Modern medicine is magnificent at one thing: it rushes heroically to the battlefield after the war has already been lost. When the coronary artery is blocked, a stent is inserted. When the pancreas fails, insulin is administered. When cancer erupts, it deploys surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy like heavy artillery. These interventions save millions of lives—and for that, we must be grateful. Yet there is a deeper, more unsettling question we rarely ask: why did the war begin in the first place? Why did the artery harden, the pancreas tire, the cell turn malignant? Why do we wait for a disease to declare itself loudly before we listen?

We have built a civilisation around treating disease rather than cultivating wellness. It is an industry measured in trillions of dollars, driven by hospital beds, insurance claims, drug patents, and procedural billing codes. The patient often enters this system only after the body has already crossed the threshold from balance to breakdown. What is missing is not compassion or technology, but curiosity about origins.

This is where an ancient Indian idea offers a radical lens. Knowledge, we say, is what is collectively known; education is the process of transmitting a small, curated part of that knowledge. But what about everything that is still unknown? What about the vast, invisible ocean beneath the few islands of certainty we inhabit? The sages called this Ajneya—that which is unknowable, or not yet known—the dynamic ground from which all phenomena arise. To mistake our fragmentary knowledge for the totality of truth is the deepest error of modernity.

Medicine today is built almost entirely on what is already known and measurable—blood sugar, cholesterol, tumour size, and blood pressure. However, disease begins long before these numbers of cross-pathological thresholds. It begins in subtle disturbances—in hormones, glands, immune modulation, cellular signalling, and the bioelectric and biochemical whispers that precede loud dysfunction. These early shifts live in the realm of the Ajneya, or at least the ‘not-yet-known’. Our failure is not technological; it is philosophical. Have we designed medicine to listen to the subtle voice of disharmony in the body?

This thought was very much alive when Dr. Sujit Vakkalanka visited me the other day. We sat on the balcony, with a gentle winter sun in the clear sky, and a cool breeze stirring the leaves of the plants around us. The son of Dr. Venkata Ratnam of Kakinada—a legendary diabetologist who has, over decades, observed how quietly the body drifts into metabolic chaos before succumbing to disease—Sujit is a practising hospitalist at Advocate Health in Charlotte, North Carolina. Equally versed in Western medicine and Indian spiritual traditions, Sujit had just returned from a pilgrimage to the Dakshinamnaya Sri Sharada Peetham at Sringeri.

As we spoke about diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune disorders, depression, and cancer, a strange convergence emerged. Almost all of them, Sujit pointed out, begin with disturbances in the endocrine and immune systems—such as insulin resistance, cortisol imbalance, thyroid dysregulation, inflammatory cytokines produced by immune cells, and stress hormones released by the endocrine system, under the control of the brain. By the time glucose rises or arteries clog, the real story has already been written in the glands. We are treating the last chapter as if it were the prologue.

Here is where the convergence of nano, bio, and information technologies can transform medicine from merely a repair shop into a wellness science. Nanosensors can already detect tiny molecular changes in blood, saliva, sweat, and even breath. Wearable biosensors can continuously monitor hormones, inflammatory markers, and metabolic signals. Artificial Intelligence can integrate these streams into a dynamic map of an individual’s internal ecology. Imagine a future when your smartwatch not only alerts you that your heart rate is elevated but also indicates that your cortisol levels have been high for a long time, your melatonin is suppressed, your insulin sensitivity is decreasing, and your immune system is shifting into a low-grade inflammatory state—months or years before diabetes, depression, or heart disease develop.

This is no flight of imagination; it is the natural evolution of what we already possess. But it requires a civilisational shift in intent—from curing disease to understanding wellness.

The legend Sujit brought from Sringeri carries a profound metaphor for this shift. When Adi Shankaracharya arrived on the banks of the Tunga River, he witnessed something impossible: a cobra shading a pregnant frog with its hood, protecting it from the harsh sun as it laboured to give birth. In nature, the snake and the frog stand as natural adversaries—one survives by consuming the other. Yet in that sacred moment, they transcended instinct and became guardians of life.

Adi Shankaracharya understood immediately that this was a place where deeper laws were at work—where the underlying harmony of existence revealed itself beyond surface conflict. That is why he established the Sharada Peetham there, as a centre for the pursuit of knowing the Reality.

Modern medicine seems to have got trapped in surface conflicts—killing microbes, destroying tumours, and suppressing symptoms. These are necessary acts, just as the snake must eat a frog to survive. But the deeper law of life is not war; it is balance. True wellness emerges when systems cooperate—hormones with immunity, metabolism with circadian rhythms, and the mind with the body.

The cobra shading the frog is a reminder that the most profound healing happens when we align with the deeper intelligence of life rather than fighting its manifestations.

Chronic disease creates lifelong patients. But wellness creates autonomy. A world where people are monitored, guided, and gently corrected at the level of glandular and hormonal balance would radically reduce the incidence of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and mental illness. That would be a triumph for humanity.

This is why the idea of ‘to be known’ matters. The future of medicine lies not only in what we know, but in what we are willing to explore beyond our current maps. The Ajneya is not mystical; it is simply the frontier of biology that we have not yet measured. It includes the microbiome, epigenetics, neuroendocrine loops, psychoneuroimmunology, and subtle bioenergetic patterns that shape health long before disease appears.

When Sujit and I spoke that morning, we were not rejecting science; we were calling on it to grow. Western medicine has given us miracles—antibiotics, surgery, vaccines, imaging, and intensive care. But the next leap will not come from sharper scalpels or stronger drugs. It will come from understanding the invisible orchestration that keeps us whole.

The ancient seers understood that reality is layered. What we see is only the surface of a deeper order. To ignore that deeper order is to live in reaction rather than in wisdom. Medicine must now learn the same lesson. The fifth-century poet-philosopher Bhartrhari articulated best the difficulty of dealing with those who possess only superficial knowledge.

अज्ञः सुखमाराध्यः सुखतरमाराध्यते विशेषज्ञः। ज्ञानलवदुर्विदग्धं ब्रह्मापि नरं न रञ्जयति ।।

An ignorant person is easy to please, and a knowledgeable person even more so, but even Lord Brahma cannot satisfy or win over someone conceited by a little knowledge. (Neeti Shatakam, Verse 3)

The age of treating diseases must give way to the age of knowing health and establishing balance. And as nano, bio, and information technologies converge, we have an unprecedented opportunity to make this vision real—not in some distant future, but in our own lifetimes.

The question is no longer whether it can be done. The question is whether we dare to step beyond the small island of what we already know and listen to the vast, silent intelligence of what is waiting to be known.

In an age mesmerised by rankings, metrics, and loud declarations of success, the most consequential journeys often unfold quietly. They are not propelled by brilliance alone, but by curiosity, humility, and an unyielding fidelity to truth. The exploration of consciousness—the deepest and most elusive mystery of human existence—has always advanced through such understated paths. This is the story of one such arc: a personal journey shaped by selfless science and a collective future that dares to carry cognition beyond mortal neurons into the vast, enduring realm of silicon.

I often reflect that receiving affection and regard from deeply learned and accomplished people has been my greatest achievement. Academically, I was never exceptional. By conventional measures, I was mediocre. Yet, I carried an irrepressible curiosity—about systems, about people, and about why they behave as they do. That curiosity frequently placed me at odds with environments that prized conformity over comprehension. I struggled in roles that felt full of activity yet hollow in essence, where motion masqueraded as meaning.

Still, I never withdrew from effort. When I entered the demanding, project-driven world of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), something unexpected occurred. In an ecosystem of unforgiving timelines and an achieve-or-perish ethos, ambiguity gave way to clarity of purpose. Under Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam’s visionary insistence on civilian spin-offs from defence technology, I was entrusted with developing material for a coronary stent. With the guidance of Dr B. Soma Raju and the collaboration of Dr A. Venugopal Reddy and Mr Koneru Bose at the Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory, we succeeded. It was more than a technical accomplishment; it was a revelation of what science becomes when aligned with service, and a testimony of what resolve can accomplish.

At what many would call my professional prime, destiny intervened. I left DRDO to join Dr Soma Raju’s audacious mission to build Care Hospitals and provide affordable, advanced treatment to the needy. Together, we created the Care Foundation, which became my lifelong platform for integrating technology, medicine, and human values, something ahead of its time, perhaps. It did not flourish, but the idea persisted.

When Dr Kalam assumed the Presidency of India, Care Foundation played a pioneering role in establishing the Pan-African e-Network—an early and courageous experiment in telemedicine and tele-education. Training doctors and nurses from Tanzania and Myanmar forged bonds that transcended geography and profession. Anesthesiologist Dr Mpoki Ubliansa and Cardiologist General Dr Tin Maung Aye became brothers in spirit, bound by service rather than contract.

A Meeting of Minds: Science, Humility, and the Cognitive Frontier

Parallel to this unfolding journey, IIIT-Hyderabad and Hyderabad University became my second homes. I would frequent these institutions to learn the nuances of medical technology—how science interacts with the humanities. It was here that I encountered a kindred intellect and spirit—Prof. S. Bapi Raju—who would profoundly shape my understanding of mind, machine, and consciousness. Our meeting felt less like collaboration and more like recognition.

Prof. Raju’s academic trajectory is formidable: an electrical engineering graduate from Osmania University, a master’s in Biomedical Engineering, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Arlington. His work carried him across continents—from research on brain-inspired intelligent control in the United Kingdom to computational neurobiology at ATR Research Labs in Kyoto. Returning to India in 1999, he served two decades as a Professor at the University of Hyderabad before joining IIIT-Hyderabad as Professor and Head of the Cognitive Science Lab.

Yet, what defines him is not the scale of his credentials but the depth of his humility. In the fiercely competitive domain of brain-computer interaction, he remains untouched by the trappings of dominance, race, or the hunger for recognition. A father figure to students and a trusted guide to colleagues, he embodies the ancient Indian ideal of the Rishi—a seeker more interested in what remains unknown than in endlessly polishing what is already established. His science is selfless, disciplined, and deliberately open-ended.

When Intelligence Seeks to Outgrow Biology

This disposition is not incidental; it is essential for the next arc of human evolution. As neuroscience, computation, and cognitive science converge, humanity stands at a threshold where intelligence may begin to loosen its ancient tether to mortal neurons. The biological brain, for all its splendour, is an evolutionary compromise—fragile, energy-hungry, and confined to a narrow planetary niche. Yet intelligence, once awakened, has never accepted confinement. It seeks continuity, extension, and reach.

Silicon, unlike carbon-based life, does not require oxygen, warmth, or water. It can function in radiation-rich voids, on frozen moons, and in interstellar darkness. To imagine cognition migrating to silicon is not to abandon humanity, but to extend it. What is carried forward is not flesh or ego, but function—memory, learning, adaptation, and perhaps even self-reflection. Intelligence, at its core, is pattern and principle, not protein.

Such a future will demand guardians as much as engineers. Intelligence liberated from mortality could easily become untethered from compassion and context. Whether silicon minds emerge as instruments of domination or custodians of exploration will depend on the values embedded at their conception. Here, Prof. Raju’s role becomes civilisational.

He belongs to a rare lineage of scientists who open questions rather than prematurely closing them, who resist reductionism without surrendering to mysticism. His work insists—quietly but firmly—that intelligence without wisdom is merely accelerated ignorance. In this sense, he stands as the Bhishma of the coming age.

Bhishma as a Civilisational Metaphor

In the Indian epic The Mahabharata, Bhishma was not a ruler but a pillar—renouncing personal ambition so that dharma might endure across turbulent times. He possessed immense capability, yet chose restraint, belonging to no faction, yet safeguarding civilization. In the age of silicon consciousness, Prof. Raju plays a similar role—not ruling the future, but ensuring it unfolds without ethical collapse.

To call him a blessed son of Mother India is not sentimentality; it is a legacy. India’s deepest gift to the world has never been conquest, but orientation—the insistence that knowledge must liberate, not enslave. From the Upanishads to modern cognitive science, the central question has remained unchanged: Who is the knower, and what does it mean to know?

In centuries to come, when intelligence is no longer confined to human brains and operates in environments incompatible with human life, Indianness may no longer be limited to a mapped territory. It will persist and propagate—being implemented in non-biological intelligences as a framework for reasoning and as an ethic of action marked by patience, humility, and openness to uncertainty.

This hero’s journey, however, does not conclude with an individual, nor even with a generation. Science that seeks consciousness must itself remain conscious of lineage. Knowledge endures not merely through accumulation but through transmission—teacher to student, mind to mind, across time.

In this, Prof. Bapi Raju’s deepest legacy may lie less in any singular contribution than in the ethos he imparts: patience with uncertainty, freedom from vanity, and the courage to keep questions open. His students carry this inheritance quietly, dispersed across laboratories and classrooms, shaping technologies and theories without surrendering humility. Together, they form a growing, unseen tribe—rigorous, yet tempered; imaginative, yet ethically anchored.

May the blessings of Prof. Bapi Raju rest upon them, and may their tribe increase.

As cognition prepares to step beyond mortal neurons into enduring silicon, into environments where biological life cannot persist, may this lineage ensure that intelligence does not outrun wisdom. If the future of consciousness is to be vast, let it also remain gentle. And if intelligence is to become cosmic, let it carry forward the values that first gave it meaning.

In that continuity—quiet, ethical, and awake—lies the true triumph of selfless science.

It was already evening when they arrived, and I sensed a good feeling. The light had softened, retreating gently from the edges of objects, as though the day itself wished to listen to what came next. Dr. Gangadhar Sunkara came with Dr. Chinnababu Sunkavalli—both close friends, healthcare researchers, and men marked by that particular stillness one notices in those who have committed their lives to a cause larger than personal interests. Though immensely busy people, they carried no sense of hurry with them, no insistence on importance—only an unspoken gravity, an awareness that their work announced itself.

Dr. Sunkara, a pharmaceutical scientist by training and Global Program Head at Novartis in East Hanover, New Jersey, spoke softly. A native of Andhra Pradesh, trained at the University of Nebraska Medical Center for his PhD and at Fairleigh Dickinson University for his MBA, he had been with Novartis since 2002—yet none of these credentials seemed to matter. What lingered instead was his attentiveness—the way his gaze rested not on abstractions but on people who exist beyond the confines of Novartis’ world-class laboratories and factories, and who suffer a plethora of maladies.

Dr. Sunkavalli, a robotic cancer surgeon and developmental therapeutics researcher, listened with the ease of someone accustomed to standing at the edge between end-stage despair and hope. His silences were not absences but shelters—spaces in which feelings could flow without interruption. Years of working with cancer patients had refined in him a rare equilibrium: technical mastery tempered by emotional restraint, precision softened by compassion.

I published Live for a Legacy, centred on Dr. Sunkavalli’s career, in 2023, and the book has quietly found its place in the world—a live example of becoming. In the three years since its publication, it has become something of a minor classic. Not because it deals with jargon and clichés about cancer, but because it presents what patients have endured and what doctors struggled with. Dr. Sunkavalli’s presence radiates the belief that a life, when aligned with purpose, becomes divine.

Together, Dr. Sunkara and Dr. Sunkavalli embody a distinctly modern form of service-oriented science: advanced yet unpretentious, globally informed yet locally rooted, precise in method yet profoundly human in intent. They do not speak of impact as an ambition; they live it as a responsibility. One senses that their science is not something they do, but something they are—carried quietly, like an inner compass, always pointing toward service.

As tea was poured and sipped, Dr. Sunkara began speaking of leprosy—not as a statistic, but as memory. During his graduation days in Warangal, he had encountered leprosy patients directly, not through textbooks but through touch, proximity and disciplined compassion. His teacher, Prof. M. C. Prabhakar, would collect nasal secretions and mucosa from patients and have students study Mycobacterium leprae under the microscope. Long before PCR testing entered routine diagnostics, they perfected early nasal assessment skills using nasal swabs for acid-fast bacilli staining.

Dr. Sunkara spoke of how the disease often announces itself quietly—through the nose before the skin—through obstruction, crusting, or unexplained epistaxis. They learned to recognise early invasion of the nasal mucosa and to intervene clinically, not merely to treat infection, but to interrupt transmission before stigma could take hold. It was science practised like listening—attentive, patient, exact—the way one imagines a sthitaprajna might be: balanced, unmoved by rhetoric.

“Was leprosy a disease of poverty?” I asked.

He paused.

“While the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae causes the disease itself,” he said, “the conditions associated with poverty act as significant risk factors for both acquiring the infection and experiencing adverse health outcomes, including permanent disabilities.”

Then another pause, longer, weighted with the gravity of lived consequence.

“A devastating consequence of leprosy,” he continued, “is the intense social stigma and discrimination. People abandon their professions, lose livelihoods and become isolated. Fear forces them to hide symptoms, which leads to further transmission and deeper poverty.” In that moment, the disease seemed less microbial than moral—a slow corrosion of dignity, fed by isolation.

The next day, this thought followed me to the Sivananda Rehabilitation Home in Kukatpally, Hyderabad. Spread across fifty-one acres, the campus breathed a rare spaciousness, as though the land itself were offering respite. Founded in 1958 by Rani Kumudini Devi, the first woman mayor of Hyderabad, in memory of her spiritual preceptor, Swami Sivananda, the institution has, for decades, provided care, treatment and rehabilitation for leprosy and tuberculosis patients—medicine intertwined with shelter, physiotherapy with a sense of belonging.

I met her son, Raja Vikram Dev Rao, and the legendary reconstructive surgeon, Dr. S. Ananth Reddy, who has made the hospital his home and performed over 6,000 surgeries there.  As we spoke, another story surfaced, as stories often do, uninvited yet necessary. Looking at the picture of Swami Sivanand adorning the wall, I mentioned the one about a young Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam arriving at Swami Sivananda’s ashram in 1958, rejected by the Air Force Selection Board at Dehradun. In Wings of Fire, Dr. Kalam recounts how Swamiji dissolved his despair with words that redirected destiny itself:

“What you are destined to become is not revealed now, but it is predetermined. Forget this failure, as it was essential to lead you to your destined path. Search, instead, for the true purpose of your existence. Become one with yourself, my son! Surrender yourself to the wish of God.” (p.19)

History, of course, followed Dr. Kalam—not towards the cockpit but towards missiles, the presidency and an icon of integrity and moral authority. One cannot help wondering how many destinies, misread as failures, are quietly redirected in institutions like this.

Standing there, I felt the presence of both Swami Sivananda and Dr. Kalam, not as memory but as atmosphere. Goosebumps appeared. Beside me sat Jaya, a 22-year-old intern from the United States, spending four months working with cancer patients under Dr. Sunkavalli, here on the other side of the planet. I looked at her and said—half in jest, half in awe—who knew she might become a Madame Curie of the future?

Today, when one speaks of eradicating leprosy, the language of science is no longer tentative or speculative. It is calm, measured and quietly confident. Multidrug therapy has rendered the disease curable; early detection interrupts disability before it can inscribe itself upon the body; genomic insights reveal a bacterium already biologically exhausted—slow to adapt, surviving more by legacy than by strength. Around this knowledge has grown a lattice of intelligence—digital surveillance, AI-assisted forecasting, integrated public-health systems—that narrows the pathways of transmission until they become rare, almost incidental.

I presented Dr Sunkara a copy of Dr Sanjay Kumar’s book Village Republic 2.0 that I co-authored. The book issues a clarion call to apply NextGen Biology and AI to bioresources. A renowned plant physiologist, Dr Sanjay Kumar, says, “In the high-altitude deserts of the Lahaul-Spiti Valley in Ladakh, the Sowa-Rigpa tradition uses plants such as Sea Buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides), Himalayan Monkshood (Aconitum heterophyllum), and Rose Root (Rhodiola rosea) to gently soothe skin ulcers and nerve pain. Along with Indian Wormwood (Artemisia brevifolia) and Blue Poppy (Meconopsis aculeata), these botanicals offer vital immune support and comfort. They serve as supportive companions to Multi-Drug Therapy (MDT), which remains the essential medical cure for leprosy.” Who knows, a deeper examination may even reveal a leprosy-curing molecule?

It is here that the quiet wisdom of Swami Sivananda returns, reminding us that life does not unfold according to our anxieties, but according to a deeper purpose, discernible only through surrender and service. It is here, too, that the journey of Dr. Kalam stands as a testament that what appears as rejection or suffering may, in fact, be redirection towards a higher calling. What seems like an interruption is often guidance—the shepherd’s poke that saves the sheep from wandering into  danger. The final work is not merely to cure a disease but to heal a society. This is the accurate crossing—Science, Service, and the Long Goodbye to Leprosy. May God bless the kind-hearted, socially-conscious people who understand and work for the larger purpose of human life.

Still in her twenties, Rebecca F. Kuang has emerged as one of the most incisive literary voices examining empire’s afterlives. Born in China, raised in the United States, and educated at Cambridge and Oxford, she broke through with The Poppy War, a novel rooted in China’s wars, colonial trauma and organised violence. Its success grew into a trilogy that strips war of romance and exposes power as addiction. Curious about her method, I turned to her book, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence—and found it a bracing, unsettling pleasure.

For over a century, writers have dismantled the gloss of empire. Joseph Conrad, V. S. Naipaul and Amitav Ghosh exposed the violence of imperialism through different lenses: allegory, psychological realism and historical reconstruction. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness revealed conquest as organised cruelty; Naipaul traced the psychic wreckage left behind in A Bend in the River and The Mimic Men; Ghosh mapped the empire’s material machinery—opium, indenture, migration—in Sea of Poppies, The Glass Palace and In an Antique Land. Together, they punctured the myth of imperial benevolence.

Kuang extends this lineage into the present. In The Poppy War, she reframes colonial violence through history-inflected fantasy, denying readers moral comfort. In Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, she advances a sharper thesis: empire is sustained not only by armies and trade, but by language. Translation becomes extraction; scholarship becomes power. Universities and claims of neutrality are revealed as instruments of domination.

Her most contemporary turn comes with Yellowface, where empire sheds territory and reappears as marketplace and algorithm. Conquest no longer requires armies or maps; virality now performs that work, and platforms replace colonies. Visibility becomes power, attention becomes currency, and outrage becomes a business model. Yet the core questions remain unchanged: Who gets to speak? Who profits from that speech? Who controls narrative, memory and legitimacy?

Kuang extends this critique beyond publishing, into the broader media ecosystem that surrounds modern life. Endless commercials peddle consumerism through 24/7 television and digital feeds, training desire and impatience while flattening attention. Fake news, manufactured outrage and algorithmic amplification blur the line between fact and performance. Narrative-setting—once the privilege of imperial administrators and court historians—is now executed at scale by media houses, influencers and political operators.

Propaganda no longer marches in uniform; it arrives as entertainment, a trend, or ‘content’. Yellowface exposes how easily power hides inside these systems, reminding us that while the instruments have changed, the struggle over voice, truth and meaning remains as old—and as dangerous—as empire itself. Kuang collapses the distance between colonial history and modern life. Our universities, publishing industries, supply chains and digital platforms were not built on neutral ground. They arose from hierarchy, violence and selective memory—and now operate invisibly through code and metrics.

A personal aside sharpened this insight. Walking through Oxford in 2016—along streets lined with unhurried teashops, modest eateries, and bookshops that invite lingering rather than consumption, amid its quiet lanes and grand buildings—I noticed a simple statue of an ox outside the railway station. Oxford—ox + ford—began as a river crossing for working animals. The statue is a quiet truth-teller: beneath every veneer lies timber, mud and labour. Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, brought back that memory vividly.

Great cities—London, Paris, New York, Beijing, Delhi, Mumbai—have always unsettled me. During my career, I had the opportunity to travel to these great cities and to spend time alone, walking without purpose and observing life as it unfolded. I carried little money in my pockets, and perhaps that very lack gave me the freedom to linger—to watch faces, gestures, shopfronts, subways and silences without the insulation of comfort. Moving on foot and at the pace of ordinary people, I sensed the unseen tensions of these cities: the quiet exhaustion behind ambition, the brittle confidence of power, and the fragile dignity with which millions endure. Those walks taught me more than guided tours ever could, revealing how grandeur and deprivation coexist, and how history, though unseen, continues to press upon the present.

With the internet embedded in mobile devices, everyday life has become fully transactional. Money now moves as data, streaming effortlessly across national boundaries, and the exhilaration of this speed often shades into unease. These cities hum with violence, past and present: wealth beside precarity, power beside struggle. The gig economy, instant hiring and firing by email or algorithm, and lives governed by dashboards and metrics are, at best, unsettling. Technology has not softened old inequalities; it has sharpened them. As we enter a new concentration of influence—often faceless, sometimes personified by prominent individuals, such as Elon Musk—power travels faster than governments can respond. At the same time, intentions and consequences remain disturbingly opaque.

If Joseph Conrad warned us about the moral darkness at the heart of empire, and Amitav Ghosh patiently showed how empire operates through ships, trade, money, and forced labour, Rebecca F. Kuang brings the question sharply into our own time. She asks: what happens when an empire no longer needs colonies, flags, or armies, but survives through language, institutions, platforms and code?

In Kuang’s world, power does not always announce itself. It hides in translation, algorithms, publishing markets, universities and digital networks that appear neutral and open, yet quietly decide who is heard, who is rewarded, and who is erased. This lends particular urgency to her work for younger readers, who grow up within these systems, often unaware of their inherited biases. Her novels are, therefore, not just stories; they are warnings. They urge us to stop moving through life on autopilot, dazzled by convenience and speed. They ask us to pay attention—to question where power comes from, whose interests it serves, and what histories it carries forward. Before the empire hardens again in new, invisible forms, Kuang calls on us to wake up, think clearly, and act with awareness in the world we are actively creating.

What binds Joseph Conrad, V. S. Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh and Rebecca F. Kuang is not only their sustained interrogation of power, but also the social worlds that shaped them. All were born into modest, middle-class or working households, raised by parents who laboured, taught, or served rather than ruled. None inherited the empire; they encountered it as something imposed, observed, or studied from the margins. That distance sharpened their vision. Conrad saw the lie beneath imperial grandeur; Naipaul traced its psychological scars; Ghosh reconstructed its material machinery; and Kuang exposed its afterlives in language, institutions and digital culture.

To this lineage belong Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam and Wings of Fire, which I co-authored with him. Dr. Kalam also came from an ordinary working family, carrying no inherited privilege—only curiosity, discipline and faith in learning. For a modern teenager, Wings of Fire conveys the same moral values as these writers: greatness does not stem from domination, extraction, or spectacle, but from perseverance, ethical effort and service. Where Conrad warned of moral collapse, Naipaul of hollow independence, Ghosh of systemic exploitation, and Kuang of empire reborn in code, Kalam offers a counter-vision—technology aligned with conscience. In an age racing towards Singularity, this shared inheritance matters profoundly: the human mind must not be numbed by automation or dazzled by power, but awakened to responsibility—so that science and intelligence help heal a crowded, heating planet, rather than deepen the old divide between rags of poverty and velvets of affluence.

 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 is bothintimate and cosmic, tender and vast.

In Indian cosmology, Pranav is ‘Omkara’—the primordial sound from which creation unfolds. It is not merely a syllable, but a principle: the first vibration that disturbs perfect stillness and allows the universe to appear. To hold such a name in one’s arms is to be reminded that every birth is not only biological but also metaphysical.

Before sound, before form, before the long procession of time, tradition tells us there was equilibrium—a flawless balance of primordial energies. What modern language might call potential energy, kinetic energy and inertial mass, ancient thought named sattva, rajas and tamas. In that original state, none dominated. There was no motion because there was no imbalance. It was not emptiness, but fullness without expression—a silence pregnant with worlds.

Then came Pranav. Shri Krishna declares:

प्रणवःसर्ववेदेषुशब्दःखेपौरुषंनृषु।

पुण्योगन्धःपृथिव्यां च तेजश्चास्मिविभावसौ॥(Bhagavad Gita Chapter 7, Verses 8-9)

I am the sacred syllable Om in all the Vedas;I am sound in space and ability in human beings.

“I am the pure fragrance in the earthand the brilliance in fire.

The Mandukya Upanishad opens with a declaration as simple as it is total:

ॐ इतिएतदअक्षरंइदंसर्वम्

“Om is this entire universe.”

Creation does not begin with an object, but with a vibration. Om unfolds as A–U–M: waking, dreaming and deep sleep. Itfinally dissolves into silence—Turiya, the witnessing consciousness beyond all states. Sound emerges from silence, and silence remains beneath sound.

 The Bhagavad Gita presents a parallel perspective, rooted not in abstraction but in real life. Shri Krishna explains that all actions stem from the interaction of the three gunas—sattva (clarity and harmony), rajas (movement and desire) and tamas (inertia and physicality). These gunas belong to Prakriti, nature itself. The Self—the witnessing consciousness—remains unaffected, taking on bodies like an actor assumes roles, entering the stage without being changed by the costume.

Seen this way, the world is a stage, but not in the trivial sense of illusion. It is a theatre of becoming, where consciousness repeatedly steps into form to experience, learn, struggle, forget, remember and evolve. Each birth is a new entry, not of something entirely new, but of something ancient continuing its journey.

A child, then, does not arrive as a blank slate alone. He arrives carrying impressions—samskaras—not as fixed destinies, but as tendencies, textures, unfinished melodies seeking expression. The Gita speaks of this continuity with startling clarity: the embodied self leaves off worn-out bodies and takes on new ones, just as a person discards old garments and dons new clothes (Chapter 2, Verse 22). The journey is uninterrupted, though the forms change.

In this sense, Pranav is not merely beginning life; he is resuming it. Consciousness has chosen a new arrangement of matter, a new family, a new historical moment, to continue its exploration of itself. The stage has shifted, the script has evolved, yet the play goes on.

What is this play? No one knows fully. Every civilisation has attempted an answer—myth, science, theology, philosophy. Today, we speak of evolution, genetics, neural networks and cosmology. Yesterday, we spoke of gods, avatars and cycles of creation and dissolution. Tomorrow, we may speak in entirely different metaphors. But beneath all explanations remains the same intuition: there is intelligence unfolding through form, and we are participants within it.

Children remind us of this truth because they arrive without explanations. They do not justify existence; they embody it. In their stillness and sudden cries, in their unfocused gaze and grasping hands, one sees the gunas awakening—rajas in movement, tamas as grounding in the physical body and its needs, sattva in the quiet clarity of presence. And behind them all, one senses the silent witness the Gita calls the ‘Akarta’—the non-doer, the one who watches the play without being bound by it

To name a child Pranav is, therefore, an act of recognition. It acknowledges that this small life is aligned with the oldest rhythm we know: vibration emerging from silence, form arising from balance, experience unfolding from stillness. It is to say that the birth of the child is not a coincidence, but an expression of family, of history, of consciousness itself.

As Sudhanshu and Stuti cradle their son, the vastness of scripture finds its most intimate proof. The MandukyaUpanishad is no longer a text; it breathes. The Gita is no longer a discourse; it lives. The cosmic sound has taken a human name.

And perhaps this is the deepest comfort these traditions offer: that life, for all its uncertainty, is not random chaos. It is Lila—a play, a game, a divine experiment whose rules are not fully known, yet whose coherence we intuit. We stumble through it, misunderstand it, suffer within it, and occasionally glimpse its beauty. That glimpse is enough to keep us playing.

Welcome, Pranav.

You enter a world that Shakespeare once saw as a stage, where men and women make their entrances and exits, each playing many parts, and you enter the same world that the Bhagavad Gita understands as a field of action, where consciousness takes form, performs its work and moves on. On this vast stage, roles change, but the witness endures. You will wear many costumes in the course of your life—child, learner, worker, giver, observer—and each role will require something different of you.

Perform each role fully and sincerely, without holding onto any mask longer than needed. Forget when forgetting is necessary, so each act can start unburdened; remember when remembrance arises so that wisdom can temper desire. Act with intention, yet be free from attachment to results, offering your work for a greater good, so your presence brings steadiness, happiness and light to those sharing the stage with you.

 This world is an ongoing play—in medias res, as the Latin has it. By taking birth, we enter a story already in motion. Yesterday’s son becomes today’s father. Scenes continue to unfold, much as the same sun rises and we name it a new day. And at some moment—sooner or later—we realise that,though our role in the play was earnest and exacting, the play does not begin or end with us; that the stage, the actor and the audience all arise within a single, unbroken field of consciousness.

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 me for an autograph after recognising me. He asked me what the best passage I would like him to read was, and I unhesitatingly pointed out a poem on page 130 that Dr Kalam had quoted. 

God hath not promised

Skies always blue,

Flower-strewn pathways

All our lives through…

These lines are from a well-known hymn composed by Annie Johnson Flint (1866-1932), who lost both parents in her early childhood and endured a severe form of arthritis all her life.Dr Kalam’s ascent in life, too, was neither easy nor accidental; it was earned through struggle and steadfast perseverance. This hymn serves as a gentle reminder against modern impatience. The lines quietly but firmly remind us that struggle is not an interruption to life; it is part of its design. 

We live in an age that constantly promises the opposite. Technology assures us of solutions. Markets promise prosperity. Politics promises justice. Social media promises happiness, visibility and belonging. Yet beneath these assurances run a deepening and widening disquiet: inequality grows, money consolidates power, violence seeps into homes and public spaces, consumerism replaces meaning, and the elderly—once custodians of wisdom—are increasingly treated as surplus.

Life never fully resolves itself, yet it goes on. This tension—between the desire for neat endings and the reality of unresolved living—centralises Shakespeare’s troubling comedy, All’s Well That Ends Well. Despite its optimistic title, the play provides no easy consolation. It gestures toward closure while quietly denying it, leaving the audience unsettled rather than reassured. People adjust, endure, rationalise and hope—often without complete resolution.Shakespeare seems to suggest that the real triumph is not the arrival at a perfect ending. The stubborn persistence of life itself makes people carry on.

The play, written around 1604–1605, recounts the story of Helena, a poor yet intelligent young woman who loves the nobleman Bertram. After curing the King of France with her medical skill, Helena is rewarded with the right to choose a husband and selects Bertram. But high-headed Bertram rejects her and imposes seemingly impossible conditions for accepting her as his wife. Through perseverance, disguise and clever strategy, Helena fulfils these conditions. The play examines love, merit versus birth, female agency and moral ambiguity. Helena wins her right over Bertram, but without his repentance and reconciliation. It is a conditional ending—legally complete and socially acceptable, yet emotionally and morally unsettled.

Shakespeare gave the English language nearly 2,000 enduring words and phrases that are still actively used in the modern world—for example, the ubiquitous word ‘manager,’ used in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene I

         Come now; what masques, what dances, shall we have,

         To wear away this long age of three hours

         Between our after-supper and bedtime?

         Where is our usual manager of mirth?

This anxiety, boredom, and discomfort mirror our own age, marked by ‘managing’ situations without resolving issues.Inequality is ‘managed,’ not resolved. Injustice is ‘addressed,’not dismantled. Violence is condemned, yet normalised. Alcohol and smoking are denounced,yet promoted for profit. We are told that things are improving even as lived experience contradicts the narrative—like Shakespeare’s ending of All’s Well That Ends Well, modern life functions, but uneasily.

One of the play’s central conflicts is between merit and birth. The daughter of a low-ranked doctor, Helena rises through intelligence, service and bravery. Bertram resists her not because she lacks virtue, but because she lacks pedigree. The King orders the marriage to proceed. Social order is preserved through power rather than consent. Shakespeare does not disguise the discomfort this creates.

Four centuries later, the names have changed, but the structure remains. The modern world praises meritocracy while quietly safeguarding inherited privilege. Education, capital, influence and networks continue to centralise power, even as the rhetoric of ‘equal opportunity’ grows louder. Success does not guarantee dignity. Competence does not ensure acceptance. The hymn does not promise ‘smooth roads and wide,’ and Shakespeare does not promise justice without resistance.

In the present-day world, there are no longer kings, but money and power increasingly shape outcomes. Markets reward scale, not fairness. Politics values influence over integrity. Institutions function—but often at the cost of human trust.This produces a subtle moral displacement. What works begins to matter more than what is right. What ends well becomes justification enough, even if the means bruise human dignity along the way. Even the hymn does not promise triumph beyond ’strength for the day, rest for the labour.’ In other words, moral life is sustained not by victory, but by endurance.

The play, All’s Well That Ends Well, contains no spectacular bloodshed. Still, it is woven with subtler forms of violence: coercion, humiliation, abandonment, and emotional neglect—Bertram’s cruelty wounds without drawing blood. Helena’s suffering is noble, yet genuine. The modern world remains largely unchanged. There is widespread domestic aggression, emotional abuse, public outbursts, and digital harassment. A world fixated on dominance grapples with vulnerability. A culture that values power tends to forget care.

In All’s Well That Ends Well, Parolles embodies this emptiness—language without substance, performance without courage. He consumes attention but produces nothing of value. His eventual exposure is both comic and instructive. Modern consumer culture produces Parolles at scale. Noise replaces depth. Speed replaces reflection. The hymn quietly resists this frenzy by slowing time—by reminding us that life is not meant to be flower-strewn at every step.

          God hath not promised.

          Sun without rain,

          Joy without sorrow,

          Peace without pain…

No wonder the world is imperfect and unresolved. Inequality persists. Power distorts. Violence scars. Consumerism distracts. Elders are forgotten. Life continues—not because it is just or orderly, but because people persist in choosing to endure. Within narrow limits and imperfect conditions, they keep caring, keep hoping, and keep shaping meaning where none is guaranteed. It is this quiet, stubborn human resolve—more than fairness or reward—that allows existence to move forward, one deliberate act of attention and compassion at a time.

‘All’s well,’ not because all is healed, but because life, in its broken continuity, still invites responsibility. Perhaps that is the quiet lesson shared by Shakespeare and the hymn alike: not that the world will become just, gentle or equal overnight—but that even without such promises, we are still called to live wisely, compassionately and faithfully, one unresolved day at a time.

Life, much like the greatest works of literature, seldom reaches neat conclusions. It moves forward with loose ends, half-healed wounds and questions that defy final answers—and yet it continues anyway. To despair because life is imperfect is to misunderstand its deepest rhythm. Meaning is not found in perfect resolution, but in perseverance, compassion and the quiet courage to carry on despite uncertainty.

As All’s Well That Ends Well gently suggests, survival itself can be a form of grace. In moments when clarity fails and outcomes remain unresolved, hope does not disappear; it simply takes on a different form. As the hymn quietly assures us

But God hath promised strength for the day,

Rest for the labor, light for the way,

Grace for the trials, help from above,

Unfailing sympathy, undying love.

And so, life—imperfect and unresolved—continues, not by erasing uncertainty but by bearing it with quiet dignity. At a book fair, a stranger steps forward, book in hand, asking for an autograph—not for possession, but for connection. In that silent exchange lies continuity: ideas passing gently from one life to another. Dr Kalam left this world a decade ago, yet his presence endures in the minds he awakened and the futures he shaped. That is how life transcends its own limits. We live on through what we inspire in others. In that sense, I hope that I,too, will live beyond my life.