvenate their doctored brains.

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