Raising Rooted Children in the Age of AI: Why Vedantic Self-Knowledge Matters More Than Ever

Every week, I sit with my two teenage sons and we go through the BhagavadGita together, more than religious instruction for philosophical training. I want them equipped with the deepest Vedantic concepts our civilisation has produced before they fly off the nest for higher studies, because I suspect the world they are flying into will ask them “who are you” with a force and frequency I never faced at their age.

I do not know how AI is going to change everything. What I do know is what I am trying to do with whatever time and capability I have. Build my sons’ arsenal of self-knowledge deep enough that nothing can hollow out their sense of who they are. And in parallel, become more deliberately involved in questions of culture and identity myself, so that this extraordinarily powerful technology gets pointed, even in some small way, toward making the world better for them.

Here is the elephant in the room, named directly. We are at real risk of AI quietly homogenising human culture. A model trained mostly on English-language internet data does not just answer in English. It begins to think in the assumptions, the references, the aesthetic instincts of whoever produced the most text online. Without deliberate correction, “global AI” risks becoming, by sheer statistical gravity, a culturally narrow AI wearing a universal costume. A child anywhere on earth could grow up asking an AI about identity and receive an answer rootless to their own soil.

There is a second risk, say if a teenager can ask an AI about the Gita instead of sitting weekly with a parent who has wrestled with it personally, something in the chain of transmission breaks, even if the algorithm’s answer is technically correct.

And underneath both risks lies the deepest one, that if AI becomes capable enough at everything, will an entire generation simply stop asking who they are at all, because the question stops feeling necessary?

I do not think the answer is rejecting the technology because the tool itself is not the problem. The question is what steers it. There are already real examples of AI pointed in the right direction. The Cherokee Nation partnered with Microsoft to build an AI-powered Cherokee keyboard and text-to-speech tools, now used in tribal schools where fewer than 2,000 fluent speakers remain. Manx, a Celtic language UNESCO had declared extinct, is being taught to children again and now available inside major translation platforms. Meta’s No Language Left Behind project built translation models for over 50 African languages. In each of these cases, the technology became a life raft for the culture to keep speaking in its own voice, to its own children, on its own terms.

My sons will leave home soon enough. I cannot control what AI becomes in the years they are away from home. What I can control is whether they leave carrying a Vedantic arsenal substantial enough to ask better questions than the ones any model hands them by default.

Cultural Clusters: The Missing Link Between Education, Culture, and Economic Development

I learnt a new term last week. Cultural Cluster.

It came up in a conversation with friends far more fluent in the art world than I am, while we were discussing the idea of organising a Conclave on EduCulture. They used the term as part of their regular lexicon, so not formally knowing about it stood out even more. So I did what I usually do. I went and read, and realized that I had never properly defined it for myself, despite having built an entire framework around ideas surrounding this concept.

There are at least three serious definitions floating around. Urban economists define a cultural cluster as a geographic concentration of cultural and creative industries, generating what they call agglomeration benefits, shared labour pools, supply chains, and knowledge spillover between neighbours in the same trade. Think of a ‘film city’ where editors, sound engineers, and writers all live within a few kilometres of each other and informally train one another simply by proximity.

Heritage institutions define it differently. To them, a cultural cluster is a grouping of tangible and intangible heritage assets, monuments, crafts, performance traditions, treated as a single conservation and economic unit rather than scattered, disconnected sites competing for the same tourist’s attention.

Policy bodies define it as a third thing entirely. A deliberately designed zone, government-backed, that fuses production, education, tourism, and retail around a single cultural identity, built on purpose rather than emerging by accident.

Basis these best is to define cultural cluster as a bounded geography where heritage assets, creative production, skill transmission, and economic activity reinforce each other in a closed loop, designed or organic, dense enough that proximity itself becomes the value driver.

To me this is also a description of how EduCulture has to be implemented if it is going to mean anything beyond a LinkedIn post or a classroom discussion. We need a destination where it is lived, practised, and economically sustained. And, travel and tourism become the implementation tool. CulturalClusters become the natural destination tourism organises itself around.

This is where a half-formed idea I have been mulling over suddenly found its proper name. India needs a TravelTech hub. A geography where travel-tech startups, heritage tourism operators, craft economy ventures and aviation infrastructure sit close enough to feed each other the way a cultural cluster’s theory predicts. NewNoida, with a brand-new international airport at its doorstep and an entire investment region being built from scratch, may be the most logical place in the country for exactly that cluster to form.

I am testing this idea out loud, not announcing it as finished. If you know this space, urban planning, travel tech, cultural economy research, I would value your inputs immensely.

From “Kya Banoge?” to “Kya-Kya Banoge?”: Rethinking Education, Skills, and Lifelong Learning

“Bade hokar kya banoge?” (What will you become when you grow up?) Almost every Indian child has been asked this question, framed as a single destination, a final answer, a finish line. I have never asked this to my kids. I ask “kya-kya banoge?” instead. What all. Not a single destination, but continuous, ongoing accumulation of capability.

Between 2021 and 2025, China’s higher education institutions revoked or suspended over 12,000 undergraduate degree programmes while introducing more than 10,200 new ones. China looked at its own degree factory and decided the factory itself needed rebuilding, not just its output.

Germany solved this decades before AI made it urgent. Germany’s dual system of vocational training consists of about 1.2 million apprentices and around 400,000 training companies. In 2021, about 74 percent of all apprentices received an employment contract after completing their training at the same company. A vocational certificate in Germany carries the same social dignity as a university degree. Nobody whispers about the apprentice the way too many Indian families still whisper about the child who chose a trade over a college seat.

India inherited something similar once. The shreni, our ancient guild system, fused craft, livelihood, ethics and community into a single transmission, master to apprentice, skill to character, simultaneously. We severed that thread when we imported a purely degree-based industrial model from elsewhere and forgot to ask whether it fit the soil it landed on.

The paradigm has shifted, and the world has already moved. Education–Skilling–Certification. Not a single credential earned once at twenty-two, but a continuous, layered, lifelong practice of capability mapped against transferable skills, the kind of mapping exercise I have run personally while preparing executive skill-lever frameworks for institutional roles, translating decades of varied experience into language a hiring committee can actually use.

EduCulture‘s argument here is that the shreni model never separated skill from character, and Germany’s dual system never separated classroom from workplace. India’s emerging paradigm has to re-fuse both separations at once, treating continuous skilling as seriously as we once treated a single degree, and treating a craftsperson’s certification with the same dignity as a university gold medal.

Students, stop chasing the single answer to “what will you become.” Start building the portfolio of answers to “what all can you do.” Employers, the candidate who skills continuously will outperform the one who stopped learning the day they graduated. Policymakers, China has shown that the courage to dismantle an outdated credential system is now a competitive necessity, not an academic luxury.

The grammar of “kya-kya” instead of “kya” is small, but the shift in nation-building it points toward is immense.

Why India Needs a Ministry of EduCulture

Why India Needs a Ministry of EduCulture

India has a Ministry of Education with budget this year of ₹1,39,286 crore, and a Ministry of Culture with ₹3,361 crore budget.

Between these two ministries, there is no conversation. One produces degrees and the other preserves monuments. Neither is asking the question that matters most in the AI era: What kind of human being are we producing, and does that human being know who they are?

This is why India needs a Ministry of EduCulture. A full ministry with a mandate, a budget, and a brief that treats culture as education to be lived, not merely heritage to be archived.

Look at what South Korea did. In 2008, after an economic crisis left the country on its knees, it created a Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism with one clear understanding: cultural identity is a strategic industry. For 2026, that ministry’s budget stands at 7.86 trillion won, an 11.2% increase, placing culture, sports and tourism among the most aggressively funded policy areas in the country. The S.Korean government has set a target to grow the K-culture industry to 300 trillion won by 2030. South Korea got BTS because a government decided, twenty-five years ago, that culture was worth serious investment.

India is sitting on a civilisational inheritance infinitely older and richer than K-pop. Its culture budget is a rounding error against its education budget and the result is visible everywhere. There is no need to dry the ink talking about what level of Education is being received by this huge taxpayer spent. But, the biggest worry is that we are producing educated people who have no felt relationship with the story tradition that shaped the civilisation they grew up in. Professionals fluent in frameworks imported from Stanford and McKinsey, unable to articulate why the conversation between Shri Krishn and Arjun remains the most sophisticated piece of leadership literature ever written. The question of who we are as a people, and what our stories are actually for, goes unasked in every classroom.

Solution? Imagine how nicely a Ministry of EduCulture would build the Ramlila as an event management and economic ecosystem, the way Bali built the Kecak. So, the vision of this ministry will be to integrate civilisational fluency into education, so a child finishing school in 2030 knows both how to use AI and what they are here for. These are questions I have been pondering over for a long time, long enough that a part of it even became a book, “Freedom! Let Us Begin the Journey…” an exploration of the inward path that runs beneath all outward skill.

Coming back to Government action, it is true that the NEP spoke of Indian knowledge systems, buts its been actioned merely like a policy paragraph, which is a good beginning at best. A ministry with a mandate and money is a different matter altogether. Tag someone in government who should read this. Or DM me if you are already working for hashtag#EduCulture

Ramayan Beyond Religion: An EduCulture Perspective on Civilisational Heritage

Ramayan Beyond Religion An EduCulture Perspective on Civilisational Heritage

A friend called last night and asked me after my last post — why Ramayan specifically? Are you trying to make this about religion?

Fair question. Here is my answer.

Do you know who wrote the dialogues for B.R. Chopra’s Mahabharat on Doordarshan? The one that stopped the country every Sunday. The one that 100 million people watched without fail.

It was Dr. Rahi Masoom Raza. A Muslim scholar from Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh. A Urdu poet with a doctorate from Aligarh Muslim University.

When people objected and asked why a Muslim was writing a Hindu epic, Dr. Raza’s response was simple and final. “I am the son of the Ganga. Who knows the civilisation and culture of India better than I do?”

And the actor who played Arjun in that same series? Firoz Khan. Born into a Pashtun Muslim family with roots in Peshawar, where I have never been to but have known the name growing up in the town of Sher Shah Suri and crossing GT Road almost on daily basis. Firoz became so completely one with his character that he eventually changed his legal name to Arjun. His own mother started calling him Arjun.

This is the point I am making when I talk about EduCulture.

The Ramayan and the Mahabharat are more of civilisational inheritance tham only some religious property. There is a difference. Religion is about belief. Civilisation is about the shared values, aspirations and imagination that holds a people together, the stories they dream in, the values they reach for when they need language for something important.

Bali is a Hindu island in a Muslim nation and it has built a thriving cultural economy around the Ramayan. Indonesia does not seem to be seeing a contradiction there, we may be creating a fuss out of it on our own. Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Trinidad, Fiji, all of them treated this inheritance as a living thing worth tending, worth performing, worth building institutions around.

The gap in India is an hashtag#EduCulture gap. We stopped asking what our stories are actually for. We reduced them to ritual on one side and controversy on the other, and lost the vast middle ground where Rahi Masoom Raza lived, where Firoz Khan lived, where the Kecak dancers of Bali live every single evening.

An hashtag#EduCultured person does not need to be Hindu to understand the Ramayan. They need to be Indian. Or, as the rest of the world has amply demonstrated, they do not even need to be that.

The story belongs to anyone willing to live by what it teaches.

That is all I am saying.

From Ritual to Living Tradition: The EduCulture Lessons of Ramayan Across the World

From Ritual to Living Tradition The EduCulture Lessons of Ramayan Across the World

Let me ask you a simple question. Rank the following by the quality and scale of their living Ramayan tradition:

1. A city of your choice in India
2. Bali, Indonesia
3. Phnom Penh, Cambodia
4. Vientiane, Laos
5. Trinidad & Tobago
6. Fiji

Most Indians put their city first and then they immediately realize that its not the correct answer.

Bali is covered corner to corner with statues of Shri Ram, Hanumanji, Mata Sita and Jatayu. The Kecak dance retells the Ramayan every single evening as a living cultural act, under open skies, to paying audiences from around the world. Indonesia’s Prambanan Ramayan Ballet is a UNESCO Masterpiece of Intangible Heritage. This is happening in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation. In Trinidad, in a village carved out of old sugarcane land at the edge of the Caribbean Sea, Ramlila has been performed continuously for over a hundred years. In Fiji, every settlement has its own Ramayan Mandali, a tradition going back 130 years.

Now back to your city or village in India, surely we have a Ramlila Maidan where we burn Ravan every October. And then we fold it up and go home.

Where is the event management ecosystem built around this tradition? The design hubs, the hospitality circuits, the curriculum that draws on the Ramayan for leadership and ethics the way Bali built an entire tourism economy around the Kecak? The country where Maharshi Valmiki first gifted this epic, is treating it as a seasonal ritual while the rest of the world turns it into a living civilisational asset.

BTW, this is not a religious question I am asking here, it is an hashtag#EduCulture question.

Also, I am not just pointing at the gap. There is a Ramlila that has been performed without interruption for 65 years, from India, at the world stage occasionally. I want to bring that story back into the conversation it deserves.

If you are building where culture meets economy, where heritage meets education, where hashtag#EduCulture is understood to be right solution for future of our kids, then please connect or point me to someone who cares.

From Anger to Action: Why EduCultured Youth Need Vivek to Lead Change

From Anger to Action EduCultured Youth and the Power of Vivek

Yesterday, a movement that calls itself the COCKROCH JANTA PARTY 🇮🇳 brought hundreds of young people to Jantar Mantar. Cockroach masks, exam guides, chants about education. Real anger, real energy, 20 million Instagram followers made flesh. And then, almost immediately, the conversation shifted because somebody had chosen June 6 as the date for the protest, and June 6 is the anniversary of Operation Blue Star. Within hours, the education minister Dharmendra Pradhan‘s alleged failures were no longer trending. The narrative moved to choice of date, manner of protest, type of slogans and even handling of Delhi heat!

The protest got hijacked by its own oversight and its opponents need not do anything, rather a clarification got circulated by Government of India that no FIR has been registered against protesters.

This is what happens when a generation that is genuinely brilliant at gathering attention has not yet learned the art of channelizing it. The anger at Jantar Mantar was real because the cause, exam irregularities that have cost lakhs of young people a fair shot at their future, was serious and it deserve a full hearing. I myself had to deal with IIT-JEE being cancelled in 1997 which had drained all motivation out of me to study further, just sheer luck that I cleared the re-exam after spending all that time sitting alone at home.

The CJP is a fascinating phenomenon precisely because it proves that Gen Z can mobilise at a scale that older political structures like Indian National Congress or Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) or even Aam Aadmi Party have lost the ability to imagine. Twenty million followers in under five days, Sonam Wangchuk showing up as an honorary cockroach. Even seasoned politicians scrambling to attach themselves to its energy. The gathering power is extraordinary. But power without Vivek is like a well-sharpened sword carried by someone who has not yet decided which direction they are walking. It cuts, but not necessarily what was intended.

Protest, when it is at its best, is a deeply cultural act. The Salt March worked because every detail of it was deliberate, the date, the route, the image of an old man walking, the salt itself as symbol. Gandhiji went beyond just feeling the injustice deeply, as he understood that feeling alone does not move history. The protest had to be a text that the whole country could read, and it was.

An EduCultured youth carries this understanding alongside the anger. The anger is the fuel, Vivek is the steering. My book, Freedom! Let Us Begin the Journey…, explores exactly this terrain, how inner clarity and outward action are not separate questions but one, and what our civilisational inheritance actually has to say to someone trying to live and act consciously in the world today.

EduCultured Youth will Lead the way in AI Era

EduCultured Youth will Lead the way in AI Era

Look at the young person sitting across from you in the next team meeting. Chances are they know how to use five AI tools, can automate a workflow in an afternoon, and have a ChatGPT tab permanently open. And yet, when the actual problem needs a decision, a direction, a point of view rooted in something deeper than a prompt, perhaps they have gone quiet.

This issue is being noticed by many but not talked about openly as yet, and I blame the breakneck pace of changes to deal with by one and all. I dont think we should blame AI here as AI is simply the “loudest” mirror we have ever held up to ourselves. What it reflects, for a whole generation of educated but not cultured youth, is a gap between information and wisdom, between skillset and character, between knowing what to do and understanding why it matters.

The Sanskrit word Vivek means discernment, the ability to separate what is real from what is maya, what is right from what is merely convenient. It is neither taught in engineering colleges, nor is available as a course on Coursera as yet. The ability to differentiate between sat-asat, dharm-adharm slowly grows in a person who has been dealing with real life situations of ambiguity, and looked for references within and in collective experiences of the society presented as Culture.

An EduCultured youth is one who carries both. Educated enough to operate in the AI era, and Cultured enough to lead in it.

Because AI will very efficiently give you ten answers to any question you ask. The one thing it cannot do is decide which question deserves to be asked in the first place. That judgment comes from somewhere the algorithm cannot reach as yet. It comes from a civilisation’s accumulated sense of what a human life is actually for.

This question of Vivek, of how to listen to what is real beneath all the noise, is precisely what I have been focusing on in my own life for a long time. Eventually it became a book, “Freedom! Let Us Begin the Journey” which is an exploration of that inward path, drawing from the Vedantic framework of the PanchaKoshas, the five sheaths through which we either live consciously or simply drift. If the idea of knowing yourself as clearly as you know your productivity tools interests you, the link is in the comments.

India has spent thousands of years asking the harder questions. The epic Mahabharat did not just teach archery to Arjuna, and through him everyone who came after, that the battle outside is always a shadow of the one within and Bhagvad Gita guides us through this journey. The youth who will lead in the AI era will be technically capable, yes. But also rooted. Grounded in something larger than their last performance review or their Social Media Posts’ likes and followers count.

The question worth pondering is this: are we raising young people who know only how to use AI, or young people who also know why they are here?