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.

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 ourselves down, if we choose for a moment to observe, not with the hurried mind of our age but with a gentler, lingering gaze, then even the simplest ingredient begins to shimmer with hidden worlds. The kitchen, then, reveals itself as a quiet laboratory; each jar, each seed, each crystal becomes a phenomenon; and even a humble sweet—say, a shard of rock sugar—turns into a secret waiting to be understood.

The other evening, after finishing dinner at a small neighbourhood eatery, I was offered the familiar combination of saunf (fennel seeds) and mishri (rock sugar)—that tiny ritual that so many Indian meals conclude with. On a whim, I turned to my host, a software engineer, and asked whether he knew what mishri really was: how those transparent little crystals form, what process gives them their clarity and crunch. He looked at me with a strange mixture of amusement and discomfort. His gaze seemed to say, “What a ridiculous question!”, yet beneath it flickered the soft embarrassment of ignorance. It struck me then how rare it is, in our modern lives, to pause and wonder about the simplest things we consume.

The next morning, as I stood waiting for my tea water to boil, the memory of his expression returned. I watched the bubbles form at the bottom of the steel vessel, the tea leaves bloom in the rolling water, and suddenly the place seemed transformed. A kitchen is, in fact, a laboratory—not merely a site of cooking, but of transformations. Ingredients are never inert; they swell, dissolve, brown, align, pop and crystallise. They obey laws as ancient as the earth itself, yet sit quietly in jars and tins, asking nothing more than a moment’s attention.

My eyes drifted to the row of boxes on the rack, filled with the materials used to cook a meal. There was also a container of mishri. How strange, I thought, that something so unassuming, so crystal clear, should contain within it such a profound lesson in science. A piece of rock sugar is not a mere sweet; it is a slow story of molecules organising themselves into an ordered lattice, a three-dimensional poem written in the language of thermodynamics. How many marvels, then, have we swallowed unthinkingly? How many stories have dissolved on our tongues without ever being heard?

Crystallisation is at the very heart of material science, and what could be a simpler example than rock sugar? When hot sugar syrup cools, it enters a fragile state of supersaturation. In that suspended moment, a few sucrose molecules—almost shyly—align themselves, forming tiny nuclei. Around these seeds, the crystal grows, layer by layer, face by face, each plane a response to molecular geometry and thermal history. Slow cooling yields larger, clearer crystals; rapid cooling yields scattered grains and opacity. The same principles shape salt in the desert, snowflakes in winter, and even the flawless silicon crystals that carry the weight of modern computing. Yet, here they are, forming quietly in a pan in our kitchens.

This curiosity, once awakened, drifts effortlessly toward other ingredients. Sabudana (tapioca pearls), for example, is not merely a fasting food but a living demonstration of starch science. Starch granules are tiny, semi-crystalline bodies. When heated with water, they swell, burst, and transform into a gel—a process called gelatinisation. This gel is rolled into pearls, dried, and polished into the soft white orbs we soak before cooking. A sabudana pearl, so innocent in appearance, is really a tiny globe of polymer behaviour, viscoelasticity and phase transition.

Then there is makhana, the fox nut, born from the lotus seed and reborn in the pan. Inside its hard shell lies a matrix of starches and proteins. As the seed is roasted, moisture trapped in its heart expands into steam; at the precise moment when internal pressure overcomes rigidity, the entire structure bursts open. The seed becomes a puff—light, airy, delicately porous. This is not mere cooking; it is a controlled explosion, a marvel of thermal expansion, pressure thresholds and structural transformation.

And yet, I thought, our inquiry could not end with individual ingredients alone. It must extend to the collective wisdom that once guided our festive foods. Just then—like a fragrance drifting in from an old courtyard—the memory of my grandmother surfaced. I could see her, hands steady and sure, making sweets that changed with the seasons. In winter, she stirred ghee-laden laddoos with edible gum and dried ginger for warmth; in summer, she shaped cooling khus-khus (poppy seeds)  and coconut preparations; during festivals, she crafted confections with herbs, nuts, lotus seeds and spices, each one carrying a purpose beyond taste. These sweets were not indulgences alone; they were nutritional equations, cultural stories and seasonal prescriptions. A whole science lived in her hands, though she never named it so.

Traditional Indian sweets were once astonishing compositions of edible gums, herbs, spices, nuts, seeds and grains—each chosen not only for taste but also for their physiological effects. Gond (edible gum) for strength, dried ginger powder for warmth, nutmeg for calm, cardamom for digestion, khus-khus for cooling, and til (sesame seeds) for vitality. A laddoo (a ball-shaped confection) was a miniature medicinal ecosystem; a barfi (fudge candy) was as much a work of biology as of cuisine. These were not random mixtures but carefully balanced systems shaped by generations of observation, trial, memory and intuition.

Today, much of this quiet intelligence has been swept aside by the tide of convenience. Industrial sweets dominate our markets—gleaming, colourful, symmetrical, long-lasting. But this kind of perfection carries a quiet cost beneath its sheen. Artificial colours impersonate saffron; synthetic flavours mimic rose and pistachio; stabilisers, emulsifiers and preservatives grant unnatural shelf life; glucose syrups replace slow-cooked jaggery; hydrogenated oils masquerade as ghee. These sweets are as much chemical engineering as they are food—attractive but nutritionally hollow, convenient but quietly harmful. In the quest for texture and durability, we have lost nourishment and knowledge.

This is why curiosity matters. To ask, “What is this? How is it made? Why was it once done differently?” is to reclaim not only our health but also our heritage. When we ask such questions, mishri becomes a lesson in crystallisation; sabudana, one in polymer science; makhana, one in thermal mechanics; and traditional sweets, one in cultural engineering.

Walk into a kitchen with this awareness, and it transforms. The jars become textbooks; the spices, experiments; the utensils, instruments. One begins to see that the everyday act of cooking is a dialogue between the natural world and human wisdom. In this quiet, reflective state, the kitchen becomes both laboratory and temple—a place where matter transforms and meaning emerges.

And perhaps that is the real sweetness behind all these sweet things: not just in their taste, but in their story. When we choose to look closely, we discover that even the smallest crystal of mishri contains a universe—one that is ours to explore. After all, is not the highest endowment of humankind the twin power of imagination and curiosity? If we forsake them, what a royal squandering of our finest inheritance it would be! For life is meant to be observed, examined and questioned—not sleepwalked through in the dim hallway of habit.

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 before us and after us; we hold only our scene, our cue, our momentary patch of light. And yet, this “stage” is also a journey. Marcel Proust, with his gentle, probing wisdom, told us that the true voyage is not in discovering new lands, but in discovering new eyes.

It was with such reflections swirling about me that Dr Krishna Yedula approached with a request: would I help shape into words the story of the Society for Cyberabad Security Council (SCSC) and its work during the pandemic—a story he had lived breath by breath as Secretary-General in those turmoiled COVID months? I agreed without hesitation. How could one refuse? For nothing in our lifetime has equalled that invisible storm that brought the machinery of the world to a standstill, stripped us of illusions, and forced us to confront the fragility of breath itself. To revisit those days was to revisit the human spirit under trial.

The SCSC is a rare and admirable institution—an alliance between the Police and the corporations of Hyderabad’s newest technological nerve centre, called Cyberabad, created to address the shared but often neglected domains of safety, responsiveness, and civic well-being. Its Chairman during the pandemic, Mr V. C. Sajjanar—later entrusted with leading the vast Telangana Road Transport Corporation—was a leader both steady and gracious, the kind of presence that turns anxiety into resolve.

When I asked Mr Sajjanar what the theme of such a book should be, he replied without the slightest pause: “The Extra Mile.” The clarity of his answer carried the weight of something larger, as though Lord Brahma Himself had leaned in to whisper a reminder—that calamities are not punishments but awakenings, moments when the human spirit is summoned to evolve. And so the book began to take shape.

It took time, for memory is a fragile archive, easily smudged by pain, haste and the passing of days. We wanted the story to hold every essential detail: the abandoned bodies given last rites by enlightened souls; the starving street dogs fed during the lockdown by hands that refused to look away; the migrant workers trudging out of a city that had forgotten how deeply it relied on them, who were offered food, dignity, and care; and the orphaned children whose education was quietly ensured by strangers who became guardians. Each thread deserved its place in the light.

Finally, on a luminous December evening in 2025, Friday the 5^th, the book was launched by the Honourable Governor of Telangana, Shri Jishnu Dev Varma—a prince of the old Tripura lineage—alongside senior officers, SCSC’s founding leaders, technologists, volunteers, and countless citizens who had experienced both sorrow and solidarity during those months. The Convention Hall at Hotel Daspalla—named after the ancient coastal kingdom of hills, forests, and rivers, now modern-day Vishakhapatnam—radiated a sense of purpose fulfilled. We chose Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam’s line as the epigraph: “Extraordinary people are those ordinary people who do extra work.” It was the perfect gateway into what I wished to share when my moment at the podium arrived.

The extra mile is not about an outward sprint; it is an inward gesture—a quiet vow: I will give a little more than what is asked, not for applause, but for the integrity of the act. This vow reveals itself in the smallest details of everyday life. The young engineer who notices the server room overheating does not walk past, murmuring, “Not my department”; he alerts the right people and prevents a failure no one else imagined. The professor who senses confusion clouding her students’ minds prepares a simple, clarifying handout, even though no syllabus demands it. The doctor finishing a weary shift sits with an anxious patient for a few unhurried minutes, knowing that reassurance can heal where medicine cannot.

In offices, the extra mile often appears as initiative: the colleague who gathers data and proposes solutions rather than rehearsing complaints. At home, it is the person who stays back after the party laughter has faded and quietly restores order—washes dishes, clears garbage, and rearranges furniture and coverings. For the farmer, it is sharpening tools late at night so that the next day’s labour is more productive. For the shopkeeper, it is letting a customer leave with twenty rupees pending because humanity weighs more than arithmetic. For a teacher, it is being ever ready to help the slowest student.

The extra mile has little to do with working longer or seeking recognition. It is about arriving at the right moment when needed, noticing what others overlook, and repairing what was not broken by you. It involves choosing quality even when no one will ever know. Here, the Bhagavad Gita enters like dawn light and gives the shloka— Karmanyeva adhikaras te ma phaleshu kadachana (2.47), which explains the concept of Nishkama Karma—action without attachment to reward.. Our authority rests in the action alone; the fruit is never ours to claim. To walk the extra mile is simply to embody this truth. It is the Gita quietly breathing through our everyday lives—devotion not in grand gestures, but in small, steadfast, selfless acts that gently refine the world from within.

For in the end, it is not the magnitude of a deed but the purity of intention that shapes character. And character, slowly built through unnoticed choices, earns trust and affection without ever demanding them. Those who walk the extra mile never walk it alone; their sincerity gathers companions, lightens burdens, knits communities, and makes the long road gentler for all.

And perhaps that is why one eventually realises: the extra mile is never crowded—because it is walked not by the strong, but by the sincere.

May the brave volunteers, the selfless leaders, and all the souls who risked their own safety and comfort to lift another out of fear or darkness be blessed with lives of abundance! May their courage ripple outward, inspiring others to step forward when the world trembles. And may their tribe increase—steadily, silently, like lamps lighting other lamps—until compassion becomes our civilisation’s most natural instinct. For it is in precisely such moments, when ordinary people choose to give more than is asked, that the extra mile reveals itself—not as the heroic road of a select few, but as the true path on which humanity moves forward together.