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.

I have been fascinated by Shakespeare, as most of those fancy English phrases and words that enchanted me were created by this one man who lived in England during 1564–1616. I was always intrigued by how one individual could produce such a great body of work that continues to charm billions of English-speaking people over centuries. Then, a biography of Shakespeare, written by Peter Ackroyd (b. 1949), landed in my hands. It was such a wonderfully written book that for nearly a month, I remained under its spell, and this blog is my way of sharing that wonderful feeling.

What bewilders me about Shakespeare is not just the scale of his creativity—38 plays, 154 sonnets and two long narrative poems—but the breadth of human experience he was able to hold in his words. Peter Ackroyd’s biography reveals a man shaped by ordinary circumstances: born to a glove-maker, married young, father to three children, losing his only son at eleven, living through plagues, fires, political tension and religious unrest. Yet, from such turbulence, emerged a voice that could articulate joy and jealousy, ambition and doubt, love and rage, and grief and transcendence.

Ackroyd portrays not a divine genius floating above life, but an actor, businessman and working dramatist who navigated the vibrant, noisy streets of London. He walked among butchers and beggars, ship captains and silk merchants, lovers and lawbreakers. What he saw, he wrote. What he heard, he transformed. His theatre, The Globe, was literally circular—a metaphor for the human experience he shaped into drama.

Shakespeare is said to have created more than 1,700 new words, enriching the English language. These include popular words like majestic, lonely, eventful, radiance, and amazement, and phrases like break the ice, own flesh and blood, forever and a day, love is blind, wear my heart upon my sleeve, and the world is my oyster. To think that everyday speech today is sprinkled with the words he coined is almost haunting. It reminds us that behind every word is a mind that dared to express the unspeakable. The words Shakespeare teaches are not just tools; they are carriers of unexpressed feelings and emotions.

Ackroyd beautifully draws out how Shakespeare understood that ‘Drama is the language of the soul.’ His plays were not mere stories but cathartic journeys. The Greeks called it catharsis—the purging of emotions to restore inner balance. Shakespeare perfected it. Hamlet gives words to grief and existential despair. Othello shows how jealousy can consume dignity. King Lear explores old age, betrayal, and the tragedy of dignity stripped away. Macbeth is ambition turned into horror. The Tempest becomes forgiveness from the depths of pain. Even his comedies—As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Twelfth Night—are not frivolous. Beneath the laughter lie longing, mistaken identity, the search for love and the desire for belonging. Every laugh comes with a tear. Every tragedy offers a glimpse of redemption.

We often imagine Shakespeare writing in solitude. But he was as much an actor as a playwright; his words were meant to be lived on stage. Shakespeare wrote not just to be read, but to be performed. He crafted his lines to suit the natural rhythms of spoken language and the physical movements of actors, aiming to elicit strong emotional reactions from the audience.

When we read King Henry V saying, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers”, we hear a call to courage spoken before battle. When we read Venus saying to Adonis, “Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear”, we feel the seduction of language itself. When we encounter Queen Margaret telling Richard, the defeated Duke of York, “Lord, how art thou changed”, we face the fall of pride and the fragility of power. His drama becomes the mirror in which we now recognise ourselves.

It is not without reason that Shakespeare is studied today not just by literature students but also by psychologists, business leaders, spiritual thinkers and actors. He did not merely reflect life—he reframed it so we could see ourselves better. In a world moving fast, where emotional suppression equals strength, Shakespeare writes:

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.

    (Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 3)

Peter Ackroyd reminds us that Shakespeare lived through multiple waves of plague. Theatres would close, silence would fall, and people would turn inward. Yet, when the stage reopened, crowds gathered in the thousands. Why? Because theatre allowed them to feel again, to release their silently carried sorrow. The greatest gift an artist, author, or dramatist offers is emotional ventilation—a safe space to cry without trauma, to laugh without danger, to confront fear without consequence. When people stop feeling, they stop healing.

In our age of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and drowning distractions, we still gather to watch a play, read a book, or recite a poem. Why? Because deep within, we are Shakespearean—we want to feel, to relate, to recognise our inner tensions reflected back to us. Ackroyd shows that Shakespeare did not escape life; he entered it more fully. Each character, each soliloquy, was his way of untangling human conflict.

“To be, or not to be…” (Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1) is not a philosophical line. It is a cry from someone on the edge of despair. Who does not feel so at some stage of one’s life? No wonder actors feel possessed when performing Shakespeare’s roles. No wonder audiences don’t just watch—they internalise. The evil of Langda Tyagi, in the film Omkara, the Hindi version of Iago in Othello, is felt.

At a time when content is instant, and attention is fleeting, Shakespeare reminds us that depth matters more than speed. He teaches that the most fragile experiences, like love, guilt, longing, beauty, and sorrow, are the most powerful forces shaping human life. AI may simulate dialogue, but cannot yet simulate the tremor of Hamlet’s voice before he speaks. Technology may scale emotion, but only theatre cultivates the courage to face it.

Ackroyd concludes that around 1611, Shakespeare quietly returned to Stratford, retiring from the thunder of applause into domestic silence. He died five years later, not in glory but in stillness. Yet the world continues to speak his words even today. There is something profoundly humbling about this. Greatness does not always end in celebration; sometimes it ends in contemplation. Just as actors exit the stage while the world goes on, Shakespeare left life, having already entered eternity. He writes in his last play:

We are such stuff as dreams are made on…

(The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1)

As I enter my seventies, I spend much of my time at home due to health reasons and find myself increasingly in the quiet company of books and thoughts. In this stillness, reading and writing—like this very blog—have become my companions and pathways to inner journeys. Shakespeare, in particular, has emerged not merely as an author from a distant era but as a fellow traveller of consciousness, a timeless soul who speaks to me across centuries. In moments of solitude, his words make me smile, stir my wonder, and gently remind me that consciousness is one—unbroken, interconnected and eternal. Though my physical world may have narrowed, my inner world expands endlessly through these conversations with his works. In these moments, I realise that not only does Shakespeare live on through his writing—he also lives quietly within me, keeping alive the joy, the curiosity and the eternal internal theatre of the human spirit.

In an era where our minds scroll faster than our hearts can feel, where information pours in like a relentless monsoon yet wisdom dries up like parched earth—the Bhagavad Gita stands not as an ancient relic, but as a future-ready operating system for the human spirit.

Today, we wrestle with dilemmas Krishna did not name, but fully understood:
overstimulation, over-choice, over-thinking, under-feeling and under-resting. We live in a world of: Cognitive surplus—more knowledge than insight; Consumption deluge—more possession than satisfaction; and Speed addiction—more acceleration than arrival. Our tools advance, yet our inner software lags.

We download apps but do not decipher meaning. We upgrade devices but not desires. We collect data yet lose direction. At this crossroads, Shri Krishna’s voice returns—not from a battlefield of chariots, but from the battlefield of attention and identity. It whispers:

You are not the noise but the awareness behind it.

You are not the device but the operative Intelligence.

Five thousand years ago, Arjuna stood paralysed on the Kurukshetra battlefield. Today, we stand frozen on the battlefield of endless tabs and perpetual notifications. Our crisis is not Kurukshetra—it is Cortex-kshetra, the battlefield of the overwhelmed mind. Arjuna feared external war. We fear internal noise.

The Gita wasn’t spoken in the serenity of an ashram. It emerged amid chaos, confusion, and conflict on a battlefield. So must its wisdom return—not to monks alone but to multitaskers, distracted professionals, restless teenagers, burnt-out entrepreneurs and dreamers fighting invisible battles.

Never in human history have we possessed so much information and yet understood so little of ourselves. We accumulate facts but lose wonder. We collect opinions but lose silence. We chase everywhere yet arrive nowhere.

The Gita pierces this paradox: knowledge without clarity becomes confusion. Confusion without action to dispel it becomes stagnation. Action without purpose becomes entropy—a futile waste of life.

We consume food beyond hunger, hold opinions beyond curiosity, stare at screens past sanity and carry emotions beyond capacity. The world tells us, “Get more.” The Gita guides us to ‘Be more.’ Minimalism isn’t modern—it is eternal Vedanta. Real abundance isn’t owning everything—it is needing little and loving deeply.

Modern life worships speed: fast food, fast news, fast progress, fast entertainment, fast outrage. But speed without direction is anxiety. The Gita teaches us to “see action in inaction and inaction in action” (4.18). The wise move is to move fastest by standing still. Stillness is not inactivity—it is frictionless movement of the mind.

Some imagine the Gita belongs to a distant past—but to me it belongs most to a distracted future. Its message is not religious—it is self-engineering: Sort out your consciousness. Update your emotional intelligence. Perform from purpose, not panic. Act without attachment—and rest without guilt.

We do not fear death anymore—we fear irrelevance, Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), emptiness and stillness. But the Gita smiles gently and asks: If you lose YOURSELF, what will you do with the whole world? The world has changed. Human nature has not. The Gita remains the bridge between motion and meaning, between speed and stillness, between updates and awakening.

We don’t need more GB of storage—we need more self-knowledge. We don’t need 6G downloads—we need deeper uploads to the soul. And in that surrender, in that clarity, we earn our true upgrade—the final freedom from all reboots, called Paramam Gatim in the Gita (8.21).

My personal favourite in the Gita is the eighth shloka of the fifteenth chapter: “Just as the wind carries fragrances from their source, the embodied soul, leaving one body and entering another, carries the mind and senses (and subtle impressions) with it.” Let a modern rendering of this shloka inspire a generation wired to the world but disconnected within:

Think of the body

As a phone you borrow for a while –

Shiny, temporary,

Bound to scratch, slow and shut down.

When its time is up,

The SIM card – the subtle body –

Slides out quietly,

Carrying contacts of memory,

Messages of experiences,

Photos of impressions,

Apps of habit,

And the unclosed tabs of desire.

It finds another device

To reboot the unfinished journey.

The number changes, the casing changes,

But the data – tendencies, fears, loves and impulses –

Migrates with the SIM.

So, update wisely.

Clear junk.

Upload compassion.

Backup peace.

Delete grudges.

Life is never lost- it just transforms.

You are neither the device,

Nor the apps –

You are the core intelligence

Running beneath the screen of life.

When this system reaches shutdown,

You do not perish –

You simply boot into another OS.

An upgraded one –

From survival to creativity,

From instinct to insight,

From confusion to clarity.

Not a repeat version,

Still looping through old bugs.

The wisest users know:

The ultimate upgrade

Is merging back into the Infinite Source code

Where no reboot is ever needed again.

Paramam Gatim – the Supreme destination.

Understand your body as a temporary device—a sophisticated instrument you inhabit for a brief moment—while your true Self is like a SIM card silently carrying the stored memories, tendencies, desires and experiences that define your journey across lifetimes. Remember that death is not an end but a transfer, a reboot into another operating system shaped by the karma and consciousness you cultivate today. Clear inner clutter, install virtues, and evolve beyond repeating patterns toward the ultimate upgrade—a return to the Infinite Source, where consciousness rests free from cycles of birth and reboot, attaining the Supreme state the Gita calls Paramam Gatim and Buddha called Nirvana.

I watched Christopher Nolan’s Inception when it was released in 2010, back when going to the theatre still felt like an event. The film is centred around the idea of entering and manipulating dreams, slipping into layers of the mind as easily as walking through doors. In that world, the only reliable test for what is real is a small spinning top: it falls in reality, but in a dream, it spins endlessly. When the film ended, I stayed in my seat as the credits faded and the screen turned dark. I didn’t fully understand what I had just seen, yet it held me completely. It felt as if I, too, was left hanging between two worlds, just like the final top that wobbles but never reveals the truth.

It was in such a moment—breath held between realities—that I heard a whisper. Not the soft murmur of Hollywood, but the calm voice of Vasishtha Muni, guiding the young prince Rama in a world just as uncertain, though untouched by our screens and cities.

Two worlds, separated by time, touched in that hush after the credits. What Nolan filmed with architecture and mirrors, Vasishtha painted with words and silence. Both asked us the question we fear the most—What if everything we call real is but a dream of the mind? And suddenly, cinema dissolves, and the scripture breathes.

Imagine a thin sheet of light hanging in the air. Then another settles over it, and then another, until hundreds of soft, see-through layers glow gently on top of each other. Try, if you can, to tell which veil came first, and which followed; which is the original and which is only a reflection. Impossible? That is how the world feels in Inception—layers folding into layers, dreams rippling beneath deeper dreams, and reality slipping like silk between the fingers.

We, too, grew up in such dreams. Our childhood longings mingle with another’s yearnings; together, they weave a new fabric of shared hopes, fears and compromises. Two adults marry, harbouring their individual dreams. When children arrive, they bring their own embryonic worlds to manifest. As they grow, love, and choose partners, more dreams enter the tapestry—strange, beautiful, conflicting. Soon, the house is full of overlapping universes: ambitions brushing against disappointments, laughter spilling over silence, tenderness meeting fatigue.

And somewhere in that swirl, you pause, bewildered. You watch people adjust, resist, laugh, quarrel, surrender, and rise again—actors in a play they did not write, yet feel compelled to perform. You begin to doubt what is real. Was that happiness or habit? Anger or exhaustion? Was that a promise or simply a line rehearsed too often to question?

Veil after veil. Dream upon dream. And at the heart of it all, a quiet whisper: What is the waking world, and when did I fall asleep? And is this not what Vasishtha Muni said to young prince Rama?

“This world is as real as the dream you see every night.” (Yoga Vasishtha 7.168.20).

A gentle sentence, terrifying in its simplicity. The words sound so true when I, now 70 years old, sit on the ledge of memory, unable to tell whether I stand on solid ground or the edge of a subconscious abyss.

In the film Inception, we see cities rise and collapse, time stretch, and staircases loop — the mind building worlds as effortlessly as a child breathes. Valmiki captured this much earlier in the Yoga Vasishtha, which he wrote after the Ramayana: “Every thought shapes a universe” (4.4.15). Queen Chudala becomes a young monk boy, Kumbha, to test her husband, Shikhidkwaja; Lila meets another Lila from a future life. King Gadhi turns into a Chandala. Four clones of Vipaschit spring up, each living differently and transmigrating into different loops. Every emotion seeds a reality. It is not merely a filmic trick; it is metaphysics with a pulse.

But before you call it a puppet show, there is no puppeteer here. Like Cobb in the film, we are followed not by policemen but by our past—our guilt crystallised into the exquisite and dangerous form of Mal, Cobb’s wife. She enters every dream, slicing the fabric of illusion, not to set him free, but to drown him deeper in his own remorse. We all live the scripts we ourselves write, but wonder when they roll out as our fate. How brilliantly the Yoga Vasishtha created the scene in the palace of Ayodhya: a teenage Rama, back from a pilgrimage, haunted by the question: What is the point of this world? Why do we suffer, love, lose, wage war, dream, and despair?

Memory binds the human mind. A prince and a thief, a royal and a fugitive, a billionaire and a pauper—all sit captive in the chambers of their own minds. Vasishtha Muni murmurs, like a wind through leaves, “The impure and confused mind, haunted by the ghost of multiplicity, creates a world of duality and illusion” (6.23.21). And so, Nolan shows us a man sinking in his subconscious oceans; Vasishtha shows us a world sunk in illusion’s tide. Both speak not merely to kings and dream-thieves, but to each of us whose heart has tripped over a memory and never recovered its footing.

In Inception, Ariadne, a collaborator of Cobb, draws bridges, buildings and labyrinths. In the Yoga Vasishtha, the architect is the mind itself. Not a team of designers, but a single pulse of consciousness shapes mountains, raises civilisations, and sets galaxies turning like a dancer’s lehnga. None is more real than the appearance and dispersion of ripples in a pond right before one’s eyes. Both works teach us—softly, dangerously—that we are builders, and weavers of our own dreams.

Cobb carries his totem—a tiny spinning top, trembling with truth. If it falls, he is awake—safe. If it spins forever, he is living in a dream. But what of us, who carry no such delicate instrument? What totem do we place on our tables when the morning news feels theatrical and our own thoughts echo louder than the world outside?

Vasishtha Muni offers not a spinning object, but a still awareness. The witness. That which sees both waking and dream, and remains untouched. One looks outward—a top trembling on wood. The other looks inward—consciousness watching itself. In the end, even Cobb’s totem betrays him, as all external anchors must. But the witness never falters, because it is not in the scene. It is the silent observer behind it.

Long before modern psychology sketched the first map of the psyche, before Freud named the unconscious or William James classified the flow of thought, an ancient Indian text sat in quiet majesty, speaking of the mind with a precision and daring unmatched even today. In the Yoga Vasishtha, thought is not merely a function of brain matter; it is the sovereign architect of reality. Consciousness is not a by-product—it is the field in which worlds rise and fall like ripples in a boundless lake.

Centuries before science coined terms like cognitive bias, mental conditioning, neuroplasticity and simulation, the sages of India had already walked those inner corridors. They observed, not with instruments, but with piercing stillness and disciplined awareness. They asked: What is perception? How does desire distort cognition? How does memory fabricate identity? What is the root of suffering? What is the nature of reality when the mind ceases? And they answered not in riddles, but with astonishing psychological clarity.

“The mind is nothing but a field of feelings.” (Yoga Vasishtha 3.96.1)

The next time you dream, pause and wonder: what if a dream is not a casual pastime gifted by sleep? Seek a faint glimmer of awareness inside the dream. What if the dream is not something you watch, but something that watches you? What if it is showing you a mirror, asking you to notice how your own actions and habits shape the flow of your mind, turning small vibrations into situations, emotions, and even destiny?

This was my intention in writing Yoga Vasishtha: The Original Thesis on Mind — to free this timeless science from the confines of Sanskrit verse and place it gently, yet urgently, in the hands of young minds searching for clarity in our bewildering age.

When I say there are no colours in reality—only electromagnetic frequencies your brain translates into colour—it can feel unsettling. We are enchanted by this vivid palette, yet it is a construct, a sensory illusion. So too with the world and the cosmos: they exist only in the seeing and in the sensing. When the eyes finally close, that private universe dissolves. The credits roll; the screen goes blank; and the theatre empties. At that point, what does it matter how brilliant or terrible the film once seemed?

When Hari Atkuri visited me with his niece, Krishna, I felt an immediate shift in the air—as if a gentle breeze had entered the room carrying the fragrance of an unseen, far-off garden. Warm, curious, and quietly luminous, their presence brought a rare ease, the kind that arrives only when good intent and pure purpose walk in together. Hari, who is based in Minneapolis, USA, leads ZeGlass as its CEO and is the visionary Founder of SmartGlass Labs. I met him through my long-time friend James Lupino—another bridge across continents woven by trust and shared aspirations.

It did not take long before we started talking about glass, which is everywhere and as old as the industry itself. There is something poetic about glass — a material born from sand and fire, clear as thought and as fragile as a breath on a winter pane. For centuries, it has stood quietly at the edges of human life—framing mornings, filtering sunlight, watching the world without speaking back. Houses, towers, hospitals, schools—all with window-eyes wide open, holding the world in silent reflection.

Yet now, a new intelligence stirs behind the silent transparency. Something gentle, almost shy, but enormously powerful. We are entering a time when glass will not merely let the light through, but also understand it, sense it, shape it and also block it, if needed. And in doing so, shape us—our comfort, our energy, our lives. This is the dawning age of intelligent glasses —the popular term for “augmented reality (AR) smart glasses,” “AI glasses,” or “head-mounted displays (HMDs)” —where windows become thinking membranes, and buildings begin to breathe, feel, and act. The wide eyes of Krishna, pursuing a degree in AI, testified to this industry-wide revolution in glass called Fenestration, which shapes the future of windows and openings.

Imagine your room on a hot afternoon. Today, the sun climbs and pours heat into your walls without hesitation. Curtains are dragged across, air-conditioners hum and whine, and electricity flows like water down a drain. But tomorrow, the glass will notice the rising heat. It will darken itself softly, like a thoughtful eyelid half-closing against glare. Light will be filtered, heat softened, and your room will remain cool without raising a finger—or a degree.

In a world racing toward energy hunger, this means life. For glass occupies much of our buildings; it is the skin of our modern cities. If this skin begins to think—begins to regulate heat, trap light, and even convert solar energy into electricity, like a quiet battery—then the city becomes not a consumer, but a producer. A living organism rather than a steel skeleton.

Why Glass? Why Now?

Sand—the simplest of things—is being reimagined. Glass is renewable, recyclable, modest and abundant. It does not need to be manufactured into complexity; it already surrounds us. All it requires is intelligence—a whisper of chemistry, a thread of nanotechnology, a breath of AI—and it transforms.

Soon, our windows will not only let us watch the world; they will also help preserve it. They will know when to cool, when to brighten, when to save power and when to release it.

Glass will become a climate shield, reducing the burden on air conditioning that today consumes global electricity. It will become a gentle battery, storing sunlight in invisible layers. It will become a mindful companion, modulating spaces so we feel calmer, sleep better and work with clarity. This is not mysticism; it is material science meeting imagination.

A PhD in Physics from the Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University and a die-hard innovator, Hari told me that the future of glass is not arriving with a rattle—it is gathering softly, like dew: electrochromic windows that tint themselves like moods, adjusting to light; thermochromic glass that responds to heat like skin sensing warmth; perovskite solar windows, almost transparent, that capture sunlight and convert it into power; quantum-dot films that draw energy even from cloudy skies and indoor light; all-glass batteries, storing energy inside the very surface meant only to shine; transparent displays, where windows turn into gentle screens when needed; sensor-woven panes, reading the air, the presence of people and the rhythm of the day. What was once a dull surface becomes a sensory organ of architecture—like a tree’s leaves tuned to the seasons.

Walk into a room, not as a stranger but as someone expected. The glass notices you. It adjusts the light, the tint, the warmth—softly. It senses that the sunlight is strong, so it protects. It knows evening is approaching, so it shifts toward warmer tones to relax the mind and prepare you for rest. The building is no longer an object. It is a companion—quiet, alert, caring. The harshness of machines gives way to a gentler intelligence. Light is no longer an intruder but a conversation. And somewhere, behind it all, a simple truth emerges—nature always knew how to balance light. We are merely learning to listen.

Listening to Hari, I could sense the ushering in of a new philosophy of space—the evolution of smart glass technology suggests a significant shift in spatial design. Walls that once only separated now connect. Every window becomes a subtle participant in life—harvesting energy, sensing moods, protecting comfort and weaving daylight like fine silk through space.

In India, where the heat weighs heavily in the afternoons, this evolution carries profound economic significance. Every smart sheet of glass becomes a climate worker, reducing energy loads, softening the heat, making cities habitable without punishing the Earth. The workplace brightens the mind; the hospital calms healing hearts; the school shields young eyes; the home becomes a tender partner in well-being.

I asked Hari whether he thought the Silicon Age was morphing into the Silica Age. He said, in an indomitable spirit, “We may one day look back and say: silicon made us think, but glass made us feel.” Silicon, born from sand, powered the digital revolution. Now silica, also born from sand, will power the intelligent Earth revolution. Not through dominance, but through harmony. Not through force, but through light.

Standing before my French-style full window this morning, feeling the first rays of the sun, I thought of how simple this material has been—quiet, unassuming, endlessly transparent. Now imagine that same glass thinking with you. Guarding you. Producing energy as you sip tea. Filtering light so your eyes soften, your breath slows, your mind sharpens. In that moment, the boundary between inside and outside fades. Technology stops being a device and becomes an environment.

The next industrial revolution may not roar; it may shimmer. It may arrive not as a factory, but as a windowpane. Quiet, humble, filled with possibility. Glass, once the silent witness to human life, is ready to become its quiet guardian. And as dawn spreads tomorrow, take a moment to look at your window—not as glass, but as a doorway to the intelligent light that is coming. A future that is not just visible but luminous, alive, and aware.

The future, then, is not steel or silicon or algorithms shouting under fluorescent lights, but sunlight meeting intelligence on a clear surface—glass that thinks, matter woven with meaning. It is a window that does not merely open to the world but opens the world anew. In this spirit, I asked Hari whether he would return to India one day to lead a Silica Revolution here, helping a land of sages, silicon, and sunlight become the capital of intelligent materials. He did not answer at once; the question hung in the air, like a seed waiting for the right season. But his niece’s eyes lit up, bright with wonder and quiet certainty. In that young gaze was a promise stronger than any spoken reply. Young Indians are rising—curious, confident, rooted yet restless. They will not only inherit the New India; they will build it.