The Better India · 6 hours ago

How Seniors Are Learning AI & Whatsapp in India with the Social Pathshala

When a offhand joke at a marketing meeting - "Parents need the training the most" - landed differently on Mahima Bhalotia than it did on everyone else in the room, she didn't laugh it off; she built a school. Since 2020, her Social Paathshala has brought more than 10,000 senior citizens across India and abroad into confident fluency with smartphones, digital payments, and now artificial intelligence. Eighty-year-old Maya Maker, who once "was getting into a real stew" navigating an India transformed by digital life, recently used Meta AI on WhatsApp to plan a six-day geology and history tour of Karnataka for a visiting professor - in minutes. What the platform offers goes beyond any syllabus: as Mahima describes it, each session has become "a counselling session, a teaching session and an emotional empowerment session - all rolled into one." At its core, this is a story about what happens when someone takes seriously the idea that the desire to keep growing does not diminish with age - it just needs someone patient enough to meet it.