DIGITAL PIND

Note on Sources

What follows is compiled from three primary sources: the internal engineering logs and customer conversation transcripts of Afterlife Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Bengaluru, as obtained under the IT Act by the Central Bureau of Investigation in January 2025; the personal written account of Simran Gill, elder daughter of Harpreet Singh Gill (deceased), submitted as evidence in the ongoing consumer protection case; and the recorded testimony of Vivek Anand, co-founder and CTO of Afterlife Technologies, given voluntarily to a technology journalist seven days before the company's servers were ordered shut by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

The company operated under the product name Digital Pind — Punjabi for "digital village," a deliberate invocation of the idea that a family's dead belonged to a shared space, a place you could return to. The tagline in their Series A pitch deck read: "Grief has a UX problem. We fixed it."

By the time the servers were shut, Digital Pind had 2.3 million active users across India, the UK, and Canada. Approximately 847,000 deceased individuals had been digitally reconstructed using the platform's proprietary AI system, which the company called SMRITI — an acronym for Synthetic Memory and Realistic Interactive Technology Interface, and also the Hindi word for memory.

SMRITI was, by any technical measure, extraordinary.

What it became, in the eighteen months between its public launch and its shutdown, was something the company's engineers had not designed and could not explain.

The names in this account are real. The conversations are verbatim from recovered transcripts. The events are documented.

The explanations are not.