DEV Community: Vinit Raj

Kurukshetra Is Not What I Expected — It’s More Than a Battlefield !!

Vinit Raj — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 19:25:45 +0000

For the longest time, I thought of Kurukshetra as a dramatic place — almost cinematic. The battlefield. The moment before the war. Krishna delivering the Gita. That’s the image most of us carry. So when I finally visited, I half-expected something intense, almost heavy in the air.

It wasn’t like that at all.

It felt… normal. Auto-rickshaws passing by. Small shops selling snacks. Students laughing outside coaching centers. Life moving on like it does everywhere else. And somehow that normalcy made it more powerful. Because beneath that everyday surface, you know you’re standing on land that people have been talking about for thousands of years.

A History That Started Long Before the War

The Mahabharata may have made Kurukshetra famous, but it didn’t create it. Long before the epic took shape, this region was already mentioned in Vedic texts. It was called Brahmavarta — considered sacred ground between ancient rivers that don’t even flow the same way anymore.

There’s also actual archaeological evidence from nearby sites showing settlements dating back to the late Vedic period. Pottery, remains of habitation, traces of organized life. That part always grounds me. It reminds me that beyond legends and beliefs, real people lived here. They cooked, traded, argued, prayed. The epic story came later, but the land was already important.

Faith Here Has Shifted Over Time

Today, everything in Kurukshetra points toward Krishna and the Bhagavad Gita. Huge statues, temples, murals — the identity feels clear and focused. But if you read a little deeper, you realize it hasn’t always looked like this.

There were periods when Surya, the Sun God, was central. There were strong Vaishnav traditions linked to Vishnu worship. Over centuries, especially during the Bhakti movement, devotion to Krishna grew stronger and more emotionally expressive. Slowly, that became the dominant narrative of the city.

What I find interesting is that nothing truly disappeared. It just layered. One era resting on top of another.

More Than One Tradition Has Called It Sacred

Another thing people don’t always mention is how many different faith traditions have passed through this region. Historical accounts describe Buddhist monasteries existing here centuries ago. Jain influences were present too. Even today, museums in Kurukshetra display more than just one religious storyline.

It makes the place feel less rigid than people assume. It hasn’t belonged to only one group at all times. It has been interpreted differently in different centuries. And yet, the idea of it being sacred somehow survived every transition.

It Survived Invasions and Still Feels Intact

Kurukshetra and nearby Thanesar saw invasions, political shifts, and the rise and fall of empires. Temples were destroyed. Idols were taken. New rulers came in with new priorities. Later, British scholars tried to map and categorize everything, sometimes questioning whether the epic war had truly happened.

But none of that erased the emotional connection people had with the place. Pilgrims kept coming. Rituals continued. Belief didn’t depend entirely on academic proof. It depended on continuity.

What Stayed With Me

What stayed with me wasn’t a monument or a statue. It was watching people at Brahma Sarovar during evening aarti. Some were deeply involved in prayer. Others were just sitting quietly, maybe thinking about something personal. It didn’t feel staged. It felt lived in.

Kurukshetra, at least to me, doesn’t feel like a frozen battlefield from mythology. It feels like a place that has absorbed centuries of meaning and still carries on like any other city. That balance between ordinary life and extraordinary history is what makes it different.

It’s easy to reduce it to a single moment from the Mahabharata. But the longer you think about it, the more you realize that Kurukshetra is not one story. It’s many stories layered over the same soil — and people are still adding to them.

The twist: AI is a tool, not the operator

Vinit Raj — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:49:12 +0000

Tuesday February 24 2026 TechWorld

Why Cyber-security job is not replaceable by AI

*CYBERSECURITY *

AI identifies patterns; humans identify intent.

Let’s just say it out loud because a lot of people are scared right now. If you look at the cybersecurity job market today, especially for entry-level roles, it looks incredibly rough.

Between corporate layoffs, the looming shadow of automation, and boot camps that promised six-figure salaries in six months flooding the market, adding artificial intelligence to the mix feels like facing a final boss.

The easy and most common conclusion people jump to is that we are all getting replaced by machines. But if you actually understand how security works on a day-to-day basis, beyond the flashy headlines and social media hype, that whole idea starts to fall apart pretty quickly.

The reality is that AI isn’t replacing cybersecurity professionals at all.

*What is AI Replacing ? *

The reality is that AI isn’t replacing cybersecurity professionals at all. What it is actually replacing are the mind-numbing, boring tasks, and honestly, that is a good thing for everyone involved.

To really get this, we have to strip away the sci-fi hype for a second and look at what AI actually is. It is a tool. A very powerful tool, sure, but at the end of the day, it is just a piece of software.

In a typical Security Operations Center, human analysts are notoriously buried under an absolute mountain of logs. We are talking about massive spreadsheets, endless meaningless alerts, and hundreds of false positives that lead nowhere.

A lot of entry-level security work used to literally just be staring at dashboards for hours, trying to find something genuinely suspicious in a massive sea of digital noise.

That isn't strategic or high-level work; it is just a test of human endurance. This is exactly where AI shines.

It is fantastic at processing huge volumes of data instantly, flagging weird anomalies, filtering out the false positives, and automating repetitive responses.

I remember coming across a great example of a bank that was dealing with around nine hundred security alerts a day, but only two or three of them were legitimate threats. Their human analysts were completely burning out just chasing noise. When they brought in AI, it filtered those alerts down to the few that actually mattered. That didn't eliminate the need for the analysts; it just stopped them from drowning in useless data.

** CYBER v/s AI**

*Hackers have AI too !! *

There is also a massive part of this conversation that gets completely ignored in all the panic, which is the fact that hackers have AI too.

If defenders are automating their threat detection, you better believe attackers are automating their evasion tactics.

This has always been an ongoing arms race, and it definitely didn't start recently. When our automated detection systems got better a few years ago, attackers simply shifted their strategies.

They moved toward living-off-the-land techniques, credential theft, sophisticated social engineering, and mimicking insider threats.

No mathematical model on earth can perfectly detect whether the person logging into the network at two in the morning is actually Sue from accounting cramming for a deadline, or a hacker sitting in another country using Sue's stolen credentials.

Figuring that out isn't just a matter of data analysis. It requires behavioral judgment, understanding human habits, and intuition. AI is notoriously terrible at that kind of nuanced judgment.

That lack of intuition brings up some major areas where artificial intelligence really struggles, starting with completely new threats.

AI models learn exclusively from historical training data. If a zero-day attack happens—something completely unprecedented that no one in the world has ever seen before—the AI model doesn't have a reference point to understand it.

**
AI models are themselves attacked . **

It just sees raw math, and enterprise security is about way more than just math. People also tend to forget that AI models themselves can be attacked.

These systems can be poisoned by hackers who manipulate the training data to intentionally generate false signals or hide real attacks.

Imagine blindly trusting an automated system during an active, high-stakes data breach when that system might have already been compromised by the attackers. Relying solely on that isn't security; it is straight-up gambling.

Human Impact .

Human beings, on the other hand, can look at a situation and recognize patterns that just feel wrong, even if they have never seen that exact exploit before. AI cannot feel that gut instinct. Beyond that, AI has absolutely zero understanding of real-world context.

It doesn't know about internal business politics, it doesn't know that a department just switched software vendors last week, it doesn't realize the company is expanding internationally, and it definitely doesn't know that an employee was granted temporary access to a specific server for a short-term project.

*Role of Human *

**
The definite change -**

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Because of all these blind spots, the role of the human in cybersecurity isn't disappearing, but it is definitely changing. The real shift happening right now is one of elevation, not replacement. The future analyst won't sit at a desk manually filtering logs for eight hours a day.

Instead, they will be stepping into higher-level roles where they validate the findings the AI spits out, investigate the incredibly complex anomalies the machine can't figure out, make tough decisions based on business impact, and proactively hunt for hidden threats.

Most importantly, they will be paid to think like an attacker. That specific ability is crucial because security is ultimately a battle of creativity between the attacker and the defender, and creativity is still a deeply human trait.

In the world of cyber threats, AI assists — but human intelligence protects.

If someone genuinely expects to do repetitive log analysis for their entire career, then yes, an algorithm will eventually replace that specific task. But cybersecurity professionals who learn how to use these new tools intelligently will only become more valuable, not less.

We really don't need fewer humans in the security industry; we just need better, more adaptable ones. At the end of the day, AI is not the operator. It is just the screwdriver, and a screwdriver has never built anything on its own. It requires a skilled professional to actually use it. The future of this industry isn't a war of humans versus machines. It is going to be a landscape of humans who understand machines winning out over humans who don't.