Blog

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 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...

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,...

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...

My name found its place in the world through Wings of Fire, the autobiography of Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, who invited me to walk beside him as co-author. When it was first published in December 1999 by Universities Press, the book did not immediately take flight. I still remember those early months—more than a year, in fact—when it lingered quietly...

For as long as I can remember, a quiet thought has drifted through my mind in the still hours between dusk and sleep: what if life itself is a simulation—an elaborate stage play in which we, vivid though we seem, may yet be characters animated by some higher intelligence? Even facial expressions change, as if we are possessed by some external...

The phrase ‘unboiling the egg’ evokes the impossible: once heat has transformed the contents of an egg, there is no turning back, no means of returning the yolk and white to their original, separate, fluid states. This commonly used analogy has helped convey the futility of attempting to reverse certain processes—whether physical, emotional, or...

Hyderabad was settled 500 years ago amid the vast expanse of stones and dust, a plateau beneath a hot sky. A part of it now bursts with high-rise glass towers, where the sun is mirrored when rising and setting. This new part is called Cyberabad, as though Hyderabad—rooted in time immemorial, bazaars and minarets—has reincarnated without dying....

There are evenings when conversation lingers like the aftertaste of cardamom tea—subtle yet insistent. Last night was one of them. Eminent chemist and my long-standing friend, Dr. S. Chandrasekhar, hosted some of his dear scientist friends, and I had the honour of being one among them. The day was doubly special, it being his father-in-law’s 96th...

I graduated in Mechanical Engineering from G.B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technology (GBPUAT) in the 1970s. I stayed there for ten years, earning a master’s degree and working as a teaching associate, before joining DRDO in 1982. During this period, I developed a profound respect for agricultural science and formed many lasting...