The best part of my career has been meeting eminent people and learning—often quietly—about the many facets of human excellence—something missed by those who pursue excellence in their own fields and live within their silos and echo chambers. Even now, when I travel less, Providence seems to arrange moments of rare grace: encounters with individuals whose mere presence teaches. In the presence of such people, I feel a calm, reassuring force—an affirmationthat human life, at its highest, is about the expansion of consciousness. It is about helping the mind escape the cage of instinct, habit and conditioning, and align itself with what is good beyond personal or immediate interest—towards the greater good of others.

It was in this spirit that I attended the Global Head & Neck Precision Onco Summit 2026 at Yashoda Hospitals, Hyderabad, to which I was invited by Dr. S. Chinnababu, with whom I co-authored a book on cancer, Live for a Legacy, in 2023; it has recently been revised and republished in a newedition. I listened to the inaugural keynote by the globally renowned head and neck surgical oncologist Dr. Anil K. D’Cruz, and within minutes, it was evident that this was neither a performance nor an exercise in persuasion. It was the voice of a man who has spent a lifetime standing at the frontier of uncertainty—where decisions are irreversible, margins are narrow, and humility is not merely a personal virtue—it is an ethical requirement of the profession.

Dr. D’Cruz’s presence is striking—composed, precise and unsentimental. There was no sugar-coating. ‘This is what surgery can do,’ he seemed to say. ‘Beyond this lies adventurism.’ What gave these words their uncommon force was the audience before him—the very best in the field, clinicians and scientists who themselves work at the frontiers of knowledge. Yet the hall was held in attentive silence. The profundity of his words was both compelling and commanding, for they arose from strength, not hesitation. Even as a lay observer, the ethical clarity was unmistakable. Each tumour is biologically unique; each patient carries a different physiology, psychology and social context. Wise care in head and neck oncology, therefore, demands strength of judgement—an intelligent, patient-specific integration of surgery, radiation and systemic therapy, increasingly informed by molecular profiling and immuno-oncology, and anchored in the courage to respect limits. Doctors are mere professionals in their chosen field; they are not gods.

The field itself has transformed profoundly. High-resolution imaging, PET-CT fusion and intra-operative navigation have refined precision. Microvascular reconstruction restores not just anatomy but speech and swallowing. Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) and image-guided radiotherapy have reduced collateral damage. Checkpoint inhibitors targeting the transmembrane proteins programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) and programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1)have opened new options for treating recurrent and metastatic disease. Yet tools, however advanced, do not absolve us of responsibility. They extend capability; they do not replace wisdom. Without ethical restraint, technology risks becoming excessive.

This restraint is increasingly difficult in a system where medicine is no longer practised by independent agents. Every doctor is embedded in institutions—hospitals, insurers, diagnostics, and supply chains—that shape incentives and choices. Excellence today requires not only skill but resistance to the gravitational pull of profit and spectacle. It requires an elevation of consciousness commensurate with capability.

I sat with Dr. D’Cruz as co-chair during Dr. Chinnababu’spresentation on cancer prevention by traversing the last mile—away from cities, into villages and hutments, where marginalised, poor and tribal communities live. Through the Grace Cancer Foundation, a creation of his own, Dr.Chinnababu has spent over a decade raising awareness and promoting early referral. The science here is disarmingly simple: when detected early, most cancers are curable with modest intervention; when detected late, treatment becomes prolonged, costly and uncertain. Prevention and early diagnosis lack glamour. They demand patience, logistics, trust and relentless follow-up—where conscience meets competence. And there is no money in it.

As I stood between Dr. D’Cruz and Dr. Chinnababu, I felt adéjà vu—an unmistakable sensation I had experienced many times before in the company of Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. Dr.Kalam is no longer with us physically, yet some individuals never truly depart. Their way of being—how they listen, decide, pause and act—never goes away, and lives as an imprint so deep that it reappears when the conditions are right. What I felt in that moment was not nostalgia or memory. It was recognition—an experiential truth that needs no explanation, only attentiveness.

Dr. D’Cruz’s own journey exemplifies a life devoted to knowing what is not yet known. Educated at St. John’s Medical College, Bengaluru, trained in surgery at the University of Mumbai, and forged over 38 years at Tata Memorial Hospital—including 28 as Professor and Head—he has helped define standards of care respected worldwide. Since 2019, as Director of Oncology at Apollo Hospitals, he has shown that disciplined excellence and large systems need not be incompatible. His legacy lies not only in surgeries and publications, but in generations trained to think before they cut, to ponder before they decide, and to respect biology over ego.

Watching Dr. D’Cruz draw firm ethical boundaries around intervention, and Dr. Chinnababu persistently widen the circle of care to include those whom systems routinely forget, I sensed the same inner alignment I had witnessed years earlier. It was the lived coherence between thought and action, between capability and responsibility. Such moments reveal themselves not through argument or ideology, but through experience—and it is from this realm of lived experience that thinkers like Sri Aurobindo spoke of a higher order of consciousness made visible in ordinary human work.

These are the people Sri Aurobindo described in The Life Divine—not saints withdrawn from the world, but individuals fully embodied in work, inwardly governed by something larger than ambition or fear. Such people do not announce their spirituality. They live it through precision, discipline and care. In medicine, this quality is unmistakable: the courage to say ‘no’ when intervention will harm; the choice of prevention over spectacle; the building of institutions rather than empires; the teaching of when not to act.

Sri Aurobindo argued that human evolution is ethical and conscious, not merely technological. The next step would be taken by individuals who master inner compulsions while remaining fully engaged with the world. At the Summit, I saw this principle enacted—quietly—by a master surgeon who knows his limits and a public-health clinician who refuses to abandon the poor.

This is not hero-worship. It is pattern recognition. In a time when medicine risks becoming algorithm-driven or profit-maximised, such lives are living correctives. They remind us that advanced tools—robotics, precision radiotherapy, immunotherapy and AI-guided diagnostics—are morally neutral until guided by consciousness.

Dr. Kalam once told me that the true test of a professional life is whether one leaves behind clarity rather than confusion. As I left the hall, that clarity lingered. It reaffirmed a belief I have long held: humanity reaches its highest expression not in dominance, but in service guided by knowledge and humility. These are the ones who transcend the known—and, in doing so, lift us with them.

I have been deeply engrossed in reading Shakespeare for a while. It remains one of the most astonishing paradoxes in literary history that Romeo and Juliet—a drama pulsing with murder, deception, impulsive rebellion and ethical transgression—has been remembered across continents and centuries, not for its violence but for a single, moonlit balcony. A recent film, O’Romeo, brought this truth to light by focusing on a passionate, high-stakes romance that mirrorsthe central, tumultuous love story of the classic play. Similar to the Montague/Capulet feud, O’Romeo roots in an intense rivalry within the modern-day Mumbai underworld, and though it does not replicate scenes, it clinically examines the perils of ‘forbidden love’.

Read plainly, the narrative is chaotic, almost startling in its speed and recklessness. A street brawl erupts within the first hundred lines. Romeo broods over a different girl altogether. Juliet, scarcely fourteen, is pressured into a marriage she does not want. Romeo trespasses into her home under the cover of night. Mercutio is slain in broad daylight, Tybalt falls in vengeance, Paris dies at the tomb, and Friar Lawrence—custodian of spiritual wisdom—concocts a dangerous sleep potion to fake Juliet’s death—so potent that he boasts it can borrow life from death. 

“And in this borrowed likeness of shrunk death” (Act 4, Scene 1)

Immediately after Romeo kills Tybalt, he realises that his impulsive act of revenge has made him a plaything of fate. He must go into exile to save his life. He laments, in a moment of bitter clarity,

 “O, I am fortune’s fool!” (Act 3, Scene 1)

Nothing about this world is calm or orderly; it is a society fermenting with feud, pride, honour and haste. Yet, despite this tumult, the moment that humanity has chosen to preserve, paint, film, dramatise and fall in love with is the quiet, tremulous exchange beneath Juliet’s window—the instant when Romeo whispers, breath held like a prayer, that it is the east, and that Juliet is the sun!

On that balcony, the world of Verona briefly dissolves (Act 2, Scene 2). No feud intrudes. No parent watches; no dagger glints. No banishment looms. No potion is brewed. Instead, the scene glows with the innocence of discovery, and the trembling honesty of two young souls speaking without armour. For those few minutes, we glimpse love unshadowed by consequence. It is the only time they are entirely themselves.

“But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”

 Why does the world cling to this scene and not the events that shape the tragedy? Why is the balcony the emblem of the play, the cultural shorthand for love itself? The answer lies inselective human memory and irresistible human longing. We do not hold on to the full truth of an experience; we distil it. We are alchemists before we are historians. Juliet, aware of the danger, whispers fearfully,

“If they do see thee, they will murder thee.”

 Yet her voice softens almost instantly as love overwhelms caution. She confesses in lines that have outlived kingdoms,

 “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep.”  

Romeo, overwhelmed by her radiance, declares his own daring ascent,

“With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls”

In a way, Romeo and Juliet resembles the production of alcohol from coarse, sticky molasses. The raw materials of the play—the feud, the bloodshed, the rash decisions, and the priest’s deception—are thick, turbulent and unrefined. They bubble and ferment with heat, anxiety and danger. But when distilled, when separated from the heaviness of their origin, what rises is clear, fragrant and intoxicating: the pure vapour of yearning. The balcony scene is this vapour. It is the spirit extracted from the chaos—the moment when the residue falls away, and only emotion remains.

 The balcony endures because it transforms private longing into a public symbol. Shakespeare, with remarkable psychological insight, understood that audiences crave a moment of sincerity amid chaos. The balcony becomes the boundary between childhood and adulthood, between safety and danger, between the earth and the sky. It is not just a window; it is a frontier where the ordinary world ends and a myth begins—and myths endure because they contain something we need. The fights, the murders, the terrible haste—these are the slow-moving elements. The gentle glow of the balcony is the concentrated spirit that the world chooses to drink.

But why did this particular play, among countless tragic romances, become the universal template? Part of its power lies in its treatment of love not as possession but as revelation. Romeo and Juliet’s passion is not engineered, planned, or socially advantageous; it erupts with the inevitability of a storm. This rawness makes it universally recognisable. Every culture has known the fever of first love—the sense that feelings define destiny and that the world cannot possibly understand the urgency burning within.

Another reason lies in how Shakespeare endows recklessnesswith rationality, transforming the volatility of young love into something that sounds almost inevitable. Adolescence is often dismissed as impulsive, emotional and irrational; yetShakespeare dignifies its wildness by offering a poetic logic to passion. When Juliet muses, 

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.”  

She is not merely defying her family’s feud; she is articulating the mind’s attempt to make sense of overwhelming feelings. In her reasoning, love itself becomes a force beyond labels, tribes, or inherited hatred—a self-justifying truth, like the rose’s fragrance.

Shakespeare thus allows recklessness to masquerade as clarity, giving young passion the philosophical defence it otherwise lacks. The audience, hearing such lines, accepts the lovers’ hurried devotion not as folly but as a kind of intuitive wisdom. We choose enchantment over caution because Shakespeare makes the illusion feel like the more profoundtruth.

This is why the story adapts so easily across cultures. In India, it becomes the tale of lovers divided by caste or community; in America, by race or class; in the Middle East, by tribe; in Japan, by tradition; in Europe, by politics or religion. The lovers become universal avatars of forbidden desire. Every society discovers its own feud within the Capulet–Montague hostility. Shakespeare’s poetry becomes the vessel into which each culture pours its own history, wounds and longings.

 In the end, the world does not remember that they died; it remembers that they loved. And that is the alchemy of the balcony: the moment when two ordinary lives rose into myth, proving that even in a universe of chaos, a single instant of pure feeling can become eternal. Shakespeare’s play closes with the Prince’s grave, a chastening reminder—

“For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.” (Act 5, Scene 3) 

Yet even in that sorrow, the world chooses the radiance that came before it, for tragedy is merely the residue, while love is the distilled spirit that rises. And thus the alchemy is complete: from the ferment of violence and folly emerges one pure, enduring vapour—the balcony’s eternal light.

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 Ulisubisya 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.