Blog

have long been an admirer of V. S. Naipaul, whose writings—especially his celebrated Indian Trilogy: An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilisation (1977), and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)—have deepened my understanding of India beyond the comforting simplifications of nationalism or ideology. Much of what circulates in the...

There are moments when knowledge does not come from books or structured lectures, but from the quiet authority of lived experience. I have increasingly come to believe that the most important knowledge comes from listening—listening to people as they recount what they have built, what they have struggled against, and what they have learnt in the...

I continue here the narrative on the power of storytelling from my earlier blog, Technology, Post-Truth, and the Craft of Story. History, when reduced to dates and events, runs the risk of becoming distant—almost abstract. But when someone writes with moral clarity and an actor embodies a life with unsettling precision, the past steps forward and...

Indian civilisation stretches back into prehistory, carrying within it one of humanity’s longest continuous memories. The Vedas stand among the earliest recorded repositories of knowledge, intuition, inquiry and metaphysical reflection. The spread of Indian culture across South-East Asia—visible in Angkor Wat, Borobudur, Prambanan and countless...

These days, I have found myself increasingly drawn to the quiet brilliance of Japanese fiction. My journey began with the deeply reflective novels of Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, whose works opened a gateway into a literary tradition where memory, loss and the unseen emotional architecture of life are rendered with extraordinary subtlety. From...

I have had a long association with Wipro since the 1990s. I accompanied Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam to the Wipro campus in Bengaluru in 1999. We aimed to develop a mobile Cath Lab, as none existed in the country outside a few large cities. There, I had the opportunity to present to Azim Premji on the civilian spin-offs of defence technology. I titled...

There are meetings that remain as events, and there are meetings that quietly become reflections. My recent interaction with Pavan Pidugu, graciously hosted by Dr. Chinnababu Sunkavalli at his home, belongs to the latter category. It was not a formal gathering of titles and achievements, though both were present in abundance—it was a meeting of...

I stopped wondering about the world a long time ago. Even this waking life feels no different from a dream—strange, layered, quietly unfolding—especially if one watches carefully. Of late, I have neither been travelling a lot nor pursuing any agenda that would make me particularly relevant to the world. And yet, life continues to bring remarkable...

I count it among the quiet privileges of my life that I live in Cyberabad, that curious frontier of Hyderabad where glass and code rise together, and where the pulse of the contemporary world beats with an almost inaudible insistence. Yet, even here, amid the measured rhythm of machines and meetings, there comes a moment when the mind turns...

It is one of history’s great ironies that nuclear energy—arguably among humanity’s most profound technological achievements—remains burdened with the shadow of destruction. The association is not without reason; it was forged in the searing memory of the Hiroshima bombing on 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, when the atom...