In every civilisation, there are two measures of success. One is public and noisy—titles, awards, positions, headlines, and the temporary glow of importance. The other is almost invisible: the quality of a human being. History remembers the first for a moment and the second forever. The tragedy of modern life is that we have learned to celebrate achievers and forgotten how to recognise gentlemen.

Worldly success has a remarkably brief half-life. Today’s titan becomes tomorrow’s emeritus, gracefully presiding over empty ceremonies, applauded by people who no longer rely on him. His power has vanished; only his manners remain—if he ever had any. Yet manners, ethics and inner stature are exactly what determine whether a person’s life develops into dignity or withers into bitterness.

Hollywood once tried to explain this distinction in its own way. The 1982 film, An Officer and a Gentleman, tells the story of a man who earns his stripes not through privilege but through discipline, loyalty and inner transformation. The title itself suggests something profound: that rank alone does not make one worthy—character does. In real life, however, such gentlemen are not forged on parade grounds but in the quiet spaces where no one is watching.

I learned this not from philosophers but from a scientist.

My personal journey unfolded under the long, blessed shadow of Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. For thirty-three years, I followed that rare blend of visionary and ascetic, learning how greatness can coexist with humility. Under his watchful guidance, I developed from a mechanical engineer into a missile scientist—from working with titanium for high-pressure air bottles, to designing thick-walled magnesium control bays and aluminium-alloy airframes, wings and fins, and ultimately to handling delta-ferrite-free austenitic steels for coronary stents. These were not just material changes; they represented expansions of imagination. Dr. Kalam had a profound passion for civilian spin-offs of defence technology. To him, a missile was never merely a weapon—it was a bridge to healthcare, energy and national dignity.

Through him, I encountered many remarkable minds. Yet among them all, one distinguished himself—not because he was louder, but because he was quieter. That man is Dr. Chandrasekhar Srivari.

We often assume that great scientists must be socially distant, even emotionally detached. Their minds are so immersed in abstractions that ordinary human gestures seem trivial. Like deep-sea divers, they operate below the waves, unaffected by surface noise. I expected Dr. Chandrasekhar to be like that—brilliant but removed, organised like elements in a periodic table.

Instead, the first thing he did was walk to a small fridge in his office and fetch me a bottle of water himself when I visited him for the first time in his Director’s office at the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology in Hyderabad. He did not ring a bell. He did not summon an assistant. He stood up and served. That simple act changed everything.

In that moment, I realised that I was in the presence of a different species of greatness. Not the kind that feeds on hierarchy, but the kind that dissolves it. The gentleman is not someone who expects service; he is someone who offers it.

As our meetings grew more frequent, I came to recognise the scale of Dr. Chandrasekhar’s scientific work. His approach to organic synthesis—particularly of marine natural products—was distinguished by extraordinary originality. These compounds were not merely academic curiosities; they were potential life-saving solutions for the developing world, addressing diseases like tuberculosis and malaria that continue to afflict the poor long after the rich have found cures.

His development of polyethylene glycol (PEG) as a green solvent was a quiet revolution. PEG is non-toxic, biodegradable, inexpensive, recyclable, and has low vapour pressure. In an era when chemistry is under scrutiny for its ecological footprint, this was a profound contribution. It made high-end synthesis compatible with environmental ethics.

His total synthesis of Eribulin—one of the most complex anticancer drugs ever created—was a tour de force of human intellect. It has immense commercial and medical value. And yet, outside specialist circles, almost no one knows his name. When COVID-19 shook the world, he quietly delivered a crucial adjuvant for Covaxin, contributing to one of India’s proudest scientific responses. Again, no parade followed.

Who recognises the flour-mill worker? Only the chefs are celebrated. The world observes the meal, not the milling process. It applauds the performance, not the preparation. It reveres what is visible, not what is essential. This is where the significance of the gentleman becomes vital.

A gentleman is not defined by applause. He is defined by indifference to it. His self-worth is not tethered to public recognition but to private standards. He does not ask whether he is being noticed; he asks whether he is being useful.

When I once gently asked Dr. Chandrasekhar how he felt about his work not receiving wider acclaim, he smiled—not with resignation, but with freedom. That smile told me everything. He had already transcended the marketplace of vanity. He knew that history’s truest rewards are not medals but meanings.

The gentleman lives in alignment. His actions, values and intellect are not at war with one another. He does not need to shout because he has nothing to prove. He does not hoard power because he does not fear losing it. He does not exploit people because he does not measure life in terms of extraction.

Shakespeare understood this long before modern academia. In King Lear, when the king asks his daughters to declare their love, Goneril and Regan perform eloquently. Cordelia refuses spectacle:

“I cannot heave my heart into my mouth.

I love your Majesty according to my bond; no more nor less.”

In our age of relentless self-promotion, Cordelia’s restraint is revolutionary. Dr. Chandrasekhar Srivari’s life gives that truth a scientific form. In chiral chemistry, two molecules can be mirror images—identical in structure yet opposite in effect: one healing, the other harmful. He lives that lesson. His brilliance is tempered by humility, so that knowledge is transformed into grace.

A scientist and a gentleman—this is the highest calling. In a civilisation of movers and shakers chasing visibility as a form of immortality, Dr. Chandrasekhar remains a gentleman by choice. Science, at its highest, is not merely about discovery; it is about character. A scientist who lies, plagiarises, intimidates, or exploits may produce papers, but he can never produce trust. Dr. Chandrasekhar’s ethics are not added to his intellect; they are embedded in it.

Whenever I meet him, I feel the quiet presence of Dr. Kalam—of that rare fraternity for whom knowledge is never a ladder to climb, but a light to hold for others. In such men, science does not merely advance; it acquires a soul. And in their company, one is reminded that to be a great scientist is admirable, but to be a scientist and a gentleman is a form of grace.

I enjoy reading quite a lot—sometimes as much as ten hours a day, though on average about eight. Reading has become my primary pastime—not as a leisure activity, but as a discipline. I read good books, chosen carefully, ordered online and added to a personal library built slowly and meticulously over the past fifty years. Every book is wrapped in a transparent plastic cover to protect it from dust and decay. I write in the margins, underline passages and affix slips of paper with tape. Books, for me, are not objects to be preserved in pristine condition; they are working instruments. I converse with them.

After publishing thirty-five books, I have decided not to write any more in that form. The inspiration came from Shakespeare, who wrote nothing in his last six years. However, I continue to write blogs—shorter, more flexible, and closer to thought in motion. Since May 2019, these blogs have been curated by Tanya Seth-Reddy. There are now more than 160 of them, each roughly a thousand words, recording observations, reflections, and, most importantly, stories of extraordinary people I have encountered. Sakal Publications published a book titled Spectrum, drawn from 150 of these blogs, that presents both my worldview and my writing style.

According to an AI analysis of my blogs, my writing falls within the stream-of-consciousness tradition pioneered by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. I accept that description with some hesitation, because style is not something one consciously adopts. It emerges from long exposure, absorption and imitation—often unconsciously. On my website, I list ten books that shaped my thinking and explain how each influenced me at a particular stage of life. I neither inherited writing nor was educated in literature, nor learned to write through workshops or manuals. I learned to write by reading.

Among all writers, V. S. Naipaul has influenced me most—his moral seriousness, his clarity and his refusal to sentimentalise. Among living authors, Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize in 2017, has been a profound teacher. Never Let Me Go, and Klara and the Sun confront the future not with spectacle, but with restraint, presenting a quiet humanity staring down an ethically diminished world. Margaret Atwood, especially through her MaddAddam trilogy, is another great teacher. She does not predict the future; she extrapolates from the present. These writers show what it means to think through fiction.

Here, I want to explain precisely what I mean by learning to write by reading, using Oryx and Crake—the first book I read in 2026—as an example.

In Oryx and Crake, Oryx is presented less as an animal than as a sound—a mantra severed from its original referent. The word survives, but its source, the antelope, has faded away. In this detachment lies Atwood’s quiet warning: meanings once rooted in lived reality are now abstracted, commodified, and hollowed out. Oryx’s own life mirrors this condition. She is shaped by forces she neither names nor controls, carried along by systems that preserve surface appearances while draining experience of depth.

Crake, by contrast, takes his name from a marshland bird that feeds in shallow waters, surviving on insects and molluscs. It is a creature adapted to liminal terrain—neither land nor water, neither depth nor stability. Atwood invokes this image deliberately. The world of Oryx and Crake resembles a vast marshland: ethically shallow, ecologically fragile and technologically saturated. In this landscape, technology does not cultivate or sustain; it forages. It feeds on natural resources, on bodies, on attention, and ultimately, on the human mind itself. Together, Oryx and Crake name a present in which words drift free of meaning and intelligence thrives in shallow ground—efficient, adaptive and extractive, yet incapable of reverence or restraint.

Atwood sets her novel around 2050, after a pandemic has wiped out most of humanity. The story is told through a man who survives and lives alone on an island with bioengineered humanoids. Atwood moves skilfully back and forth between the post-apocalyptic present—where the hero struggles to survive—and the pre-apocalyptic past of 2030, reconstructed through memory. This non-linear structure gradually reveals how the world fell apart, creating suspense while allowing the reader to learn inductively, rather than be told.

Atwood’s world-building is vivid and unsettling because it feels familiar. The sterile, high-tech corporate compounds are sharply contrasted with the chaotic and violent ‘pleeblands’, where the poor (plebeians) live. In the ‘Blood and Roses’ game, characters trade human achievements in art and music against histories of war and atrocity, reducing both to points. Civilisation itself becomes a scoreboard.

Memory, for Atwood, is not merely a narrative device but a central theme. The hero’s constant return to the past is both a coping mechanism and a burden. He is deeply flawed—an ‘intimate outsider’ who witnesses the disaster partly through his own complicity. This moral proximity is crucial. The reader identifies with him not because he is heroic, but because he is recognisably human. 

Who is not like this helpless hero archetype of modern times? In our inability to effect change, embedded in our cowardice, we are later haunted by the guilt of a co-conspirator. But when was it ever different? Did not Bhishma watch in silence as Draupadi was subjected to an attempt at disrobing? Did he not lie upon a bed of arrows, delaying his death while reflecting and lamenting? Had he not awaited the auspicious phase of the Sun?

Is Atwood pointing out the same trajectory for the thoughtful people of the world? Atwood insists that she writes speculative fiction, not science fiction. Nothing in Oryx and Crake depends on impossible technology. The question she asks is not ‘can we do this?’, but ‘will we?’ What happens when scientific capability outruns ethical restraint? The novel is a warning, but it is also a compelling story—addictive, unsettling and meticulously constructed.

What I learned most from Oryx and Crake is the power of wordplay. Atwood’s stunning neologisms and puns expose the devaluation of language in a consumer-driven, high-tech world. Brand names do the work of philosophy. ‘NooSkin’ suggests renewal while concealing artificiality. ‘HelthWyzer’ masks corporate manipulation beneath the guise of managerial wisdom. The ‘BlyssPluss’ pill promises pleasure and enhancement while carrying a hidden plague. The secure facility where the new world is created is called ‘Paradice’—a play on paradise and dice—signalling that this supposedly perfect world is built on a reckless gamble.

Reading teaches that writing is not merely a vehicle for story, but a moral instrument. Language does not arrive empty; it carries histories, hierarchies, silences and choices. Ethics are embedded not only in what is said, but also in how patiently, honestly and sparingly it is said. A writer who reads learns that meaning is shaped as much by what comes first and what comes later as by the sentences in between.

Perhaps most powerfully, reading teaches the value of restraint. Consider, for example, Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants. The entire story deals with the dilemma of having an unwanted baby, but the word ’abortion’ is not used. The moral weight of the story lies entirely in the unsaid—in pauses, repetitions and evasions. The couple’s inability to name the problem mirrors their inability to face it honestly. Excess explanation would have weakened the story. 

From such works, a writer learns that excess often betrays insecurity, while restraint signals trust—trust in language, in the reader, and in truth itself. Reading teaches that silence can accuse, simplicity can confer dignity, and structure can disclose what argument struggles to prove. When one reads deeply and attentively over many years, rhythms begin to seep in—along with moral posture, pauses, and an instinct for what must be left unsaid. This is not a shortcut but a discipline that demands time, patience and practice. And then, almost quietly, writing arrives with a revelation: the sentences were already there, waiting to be recognised. Perhaps that is why my future blogs may read less like posts and more like small, self-contained books.

 Please keep reading—and do share your thoughts in the comments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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