Across India, a quiet digital ritual has taken hold: politicians and citizens alike are feeding their faces into AI image generators and emerging, transformed, as versions of themselves from four decades past. The trend — rooted in nothing more than nostalgia, curiosity, and the matured capability of tools like ChatGPT to read and replicate visual history — has drawn in figures like Kiren Rijiju, Shashi Tharoor, and Chirag Paswan, who have shared their reimagined 1980s selves on social platforms. It is a small thing, perhaps, but it marks a larger passage: the moment when AI-generated imagery