In the border village of Dera Guru Nanak in Gurdaspur district in India’s Punjab, a few faithful have gathered hoping for darshan — to view the holy gurdwara or Sikh temple to seek blessings of the guru. But there’s no gurdwara — only a vast expanse of fields — visible to the naked eye. Sikhism’s holiest shrine, Gurdwara Darbar Sahib Kartarpur, where the founder of the religion, Guru Nanak, lived for 18 years, is 2.5 miles away — across the border in Pakistan.

Last November, that distance, a pain point for generations of Sikhs, appeared set to shrink when the leaders of India and Pakistan choreographed a rare moment of symphony. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for a corridor connecting the village to the Kartarpur gurdwara in Narowal in Pakistan’s Punjab. Two days later, his Pakistani counterpart Imran Khan laid the foundation from his side of the border. Jointly, they announced plans to open the corridor to Sikh pilgrims for visa-free travel on the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak in November 2019.

It’s hard to walk away from millions of dollars a year. Probably even harder if it’s tax-free. And if all of your product is coming in from the Dark Web and leaving via the U.S. postal system, effectively eliminating the intensive hand-to-hand drug sales bit? Well, what’s not to like? Greek immigrant Pericles Mosdromos, aka the Mad Greek, went this route after a succession of family-owned and -operated restaurants, the death of his father and the slow decline of a mother with dementia. He decided he needed to do something to be able to keep his mom in the kind of elder care where they really seemed to care — at a price tag of more than $80,000.

Which is what the newspaper headlines said after the FBI, the DEA and assorted cops kicked in the doors and arrested him at his quiet Palo Alto apartment: “Man Deals Drugs for Mother.” Right over a photo of the aggrieved Mad Greek, looking a little confused that he received that kind of press treatment when “there were real criminals all over the place.”

Robots waiting tables are nothing new. Part of the reason they haven’t taken off, though, is because they’re clumsy and more than a little intimidating. But that’s changing fast, and the best evidence might reside in the remote, mountain-strewn nation of Nepal.

At Naulo restaurant in downtown Kathmandu, Ginger and her two robot colleagues “converse” with customers and even tell jokes in English when prompted. Their hand-painted, rounded shapes and large, blinking, almost sympathetic eyes help assuage my unease as they take my order of chicken fingers and fries.

Ginger is the brainchild of Rabin Giri, 26, and his colleagues at Paaila Technology, an award-winning robotics and artificial intelligence startup formed by a group of college friends and engineers in 2016.