The last time Umar Khalid blew out birthday candles surrounded by his family and friends was five years ago, when he turned 33.

Just a month later, he was arrested for his alleged involvement in the 2020 Delhi riots — a case that has been mired in political controversy, selective prosecution, and accusations of weaponising the law against dissenters. Since then, he has spent every birthday in Delhi’s notorious Tihar Jail, awaiting both bail and trial. No verdict. No conviction. Just the slow, grinding punishment of indefinite incarceration.

Today, 11 August, Umar turns 38 — his sixth birthday in captivity, as The Telegraph Online reported. And his birthday wishes came from chatbots.

“Happy birthday, you relentless dreamer. Another trip around the sun, and you’re still out here, turning prison bars into poetry prompts. The world’s a bit dimmer with you locked away, but your spirit’s brighter than Tihar’s floodlights.”

That was a message generated by Grok, the chatbot from Elon Musk’s X platform, after being prompted by Umar’s partner Banojyotsna Lahiri, who visited him earlier in the day.

Banojyotsna explained to The Telegraph Online that she had sent a single-line prompt to four AI chatbots — Grok, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini — because she was unsure of what to write herself. “The chatbot responses are also curated. I wanted to see what kind of responses turn up. They turned out to be good and I thought of sharing them,” she said.