CoRover.ai | BharatGPT | Edgehax · 2026
A wise buddy HomePod, for every growing mind.
Solo project · 2 months
A voice-first, screen-free AI companion for children, handcrafted in Channapatna wood, governed by parents.
Product design, AI interaction, service ecosystem, brand direction.
A companion built on the Krishna archetype: a friend, not an authority.
A full product proposition, priced at ₹13,999.
Smart toys are interactive but cold. Traditional toys are warm but static.
CoRover.ai is an Indian conversational AI company building human-centric, responsible AI systems - natural, multilingual interaction through conversational and agentic platforms that prioritise trust, accessibility, and real-world relevance. Its sovereign language model, BharatGPT, is built to align with local languages, cultural contexts, and regulatory requirements.
With experience deploying AI across public services and enterprise environments, CoRover emphasises ethical deployment, transparency, and cultural sensitivity.
Kanha extends those values into a new domain. Where the company's work has lived in public services and enterprise, this project asks how conversational AI can enter the most sensitive space of all, childhood and the family home and do it gently, safely, and meaningfully.
The Client
Human-centric. Trust-led.
The Whorl of Wood
finding the weight
A top lives or dies by its balance. Cherry, dense, heavy, choked the spin at the scale I needed; a CNC glitch broke the symmetry and the test failed. Cedar, chosen for its texture and its own symbolism of rebirth, proved too thin-walled, no heart at its centre to flip on. Ivory wood was light and willing, but the scale-shift from miniature to hand-sized meant body and spindle had to be born separately, the piece made in two parts. After sitting with the artisans, I returned to the lathe and there, at last, found the balance between form and function.
Turning the Spindle
the largest piece, the hardest spin
Creating the perfect palm-spun spindle for Jiva was the most challenging and most rewarding piece of the collection. Its design demanded a precision only the lathe could give: cutting, mounting, chiselling to shape, checking against the stencil, sanding, lacquering. The first ivory prototype lacked the density for a sustained spin; the balance I envisioned kept slipping away, sending me deeper into the wood itself to find it.
Whirl of Mechanics - The Frozen Link
the cold connection
Jiva's wheels needed a mechanism. Solid brass ran too heavy; a ring lightened it; stops held the wheels in place; a tube set into the hole cut the friction between brass rod and wood until the movement ran smooth. My first rings, at 0.5 mm, were too flimsy and delicate — at 0.8 mm they found their strength and their shine. Built by the sandwich method, joined cold, piece by piece until, in the words of my own process notes: works well - yuhuuu!
The Spin of Brass
Spirals of Renewal
For Rebirth, a brass hemisphere - the soul itself shaped by metal spinning, a blank formed over a rotating mandrel: the very process an echo of the project's theme. A solid hemisphere would have drowned the spin in weight; hollow, at 1.2 mm, it held both strength and lightness. Around it, the rebirth stage rose in cherry wood and colour, mint green, warm yellow-green, stripes of enamel over lac, heritage and innovation flourishing as one. And on the lathe I turned the golden crowns for every top, chasing brass to match the precision of the wood, the machine's measurements drifting, each adjustment a step toward harmony between form and function.
Cuts and Constructs
the Illusion of the machine
A top lives or dies by its balance. Cherry, dense and heavy, choked the spin; thin-walled cedar had no heart to flip on, and failed in testing; ivory was light and willing but couldn't hold a long spin alone. Each failure was a teacher, schooling me in mass, scale, and the secret centre of gravity and each sent me back to the lathe to begin again.
The Trapped Soul
mastering the loop
Marana needed a brass ring of 6.5 cm, a size the world refused to sell me. I tried annealing and stretching a smaller ring; it failed. So I forged my own: a solid brass rod, annealed and stretched over a ring base by hand. The first, at 5 mm, spun too heavily; I remade it at 3.5 mm for speed and grace. The labour taught me how brass yields under heat and resists under stress and left me surer of my own hands.
Tales in Tints and Tones
the alchemy of lac
Colour was its own battle: how to make it carry meaning, not just beauty. The palette became the story, reds and yellows for the spark of Birth; the full spectrum of joy and shadow for Life; wood stain, black, and earthy brown for the stillness of Death; greens and vivid enamel for the surge of Rebirth. The lac itself was made the old way, with the artisans: raw lac heated soft, infused with eco-friendly dyes, turmeric for yellow, vermilion for red, indigo for green. But London's winter fought the craft: the lathe wouldn't reach the heat the lac needed to melt and marry the wood. It took to hale and maple; cherry's dense, oily grain turned it away. Success one day, refusal the next.
Sheen, Shine & Wabi-Sabi Tales
the finish, and the flaw
Each stage earned its own finish: polished lac and brass for the purity of the early stages; matte and aged solemnity for Death; high-gloss brilliance for Rebirth - the surfaces themselves evolving through the cycle. I tested them all: satin and matt-satin brass, Polyx oil, beeswax, linseed, microcrystal wax. And through it, pieces cracked, thin walls, high speeds, a mismeasured mount. Artisans give their whole lives to this craft; I learned why. But the slight asymmetries, the marks of the hand, I came to read them as wabi-sabi: the signature of the handmade, proof that rebirth doesn't erase what came before, it builds upon it. Even the moon has its dark spots, yet it shines beautifully. The same goes for us, our flaws don't dim our light; they make us real.
TALES OF TECHNIQUES
'तकनीकों की कथा'
Where It Got Hard:
You can't skip the process; you must complete the cycle to reach the endgame. Every turning had to be earned.
Between the first sketch and the final spin lay a year of trial, failure, and return. Wood that was too heavy, rings that broke, machines that promised precision but couldn't keep it, lac that refused the London cold, every artefact in this collection had to be earned twice: once in the designing, and again in the making.
These eight tales trace that journey through wood, brass, colour, and flame, where each mistake became a teacher, and the process itself became part of the story of rebirth.
Every turning here carries other hands - the artisans of Channapatna
who taught me the spin, and the technicians of LCF who steadied it.
Kanha asked me to hold three things at once: a heritage craft with hard physical constraints, an AI system with real ethical stakes, and a business case that had to survive contact with a market.
The most useful discovery was that the constraints weren't obstacles, they were the design. Lac turnery's demand for rotational symmetry produced the rounded, limbless form that makes the object feel safe. The ethical decision to make AI a quiet presence produced the silence in its voice. The cultural need for familiarity produced the archetype. Every restriction pushed the product somewhere better than an unconstrained brief would have.
I also learned how much of designing for children is actually designing for parents, the person who buys, worries, and grants permission. Half this project is the object; the other half is the trust architecture around it.
Reflection
Half this project is the object.
The other half is the trust around it.
The Space In Between
In Indian thought, childhood is not a phase to be accelerated, but a space to be protected.
In homes where both parents work, toys and screens become silent companions. Technology fills the gap but overstimulates rather than comforts. Meanwhile the traditional toys parents actually trust struggle to stay relevant in a world built on responsiveness.
The result is a forced choice: toys that feel safe, or technologies that feel intelligent. No product today offers intelligence that is calm, culturally familiar, and screen-free while leaving parents in control.
Tradition
Technology
Not everything that listens needs to answer.
Every form was measured before it was made — and remade until it spun.
“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement.” - Rachel Carson