Blog
A Child and a Name in the Lila of Becoming
My younger brother Salil Tiwari’s son, Sudhanshu, and his wife, Stuti, have been blessed with a son. They live in Meerut, my hometown, and visited me recently. Like all visits involving a newborn, it carried a quiet gravity—soft footsteps, hushed voices, time slowing itself to the rhythm of breath. They have named the child Pranav, a name that...
Life Goes On—Imperfect and Unresolved
The readers have lapped up the silver jubilee edition of Wings of Fire. Within a month of its release on October 15, 2025, the 94th birth anniversary of Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, the first print was sold out. At the 38th Hyderabad Book Fair, on December 20th, 2025, I saw people buying this book, and was pleasantly surprised when one of them approached...
The Lost Wisdom of Our Kitchens
There is a peculiar magic in the things we eat—an intimacy so daily, so habitual, that it becomes almost invisible. Food enters our bodies the way air enters our lungs: without ceremony, without question. We assume its shapes, its colours, its textures, as though they were born complete, needing no history, no explanation. But if we slow...
The Extra Mile
Shakespeare once reminded us that life is but a stage; listen closely, and beneath those familiar words, you can hear the soft hum of entrances and exits. Each of us arrives in medias res, as the Latins say—dropped into the middle of a vast, unfolding drama whose beginning we never witnessed and whose ending we shall not see. The world continues...
The Theatre Within
I have been fascinated by Shakespeare, as most of those fancy English phrases and words that enchanted me were created by this one man who lived in England during 1564–1616. I was always intrigued by how one individual could produce such a great body of work that continues to charm billions of English-speaking people over centuries. Then, a...
The Bhagavad Gita OS
In an era where our minds scroll faster than our hearts can feel, where information pours in like a relentless monsoon yet wisdom dries up like parched earth—the Bhagavad Gita stands not as an ancient relic, but as a future-ready operating system for the human spirit. Today, we wrestle with dilemmas Krishna did not name, but fully...
Yoga Vasishtha Walks into Nolan’s Dream
I watched Christopher Nolan’s Inception when it was released in 2010, back when going to the theatre still felt like an event. The film is centred around the idea of entering and manipulating dreams, slipping into layers of the mind as easily as walking through doors. In that world, the only reliable test for what is real is a small spinning top:...
When Glass Begins to Think
When Hari Atkuri visited me with his niece, Krishna, I felt an immediate shift in the air—as if a gentle breeze had entered the room carrying the fragrance of an unseen, far-off garden. Warm, curious, and quietly luminous, their presence brought a rare ease, the kind that arrives only when good intent and pure purpose walk in together. Hari, who...
A Book Between Generations
It was a mild noon, neither summer nor winter, when Venkat Kumar Tangirala came to see me. The sun, hidden behind clouds that held back its heat, allowed only a soft light, as if words were holding their breath between two thoughts, unsure whether to be expressed or remain silent. He arrived with his twenty-one-year-old son, Medhansh Tangirala,...
A Small Republic of Trust
It was a quiet forenoon when they arrived — father and son, two physicians bound by a lineage of service and an unspoken continuity between action and thought. The air outside was still, save for the occasional chirping of birds on my 14th-floor east-facing balcony. By noon, the sun had moved overhead, leaving the balcony in shade and pleasantly...
