The Bangle and the Algorithm

By Kavisha Pillay

Let me begin with a small, mortifying truth. I have been catastrophically misguided about love.

Not by poets, musicians, authors or philosophers. Not even by badly behaved exes. But by Indian cinema: that grand, glittering machinery, where violins rise at precisely the right moment. 

I grew up watching Bollywood and Tamil films. I watched women in sarees running through fields towards men, arms outstretched and the rain obligingly falling, as if the monsoon itself had a supporting role. The way love works in these movies is genuinely insane when you think about it. Boy meets girl. Their friend groups happen to be walking past each other. Her bangle catches on a thread of his shirt. That's it. That's the love story. The entire romantic arc of two people's lives hinged on jewellery and loose threading.

I believed it. I internalised the grammar of that world, that somewhere, sometime, fabric and jewellery would conspire on my behalf. That at some point that ineffable, unreasonable, and incandescent moment would arrive and reorder my life with cinematic clarity.

So you can imagine how I am doing in 2026, where love now arrives not in flowery fields but in push notifications.

There is a Tamil song that found its way back onto my playlist recently: Girlfriend from the 2003 film Boys. A vibey anthem composed by A. R. Rahman, in which young men proclaim, with adolescent urgency, that a girlfriend is their ultimate “boost.”

What struck me recently in rewatching the music video, was the computer-generated woman that the video revolves around. A CGI-girl, conjured into being because the real women in the narrative are too complicated, too opinionated, too alive, and too discerning. So the boys fabricate one. A woman made of pixels and projection, who dances obligingly inside their fantasy.

In 2003, it was a joke. In 2026, it is an industry.

The dating app economy is valued at billions of dollars a year. Millions of users scroll through catalogues of human possibility while waiting for coffee. They swipe through faces in under two seconds, faster than it takes to decide between fresh milk and oat milk.

You can filter for height. For politics. For diet. For whether someone wants children. You can pre-empt disagreement before you have even encountered the thrill, or terror, of it.

I understand the appeal. The world is busy. We are tired. Why risk investing in someone who may never align with your values? Why waste time?

But, perhaps the time-wasting was the point. Perhaps love was never meant to be optimised.

There is something sacred, yes, sacred, about not knowing. About sitting across from someone whose data you do not possess. About discovering, slowly, that you are disarmed by the way they think. About the awkward silences. The missteps. The recalibrations. The moments when you realise you were wrong about them.

In any case, that debate feels almost quaint now. Because we've moved past filtering for humans.

Now we manufacture them.

AI companion platforms are ballooning into a projected multi-billion-dollar universe. Hundreds of millions of users speak daily to entities engineered to respond with perfect attentiveness. Young people, inheritors of a fractured, overheating planet, report record levels of loneliness. The World Health Organisation calls it a public health crisis. Isolation, they tell us, corrodes the body as surely as nicotine.

So when an app promises connection at 2 am, no judgment, no fatigue, no blue-ticking, who are we to sneer?

But I will ask this: what happens when intimacy becomes frictionless, and when affection is engineered to avoid the abrasion that makes us grow?

The AI companion learns you. It adapts to you. It does not arrive with childhood wounds or inconvenient moods. It does not force you to confront your impatience, your jealousy, your fear. It does not have a terrible Tuesday that spills into your Wednesday evening.

It mirrors you, softly.

And so, we are back to the CGI-girl. Perfect because she is composed of desire and code. She cannot contradict you. She cannot leave.

We have built a world in which love can be customised like a playlist. No sharp edges. No misalignment. No thread to catch your bangle on unexpectedly.

I worry about that.

Love, in its truest form, is a confrontation with otherness. It is the daily negotiation with a consciousness that is not yours. 

To love someone is to stay past the point where they can be filtered.

It is to choose the person who sometimes irritates you. Who surprises you. Who refuses to behave like a perfectly tuned algorithm.

In a world that increasingly wants to smooth our experience, to reduce our encounters to preferences and probabilities, love remains gloriously inefficient.

I know my expectations are unreasonable. I know the world has changed. I know that people have found profound partnerships on dating apps, and that AI companions have carried some through unbearable nights.

I am not after nostalgia, I am arguing for friction.

To be undone by someone imperfect. The beauty of surprise. For the stubborn, old-fashioned belief that love is not a “boost” or a feature or a subscription model, but a risk; taken without guarantees.

While the algorithms hum and the CGI-girls shimmer, somewhere, in a room with bad lighting and no orchestral score, two flawed people will still collide. And something, mercifully, inconveniently, will catch.