Sameer Gudhate Presents the Book Review of Ink Over Algorithms by Manjima Misra

I remember noticing my hands first.

They were still holding the book, long after the sentence had ended. Not gripping it. Just resting there, as if letting go would mean admitting the moment was over. The room had begun to dim in that slow, undecided way evenings do—neither day nor night, just tired of choosing. I was slouched, slightly crooked, aware that my body had been still for too long. The first thought that came wasn’t articulate. It was simpler.

I’ve been rushing more than I admit.

The book had not announced itself while I was reading it. It didn’t interrupt. It waited. Like someone sitting across from you, saying very little, but watching closely enough that you start adjusting your posture without realizing why.

Ink Over Algorithms didn’t feel like a book concerned with arguments. It felt concerned with accountability. With what happens when convenience quietly replaces care, and we tell ourselves nothing essential has been lost. Page after page, it stayed near that discomfort—not pressing for agreement, just refusing to let the feeling pass unexamined.

At first, I resisted it.

Not openly. Not defensively. But in the way one resists slowing down when the world keeps rewarding speed. There were moments I wanted it to be clearer, firmer, more decisive—to take a position I could either agree with or push against. Instead, it lingered. It asked questions that didn’t resolve neatly. That unsettled me more than a strong opinion would have.

The unease told me something important was happening.

I’ve lived long enough with words to recognize when they’re performing and when they’re present. This writing wasn’t trying to persuade. It wasn’t nostalgic, and it wasn’t reactionary. It seemed more interested in what we surrender without noticing—how authorship changes when effort becomes optional, how voice thins when struggle is outsourced.

There were stretches where the prose slowed deliberately, almost testing my patience. Ideas thickened. The language leaned intellectual, careful, precise. In those moments, I felt a distance open up—not rejection, but separation. This didn’t fully meet me, and I stayed with that feeling. I wondered what might have happened if the book had risked more vulnerability there, loosened its grip on rigor, trusted silence a little more.

And yet, even that restraint felt honest.

Because the book never performed urgency. It never dramatized fear. It never reached for spectacle. It returned, again and again, to a quieter insistence: that writing is not just production, but presence. That words don’t merely appear—they arrive carrying the weight of the one who stands behind them.

Somewhere midway through, I stopped reading it as a conversation about technology. I began reading it as a meditation on responsibility. On the difference between assistance and abdication. On how easily we trade effort for efficiency, and call it progress.

What stayed with me most was its attention to voice—not as style, but as accumulation. Voice as something formed by hesitation, by error, by time. Something lived into existence rather than engineered. The book seemed to suggest that voice cannot be replicated because it is not designed. It is endured.

That idea landed quietly, but firmly.

There’s a line—paraphrased now—that kept echoing after I’d moved on: AI can simulate results, but it cannot undergo the journey. It wasn’t clever. It didn’t try to be. It felt like a truth you recognize in your body before your mind catches up.

Journeys leave marks.

On the wrists that ache after writing too long. On the breath that changes when a sentence finally says what it’s been circling for days. On the strange recognition that the person who wrote something earlier was not yet done becoming.

When I reached the final page, there was no sense of completion. No satisfaction. Just residue. The kind that lingers—not demanding action, but altering attention. I noticed myself hesitating the next time I reached for a shortcut. Pausing before allowing ease to replace intention.

The room itself hadn’t changed. Same chair. Same fading light. Same quiet. But something had shifted internally—not enough to announce itself, only enough to be felt.

The book didn’t follow me out of the room.

It stayed behind, open somewhere in the middle, waiting—not for agreement, but for the next moment I choose between speed and care, between convenience and necessity.

And I know it will notice.

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