I have been reading an English translation of the Kathasaritsagara—The Ocean of the Streams of Stories—composed in Sanskrit by Somadeva, a Kashmiri writer of the eleventh century. Organised into eighteen books, it is less a conventional book than an immense reservoir of narratives. Stories arise from within other stories, branch into still more stories and then disappear back into the larger current from which they emerged. The celebrated twenty-five tales of Vikram and Vetala are embedded within this extraordinary ocean. 

What fascinates me is not merely their antiquity. It is their survival. I can vouch that when I read them now in my seventies, I loved them. I could enter the tales almost effortlessly—as easily as one gets wet while walking in the rain. Something in them traverses geography and time. Or perhaps they resonate with something already present deep in the human psyche.

 Increasingly, I have come to believe that we do not merely tell stories. We live through them.

When we watch a movie or read a novel, we willingly enter a deliberately streamlined version of life. Irrelevant moments have been removed. Characters have motivations. Events lead somewhere. Cause and effect become visible. A good screenplay rarely says, “This happened, then this happened, and then this happened.” Its deeper grammar is closer to: this happened, therefore that happened; however, something intervened, therefore events took another turn. 

Real life is far messier. Yet when we remember it, we instinctively impose some of the same order upon it. 

We remember the song played when we had dinner with a friend, but often forget the food. We remember why we left a job, why a friendship ended, why somebody betrayed us, why a particular decision changed everything. Years later, the ‘event’ may feel perfectly coherent not because our memory retains the whole event, but because it retains the meaning we constructed from it—and perhaps the emotion we felt. The mind loses details while preserving much of the interpretation.

During the past two decades, neuroscience has begun to illuminate parts of this narrative machinery. Researchers studying people watching films and listening to stories have found that the brain naturally segments continuous experience into meaningful events. It also draws upon familiar ‘schemas’—mental structures representing situations such as entering a restaurant or passing through an airport—to understand new experiences. Higher-order cortical regions appear capable of representing an event’sunderlying structure even when its surface details differ.

In other words, we possess mental scaffolds for the kinds of stories life repeatedly presents to us. 

One famous experiment made this dramatically visible. In 2004, neuroscientist Uri Hasson, now a professor at Princeton University, and his colleagues placed five people in brain scanners while they independently watched half an hour of Sergio Leone’s film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Their brain activity showed striking synchronisation across viewers—not merely in elementary visual and auditory regions but across substantial areas of the cortex.

 Five separate brains, watching the same unfolding film, showedsignificant correlated patterns of activity in several respects. A film made decades earlier produced synchronised patterns of activity in their brains as they watched it. 

The brain, of course, is not a film studio, but the analogy is hard to resist. It selects scenes, identifies characters, predicts intentions, recognises familiar situations, marks transitions, and stores some experiences while letting countless others vanish.

And more than that, the brain does naturally what the storyteller does deliberately: it searches for patterns.

Perhaps this is why humanity’s oldest stories remain recognisable. The Mahabharata, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Epic of Gilgamesh and countless oral traditions across civilisations repeatedly return to a surprisingly persistent repertoire—love and jealousy, loyalty and betrayal, courage and fear, ambition and sacrifice, justice and revenge, wisdom and folly, mortality and the desire to transcend it.

The familiar saying, “there is nothing new under the sun,” from Ecclesiastes, one of the wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible, resonates because of precisely this recognition: circumstances change enormously, while certain human patterns keep returning.  

This is also why stories are powerful—and dangerous. 

For a story to persuade, it must resonate with structures already present in the listener. Every culture therefore develops master narratives about success, duty, family, nation, honour, gender, wealth, heroism, failure and happiness. We inherit many of these long before we can examine them.

Then something subtle happens.

We keep living stories, fitting our experiences into parts of the template. Storytelling is therefore not merely entertainment. It is one of the mechanisms through which cultures reproduce themselves—and occasionally transform themselves. 

And now enters artificial intelligence.

When I decided to attempt ‘my’ retelling of Vikram and Vetala, I gradually began to see that AI could become a new-age Vetala.

The ancient Vetala never lets King Vikram walk peacefully towards his destination. Hanging over his shoulder, from inside the corpse, Vetala tells Vikram a story, presents a dilemma and compels him to answer. If Vikram remains silent, despite knowing the answer, he will die; so he responds, and Vetala escapes back to the tree.. Vikram must return, lift the corpse once more and begin again. 

It is a magnificent recursive structure. 

So, I decided to call my retelling Out of the Box. The ‘box’ is not simply conventional thinking. It is the invisible architecture of assumptions through which we organise reality.

Here AI becomes interesting.

Used lazily, AI can strengthen the box we are already in. Ofcourse, AI itself has boxes of its own, shaped by the information, patterns and assumptions embedded in its training and design, as well as by the information supplied in a particular interaction. It can tell us what we already believe, reinforce our prejudices, generate comfortable explanations and surround us with endless variations of familiar ideas. Recommendation algorithms can go further, repeatedly serving material similar to what has engaged us before. A machine that can predict our preferences can easily become an extraordinarily efficient manufacturer of intellectual comfort.

But that is the least interesting use of AI.

Its greater possibility is precisely the opposite.

 We can ask it: What am I missing? What assumption have I made? Argue against me. Interpret this event from another person’s position. Show me evidence that would overturn my conclusion. What would a historian see here? A scientist? A child? An adversary? What if the person I regard as the villain were telling the story?

Suddenly the machine becomes Vetala.

It pokes. It prods. It contradicts. It asks another question just when we think the matter is settled.

The greatest challenge in life is to free oneself from conditioning—to overcome fears, doubts, habits, compulsions and prejudices. Friedrich Nietzsche made ‘self-overcoming’ central to his philosophy: human beings must continually confront and transcend inherited limits rather than merely inhabit them. If human life is understood as an expansion of embodied consciousness, this becomes especially significant. Growth requires not merely acquiring more information, but seeing through the conditioning that shapes how information is received, interpreted and acted upon. True freedom begins when we can observe the forces shaping us without automatically obeying them.

For most of human history, such interrogation depended upon finding an exceptional teacher, philosopher, wise friend—or a story.  

Today, we can enter sustained dialogue with an artificial intelligence that has access to an extraordinary range of human knowledge and perspectives.

So, what next? Where do we go from here?

Perhaps towards a new kind of literacy.

The essential skill of the AI age may not be learning how to obtain answers from machines. It may be learning how to use machines to question the stories through which we ourselves operate.

 We must learn to recognise the narrative we have constructed, separate event from interpretation, distinguish memory from reality, invite alternative explanations and remain willing to revise the script.

 Let AI be Vetala, not Vikram. Use it to question and provoke; let itchallenge you. 

But we must remain Vikram—the one who walks, listens, decides and bears responsibility for the answer. For perhaps the purpose of every great story is ultimately not to tell us what happened to somebody else.

Is not the purpose of all learning, experience, travel and meditation ultimately to make us discover the story from which we ourselves need to escape?

One teaching of Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam that I have always tried to follow is to ‘stay in circulation’, as he put it. By this, he did not merely mean travelling, attending meetings or remaining publicly visible. He meant keeping the mind in motion—meeting people, visiting institutions, listening to new ideas and allowing one’s own convictions to be questioned and renewed. Circulation prevents intellectual stagnation. It keeps experience connected with emerging realities.

Now that my health does not permit me to travel widely, I consider myself fortunate to live in Hyderabad, a city endowed with many fine institutions. I make it a point to visit some of them whenever possible and exchange ideas with people who have accomplished meaningful work in their chosen fields. Such visits are not formal obligations for me. They are opportunities to remain a student of life.

One such visit recently took me to the Banjara Hills campus of the Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI), where Dr. Subodh Kandamuthan, Professor and Director of the Dr. Kakarla Subba Rao Centre for Health Care Management, invited me to deliver an inaugural lecture to the new Batch 21 students of the PGDM (Hospital Management) programme.

It turned out to be one of those excellent visits that immediately occupy the ‘front seat’ of memory. The ASCI campus stands at perhaps one of the highest elevations in Banjara Hills. From there, one gets a panoramic view of KBR National Park, the precious green expanse that remains a vital lung for our fast-growing metropolis. The setting itself seemed to offer a lesson. As towers, roads and commercial establishments steadily encircle this surviving forest, one is reminded that progress must be measured not only by what we build, but also by what we choose to preserve.

The audience was pan-Indian: bright young students who had arrived at ASCI after walking meritorious academic paths in different parts of the country. Their presence represented India not merely as a geographical entity but as a confluence of diverse aspirations. They chose healthcare and hospital management at a moment when India’s health system is expanding rapidly but also confronting serious questions about affordability, access, ethics, and purpose.

What stayed with me most, however, was my tête-à-tête with Dr. Kandamuthan, a health economist. A native of Kerala with an MPhil from the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, affiliated to Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and a PhD in Health Economics from the Institute of Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru, his academic rigour is enriched by a perceptive grasp of India’s social complexities. In him, one can see the enduring social conscience of Indian society—a conviction that human welfare cannot be left entirely to the seasonal tides of capitalism.

Markets are powerful instruments. They can mobilise resources, encourage innovation and improve efficiency. But they cannot, by themselves, decide what a society ought to value. If profitability alone becomes the organising principle of healthcare, illness begins to acquire greater economic value than wellness. More tests, procedures, hospital admissions and interventions generate more visible revenue than fewer illnesses. The system may then grow financially while society becomes progressively less healthy.

From the stimulating and sagacious company of Dr. Kandamuthan, I could distil the need for a decisive paradigm shift: from an illness-based healthcare ‘industry’ to health economics rooted in wellness.

He drew attention to the wrong scorecard by which healthcare success is commonly measured. We count hospital beds, surgeries, diagnostic procedures, intensive-care facilities and insurance claims. These indicators are necessary, but they mainly tell us how much illness we are managing. They do not tell us how much illness we have prevented.

A hospital may perform thousands of cardiac procedures and be celebrated as a great success. But if many of those patients could have avoided severe disease through early screening, nutritional guidance, exercise, tobacco control, stress management and timely primary care, the larger health system has not truly succeeded. It has intervened efficiently at the end of a chain of failures.

Is not the cheapest hospitalisation the one that never happens?

This question brings us to the idea of the ‘Wellness Dividend’. In simple terms, a wellness dividend is the value created when individuals and communities remain healthy for longer. That value is not abstract. It is reflected in fewer hospital admissions, lower expenditure on medicines, reduced absenteeism, greater workplace productivity, longer working lives and less emotional and financial distress for families. It also frees public resources for education, sanitation, nutrition, housing and the treatment of illnesses that cannot be prevented.

Consider a person at risk of diabetes who receives timely advice, regular monitoring and sustained support to change diet and physical activity. If the onset of diabetes is delayed by ten years—or prevented altogether—the gain is much greater than the price of a few consultations and tests. The individual gains years of healthier life. The family avoids expenditure and anxiety. The employer benefits from greater productivity. Insurers face fewer claims. Hospitals retain capacity for those who genuinely need advanced care. The nation gains from the continued participation of a healthy citizen.

That combined value is the wellness dividend.

Yet our economic system often fails to recognise the wellness dividend because those who fund prevention may not receive its eventual savings. The benefits are dispersed across individuals, employers, insurers and governments—and may appear only years later. We readily calculate the cost of vaccination, screening or nutrition, but rarely the value of the illness prevented.

Realising the wellness dividend therefore requires incentives that give prevention measurable economic value. Healthy behaviour could earn lower insurance premiums, tax benefits or credits in a Personal Health Account. Employers could be rewarded for healthier workplaces, and primary-care providers for keeping communities well—not merely for treating them.

A Personal Health Account, linked securely with the Ayushman Bharat Health Account (ABHA), could serve as a lifelong health ledger supporting screening, vaccination, nutrition, mental wellbeing and chronic risk management, while safeguarding privacy and consent. It could also recognise citizens economically for remaining healthy, rather than paying only after serious illness occurs.

Hospitals and advanced care remain indispensable, but they must rest upon a vibrant primary-care system—the economic and moral foundation of modern healthcare. Without it, patients reach specialist care too late, illnesses become costlier to treat, and expenditure rises without proportionate improvement in public health. Family physicians, nurses, community health workers, nutritionists and local diagnostic centres may prevent more suffering than sophisticated hospitals can later repair; their contribution must therefore be recognised, measured and rewarded.

The movement from the economics of illness to the economics of wellness is ultimately a change in what we choose to celebrate. Do we celebrate only the dramatic rescue in the intensive-care unit, or also the quiet work that prevented a thousand people from entering it? Do we reward only the procedure, or also the years of healthy living that made the procedure unnecessary? Do we regard health expenditure as money spent after disease appears, or as an investment in human capability?

These are not merely philosophical questions. Nor are the Personal Health Account and the Wellness Dividend utopian ideals. They are practical concepts articulated by an astute economist whose thinking remains grounded in the realities of his country and its people.

India needs many more such conversations. It must also cherish institutions such as ASCI—places where administrators, economists, healthcare professionals and young managers can meet beyond their disciplinary boundaries and reconsider the assumptions governing public systems. Institutions acquire greatness not through buildings alone, but by creating spaces where experience encounters inquiry and ideas become instruments of service.

We must equally celebrate people such as Dr. Subodh Kandamuthan: true sons of the soil whose education has taken them across institutions and disciplines, but whose hearts continue to beat with their people. Their scholarship does not distance them from society; it returns them to it with greater responsibility. In their work, knowledge remains accountable to the ordinary citizen.

As I left the high-ground ASCI College Park campus, with KBR Park spread below and a new generation of healthcare managers beginning its journey, I felt renewed by Dr. Kalam’s counsel to stay in circulation. Sometimes circulation is not about travelling far. It is about reaching the right place, meeting a thoughtful person and returning home with an idea capable of changing how we see the future.

Every year on September 5, India celebrates Teachers’ Day in memory of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975), one of modern India’s most distinguished philosophers, teachers and statesmen. His life demonstrated that scholarship need not remain confined to the classroom; at its best, it can illuminate public life and guide a nation.

Dr. Radhakrishnan taught at several eminent institutions, including the University of Oxford, and was knighted in 1931. He served as Vice-Chancellor of Andhra University from 1931 to 1936 and of Banaras Hindu University from 1939 to 1948. After India attained independence, he became the country’s ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1949 to 1952, Vice-President of India from 1952 to 1962, and President from 1962 to 1967. Yet, through all these distinctions, he remained fundamentally a teacher. It is only fitting that his birthday became an occasion not merely to remember an illustrious life, but to honour the countless men and women who quietly shape the nation’s intellectual and moral character.

This year, Dr. Srivari Chandrasekhar, my long-standing friend and an eminent synthetic organic chemist, hosted a Teachers’ Day dinner at Dakshin, the iconic restaurant at ITC Kakatiya in Hyderabad. A large gathering of teachers attended, many from local schools and colleges, where they teach with financial support from Dr. Chandrasekhar and his wife, Bharathi. It was one of those rare evenings whose warmth remains long after the lights have dimmed and the tables have been cleared.

There was something deeply moving about the simplicity of the teachers gathered there. They carried no outward signs of power or privilege. Yet they possessed an unmistakable dignity—the quiet aura of people who have made useful work their livelihood and the growth of others their reward. Their lives may seldom receive public attention, but their influence travels through generations. A teacher may spend decades in the same classroom, yet through the students who pass through it, that classroom reaches laboratories, hospitals, industries, universities, public institutions and distant countries.

It is a sad truth that teachers in India are often underpaid. Their compensation rarely reflects the weight of the responsibility placed upon them. But a good teacher receives another kind of wealth: the affection of students, the respect of families and the knowledge that something of his or her mind and spirit will continue to live in the minds of others. This, of course, does not excuse society from paying teachers fairly. Respect cannot settle household expenses, nor can gratitude substitute for institutional support. Yet the love accorded to a good teacher remains one of the purest forms of recognition available in human life.

Dr. Chandrasekhar and Bharathi honoured me that evening as a teacher. It was indeed a humbling moment. I have never considered myself an academician in the formal sense. Except for a decade-long association as an adjunct faculty member at the School of Management Studies, University of Hyderabad, I possess few academic credentials that might justify such recognition. Most of my learning and work took place in laboratories, technology missions, public projects, books and conversations with remarkable people.

But perhaps teaching is larger than an academic appointment. A teacher is anyone who helps another person see more clearly, think more rigorously or act with greater confidence. A scientist explaining a failure to a young colleague is teaching. A physician listening carefully to a patient is teaching a young intern. A senior engineer who allows a junior colleague to attempt a difficult task is teaching. An author who places a hard-earned insight before an unknown reader is also, in some measure, teaching. Seen in this way, teaching is not merely a profession. It is a way in which knowledge accepts responsibility for the future.

Another satisfying part of the evening was meeting some of Dr. Chandrasekhar’s former students, now accomplished scientists in their own right. Over his three-decade academic career, he guided 97 scholars to complete their PhDs—an extraordinary achievement. Each doctorate represents far more than a thesis, a viva voce examination and a degree. It embodies years of experiments, failed chemical reactions, uncertain results, revised hypotheses, rejected manuscripts and the slow cultivation of scientific judgement.

Dr. Chandrasekhar also remembered, with equal warmth, another 13 students who had registered under his supervision but could not complete their doctoral work. For different personal, professional or academic reasons, they had to leave midway through the several years of demanding work typically required to complete a PhD. His remembrance of them was important. A teacher’s responsibility is not limited to those whose names appear successfully on a list. Those who could not complete the journey are also part of the teacher’s story. Education must retain compassion for unfinished journeys, for life does not always cooperate with ambition.

Of the 97 students who earned their doctorates under him, only about half pursued academic careers. The others entered industry, carrying their scientific training into the practical world of products, processes and manufacturing. More than 30 now work abroad, many in major chemical companies. Their paths remind us that the value of a doctoral education cannot be measured only by the number of professorships it produces. A scientist trained to observe accurately, question assumptions, endure uncertainty and learn from failure carries those capacities wherever he or she goes.

After retiring from the distinguished position of Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, Dr. Chandrasekhar did not retire from science. Through his association with GITAM University and PI Health Sciences, he continues to teach, mentor and participate in research. He hosted me at both places, and the vibrancy of the people around him struck me. Young researchers approached him freely. Questions moved easily across age and hierarchy. Ideas were discussed without ceremony. That atmosphere revealed something essential: a true teacher does not create dependence on himself; he creates confidence in others.

The continuity of this tradition became even more visible when Dr. Chandrasekhar spoke of his own teacher, the legendary Dr. A. V. Rama Rao, who guided 108 PhD scholars, including Dr. Chandrasekhar himself. His students once presented him with a unique Periodic Table containing 108 elements, each represented by the photograph of one of his doctoral scholars. It was a beautiful scientific metaphor. Just as the elements combine to create the material world, those students had carried their teacher’s influence into numerous institutions, disciplines and industries.

On the morning of Teachers’ Day, Dr. Chandrasekhar visited his guru. In speaking of Dr. Rama Rao’s achievement, he made his own remarkable record of 97 PhDs appear almost modest. But this is precisely how a great lineage of learning sustains itself. The accomplished student does not outgrow gratitude. He honours the teacher by extending the tradition, improving upon what he received and passing it forward. In Indian civilisation, the guru–shishya relationship has never been understood merely as a transaction of information. It is a living chain of trust, discipline, example and intellectual inheritance.

India’s chemical and pharmaceutical achievements offer visible evidence of this chain. The country has developed formidable capabilities in active pharmaceutical ingredients, generic medicines, agrochemicals and process chemistry. Its chemical industry is among the world’s most capable and competitive. Behind every successful molecule manufactured at scale stands an often-invisible community of teachers and students: professors who established laboratories with limited resources, research scholars who repeated experiments late into the night, technicians who refined processes, and industrial scientists who converted laboratory insight into reliable production.

The Indian scientific system has its share of shortcomings. Laboratories may face shortages of equipment and resources. Universities may struggle with bureaucracy. Research scholars may endure uncertain fellowships, inadequate infrastructure and long periods without encouraging results. Yet the system continues to produce scientists of international standing. This is not a reason to ignore its deficiencies. It is a reason to recognise the extraordinary human qualities that keep it alive despite them

During dinner, I asked Dr. Chandrasekhar what makes science—and especially the teaching of science at the highest level—truly great. His answer was concise: teacher commitment and student resilience.

The teacher’s commitment is not fulfilled merely by delivering lectures or signing progress reports. It means standing by a student through periods of confusion; protecting intellectual freedom while insisting on rigour; recognising potential before achievement makes it visible; and knowing when to guide, when to challenge, and when to step aside. A committed teacher does not provide easy answers to every question. He helps the student acquire the courage and discipline to pursue the answer independently.

The student’s resilience is the answering virtue. Research repeatedly confronts the young mind with failure. Experiments refuse to behave. Instruments malfunction. Papers are rejected. Promising ideas collapse under evidence. Resilience is not stubborn repetition; it is the capacity to absorb disappointment, learn from it and return to the problem with a better question. The student must remain teachable without becoming submissive, confident without becoming arrogant, and ambitious without losing integrity.

Commitment without resilience can produce frustration; resilience without commitment can become lonely endurance. But when the two meet, education becomes transformative. The teacher holds the lamp steady, while the student develops the strength to continue walking. One offers faith before success; the other justifies that faith through perseverance.

That Teachers’ Day dinner therefore became more than a celebration. It became a reminder of how civilisation renews itself. Nations are not built only in parliaments, factories or markets. They are built wherever one generation accepts responsibility for the next—where a teacher refuses to give up on a student and where a student rises once more after failure.

Blessed are such teachers. Blessed, too, are the resilient students who honour them not merely with flowers and words, but by carrying their learning into the world and making it fruitful.

Among the great images created by Indian civilisation, few possess the visual authority of the Chola Nataraja. Shiva dances within a circle of flame, one foot planted upon ignorance and the other lifted in liberating grace. His hair flies outward, his arms extend in several directions, yet his face remains serenely composed. Motion and stillness, destruction and renewal are held together in one form. It is not merely a god dancing, but a philosophical account of a universe continuously becoming, dissolving and beginning again.

The Chola Nataraja is also remarkable as a product of metal engineering. The sculptor had to transform an extraordinarily complex wax model—with extended arms, slender fingers, flying locks, flames, ornaments and an asymmetrically positioned body—into a durable copper-alloy image. Molten metal had to flow into every extremity before solidifying; the mould had to preserve minute details while containing the molten alloy; and the finished sculpture had to remain stable despite appearing to balance on a single dancing foot.

The precise construction method varied with the idol’s size and design. In some monumental examples, Shiva, the dwarf Apasmara, an icon of spiritual ignorance, ego, and forgetfulness of one’s true divine nature, and the flaming aureole were solid-cast together, while the lotus pedestal and rectangular plinth were cast separately and mechanically attached. What appears to the observer as a single, effortless composition could therefore be a carefully planned assembly of cast and joined components.

The engineering began long before the furnace was lit. The figure was constructed according to a canonical system of proportion in which the body was divided into modules that regulated the dimensions of the head, torso, limbs, hands, and overall stature. These proportions were not merely aesthetic conventions. They also controlled the length, position and mass of projecting components.

The raised leg extends across the body, four arms spread into the surrounding space, and locks of hair radiate from the head. If these elements were disproportionately long or heavy, they would increase the bending moments acting at the ankles, shoulders, wrists and hair junctions. Proportional geometry therefore helped the sculptor reconcile visual dynamism with physical stability.

In the living bronze-casting tradition of Swamimalai, the wax mixture has commonly been prepared from approximately equal proportions of beeswax and powdered dammar resin, softened with a small quantity of groundnut or sesame oil. Beeswax provides plasticity; the resin increases firmness and helps the model retain sharp edges; and the oil modifies its workability. The result is a modelling material that can be shaped by hand while remaining sufficiently stable to hold intricate detail.

Wax channels were then attached to the model. Some became pouring passages, or sprues, while others formed runners that distributed molten metal towards distant or delicate regions. Traditional prescriptions and surviving workshop practices often place these channels at the back, shoulders, neck and head, where the marks left after their removal would be least disruptive.

Their position was critical. Insufficient feeding could leave a hand, finger or flame incomplete. Poorly arranged passages could create excessive turbulence, trap gases or cause separate streams of metal to meet only after they had cooled too far to fuse properly. The channels therefore had to deliver metal rapidly and evenly while allowing displaced air and gases to escape.

The clay mould had to perform several apparently conflicting functions. Its inner surface needed to be fine enough to reproduce delicate facial modelling and ornament. At the same time, it had to be porous enough to release gases, refractory enough to withstand contact with molten copper alloy and mechanically strong enough to resist cracking or bursting during the pour.

The principal constituent of most early South Indian bronze images was copper, often forming around four-fifths or more of the alloy. Tin and lead were present in varying proportions, while zinc, silver, gold and other metals might occur in smaller or even trace quantities. The ritual term pancha-loha, meaning ‘five metals’, should therefore not be understood as a single, universally fixed metallurgical formula.

Tin increases copper’s hardness and strength, although excessive tin can make the alloy brittle. Lead has only limited solubility in copper and tends to remain dispersed as small globules, but it can improve the apparent fluidity and castability of the molten alloy. It may therefore help the metal enter narrow passages and reproduce fine details.

Yet some outstanding bronzes contain relatively modest quantities of both tin and lead. Their successful casting depended not merely upon a highly fluid alloy, but upon the entire foundry system: careful mould preparation, accurate temperature control, intelligent gating and rapid, well-directed pouring.

A Nataraja is especially difficult to cast because its sections vary greatly in thickness. The massive torso retains heat and remains molten longer than the slender fingers, flying hair and individual flames. If these thin regions solidify before they have filled completely, the result is a misrun—an incomplete casting. If two partly cooled streams meet, they may produce a cold shut, a weak seam where the metal fronts fail to fuse fully.

Thicker sections created additional challenges because metal contracts as it cools. Without continued feeding from reservoirs of molten alloy, shrinkage cavities, gas porosity, residual stresses, cracking and distortion could develop. The mould and gating system therefore had to ensure rapid filling of delicate features followed by progressive solidification, keeping heavier regions supplied with liquid metal long enough to compensate for contraction. The sculptor-founder was controlling not only the bronze’s form, but also the sequence in which it became solid.

The structural achievement is equally impressive. Visually, Shiva appears to float upon one leg. Mechanically, however, the load is distributed through a more complex system. The principal gravitational force passes through the supporting leg, the figure of Apasmara, the footplate and the pedestal. The entire geometry of the dancing Shiva is composed around this gravitational axis: although the limbs, hair and surrounding aureole extend dramatically into space, their masses counterbalance one another so precisely that the sculpture’s combined centre of gravity is brought into alignment with the single supporting leg. What appears to be movement at the edge of instability is, in fact, a remarkable achievement of static balance.

The Nataraja is therefore not a statue precariously balanced upon a single point of support. It is a carefully integrated structural system that conceals its engineering within its iconography. Apasmara becomes a compression-bearing element; the lotus pedestal becomes a load-distributing foundation; hair and ornamental links act as braces; and the aureole helps unite the composition mechanically as well as visually.

Chola craftsmen did not possess modern phase diagrams, finite-element models or computational fluid-dynamics software. Their knowledge was embodied in measurements, materials, proportions, workshop sequences and accumulated experience. A failed finger indicated inadequate feeding. A cracked investment revealed unsuitable clay, excessive moisture or insufficient drying. Porosity could indicate trapped gases, turbulence or inadequate control of the melt.

Over generations, success and failure produced a systematic body of empirical knowledge, transmitted through apprenticeship and grounded in close observation, disciplined practice and an intimate understanding of materials. This tradition remains alive in Swamimalai, where master sculptors and bronze casters from hereditary craft families continue to create sacred images through the lost-wax process, preserving historic proportions, materials and foundry techniques.

The continuing capacity of this tradition was dramatically demonstrated by the Nataraja installed at Bharat Mandapam for the 2023 G20 Summit in New Delhi. Standing 27 feet high including the pedestal and weighing approximately 18 tonnes, it was produced by traditional master craftsmen from Swamimalai using lost-wax casting and canonical proportions. Its scale was modern, but the fundamental sequence—proportional design, wax modelling, refractory investment, dewaxing, alloy melting, pouring and hand finishing—continued the historic South Indian foundry tradition.

The Chola Nataraja is thus not simply bronze shaped into a beautiful deity. It is geometry translated into wax, wax transformed into a refractory void, and that void filled through the controlled movement of fire and molten metal. Its deepest engineering triumph lies in making immense technical difficulty disappear.

The observer sees neither sprues nor solidification fronts, neither shrinkage cavities nor hidden load paths. One sees only Shiva dancing—bronze transformed into rhythm, mass into apparent weightlessness, and metallurgical knowledge into spiritual form.

I recently visited PI Health Sciences Ltd. at Genome Valley, Hyderabad, at the invitation of my long-standing friend, Dr. S. Chandrasekhar, who joined the organisation as Chief Scientific Advisor after his superannuation as Secretary, Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. Given the freedom to choose my subject, I decided to speak on From Molecules to Missions, and, building upon my continuing engagement with artificial intelligence, made Science Beyond Silos in the AI Era my theme.

The conference room, with a capacity of about a hundred, was filled to capacity. Scientists from PI Health Sciences facilities at Panoli, Jaipur, Ankleshwar and Udaipur joined online. For a non-chemist to stand before such a formidable gathering of chemists was initially a little awkward for an engineer like me.

I therefore began with engineering.

Chemistry, I said, cannot remain in the flask. For a chemical reaction conceived by a scientist to become an industrial reality, engineering must create and control the required temperature, pressure, flow, mixing, separation and containment—precisely, repeatedly and safely. That simple acknowledgement produced an instant bonhomie. I could then change tracks and make the larger point: in the modern world, chemistry cannot remain separated from engineering, biology, environmental science, medicine—and increasingly, AI.

The hour then passed like a breeze.

Using AI-generated slides, I began with a proposition that sounds almost philosophical but is fundamentally scientific: molecules have an afterlife. What we create does not simply vanish after its intended use is over. Molecules may degrade, transform, bind to other substances, migrate, accumulate or persist. Their journey can continue long after the product they were designed for has been discarded.

Consider the chemicals entering soil through fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides; industrial chemicals discharged onto land and water; or pharmaceuticals and their metabolites leaving the human body and entering sewage systems. Some are removed or broken down, but others can survive treatment, move through water and soil, interact with organisms and reappear in unexpected places.

What goes down does not simply go away.

Groundwater makes this particularly clear. Landfill leachate, industrial effluents and agricultural chemicals can migrate through soil and rock and, under the wrong conditions, reach aquifers. Once there, the problem is no longer one of chemistry alone. Hydrology must tell us where the water moves. Geology determines the pathways. Agriculture must examine uptake by crops. Toxicology and medicine must assess exposure and consequences. Public policy must decide acceptable risk levels and how best to prevent or mitigate the associated harms.

The food web carries the story further. Certain persistent pollutants can accumulate in organisms and, in some cases, become increasingly concentrated at higher trophic levels. What begins invisibly in water may pass into plankton, fish, larger predators and ultimately human beings. The food web remembers what our production and disposal systems may forget.

Then there is plastic.

Plastic is one of modern chemistry’s great achievements precisely because it is durable, versatile and inexpensive. Yet the durability that created its enormous utility has also created its environmental persistence. Larger plastic objects fragment into microplastics and still smaller particles; fragmentation is not disappearance. Such particles are now found across marine and terrestrial environments and have been detected in human tissues as well. The precise health consequences are still being investigated, and science should resist premature claims. But the ubiquity of exposure itself gives us sufficient reason to take prevention, materials design and waste management far more seriously than we presently do.

This led me to a more uncomfortable question. Have we built parts of modern civilisation in which we first create exposures and lifestyles that favour chronic disease and then build increasingly sophisticated systems to treat their consequences?

The diabetes epidemic, for example, cannot be attributed simply to sugar—humans have consumed sugars for millennia. But it certainly cannot be separated from the modern ability to refine, concentrate, manufacture and distribute calorie-dense foods on an unprecedented scale, combined with sedentary living and other metabolic risks. Similarly, rising concern about environmental exposures and cancers in younger populations deserves rigorous investigation, not sensational attribution to a single culprit. The scientific responsibility is to ask the question early enough, collect the right evidence and act when the evidence becomes persuasive.

The same principle applies to climate change. Carbon capture is scientifically feasible and has already been demonstrated in several settings. But capturing carbon dioxide is only one part of the problem. It must then be compressed, transported and stored securely for very long periods. Economics, infrastructure, geology, monitoring, regulation and public confidence immediately enter the picture. Once again, no discipline owns the problem.

This was the central message of my lecture.

Plastic pollution is not merely polymer chemistry. Groundwater contamination is not merely hydrology. Food safety is not merely biology. Climate change is not merely atmospheric science. The problems have already crossed the boundaries between our departments. Our science must now do the same.

And this is where AI offers an extraordinary opportunity.

AI’s greatest contribution to science may not ultimately be faster calculation. It may be its ability to connect what science has separated—datasets residing in different institutions, models built by different disciplines, research literature too vast for one individual to master, and relationships visible only when information is examined across scales.

Chemistry can speak to biology. Environmental measurements can connect with health outcomes. Molecular properties can be combined with hydrology and land-use data to predict environmental fate. AI-enabled surveillance can identify emerging contamination hotspots, detect weak signals and help us move from discovering damage after it has occurred to anticipating pathways before harm becomes widespread.

In other words, from prediction to prevention.

That requires a change in the scientist’s question. We must continue asking, Does this molecule work? But we should add: Where will it eventually go? What will it become? What will it encounter? And what might it do there?

We must begin to design for fate, not merely for function.

After the lecture and an engaging Q&A, we continued the conversation over an excellent working lunch. It gave me an opportunity to interact more closely with Dr. Dinesh Chaurasiya, Dr. Prathama Mainkar and Dr. Abhishek Sud, among other outstanding scientists who have helped build PI into a leading Contract Research, Development and Manufacturing Organisation, particularly in the agrochemical domain. Their depth of scientific experience and the range of the discussion reinforced the very point I had tried to make in my lecture: important problems are increasingly solved not within disciplinary compartments, but through conversations across them.

Dr. Chandrasekhar, with his trademark wit, provided the perfect closing line. “Karl Ziegler and Giulio Natta received the 1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discoveries in the chemistry and technology of high polymers”, he said. “Now depolymerisation is waiting for one. Whoever really gets rid of plastics may take it home.”

Behind the humour lies a serious mission.

The scientist’s responsibility does not end when the molecule succeeds. It extends to what that molecule eventually does in the world.

Our molecules. Our missions. Our world. Our responsibility.

I returned home with a quiet sense of fulfilment—almost like a pilgrim returning from a place of learning and purpose. PI Health Sciences had seemed to me not merely a laboratory or an enterprise, but a portal of scientific excellence, where knowledge is being transformed into possibilities for a better world.