Speed, Truth, and the Architecture of Civilisations

In 2020, I was designing NDMS, the pan-India cloud-based news gathering system for Akashvani and Doordarshan. One decision point became central to the entire architecture, “Should machine translation auto-publish news across India’s regional languages, or should every single item pass through a human Information Services Officer first?”

Speed argued for automation. The risk of fake news insertion, rapid propagation across regional languages, and translation errors that could distort meaning in ways no algorithm would catch, argued otherwise. I chose authentication over speed and built NDMS where every news item is manually verified before it reaches a citizen in any of India’s languages.

That was a small decision inside a government system. But the same choice seems central to our entire civilisation, at infinitely larger scale, with infinitely higher stakes.

And here not just Jobs, but lives are at stake. In November 2024, Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old former OpenAI researcher who had gone public with concerns that the company broke copyright law to train its AI, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment. His parents have disavowed the conclusion of authorities and have publicly stated, repeatedly and on record, their belief that their son was killed for what he knew. They have filed a wrongful death lawsuit alleging tampering with surveillance footage and obstruction of the investigation. Sam Altman, when asked, said it looked like a suicide to him.

What I want to name here is the civilisational moment it represents. A whistleblower raised concerns about how a powerful technology company built its product. He died a month later. His own parents do not believe the official story. And the public conversation moved on within weeks, because the technology kept shipping regardless.

The Bhagavad Gita’s sixteenth chapter offers a framework I am developing further in my upcoming work. It describes two inherited natures in every person and every institution. Daivik Sampada, the divine qualities of truthfulness, restraint, and fearlessness in service of what is right. Asurik Sampada, the demonic qualities of hypocrisy, arrogance, and the pursuit of power without conscience. And civilisations, like a person, become whatever nature it consistently chooses under pressure.

A technological civilisation built entirely on Asurik Sampada optimises for speed, scale, and shareholder value, and treats truth, dignity, and human life as variables to be managed around. A technological civilisation built on Daivik Sampada asks a harder, slower question before every deployment. What does this do to a human being’s capacity to trust, to know what is real, to remain safe?

My NDMS decision was small but the principle inside it was not. Choose Daivik Sampada at the architecture level, before the product ships, or inherit Asurik Sampada’s consequences after it does. What does your organisation choose when speed and truth compete for the same deadline?

Why Character Matters More Than Intelligence in the Age of AI

What struck me most when I started living at Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur campus was the sheer density of raw intelligence all around me. One kid was super brilliant in optics, other in probability, 3rd in thermodynamics and so one. Yet, the closest friends became the ones who were kind, compassionate, honest, responsible and aware.

Chanakya, who walked the soil of my home state Bihar more than 2,300 years ago and wrote the Arthashastra, perhaps the most strategically sophisticated political treatise ever produced on this subcontinent, also wrote that a leader without character is the most dangerous creature in any institution. His ideal was the Rajarishi, the philosopher-king, a person in whom intelligence and inner formation were inseparable. Chanakya trained Chandragupta Maurya the man before he built Chandragupta Maurya the emperor.

Today, algorithms have done something remarkable and unsettling at the same time. They have commoditised intelligence. A task that once required a sharp human mind, drafting, analysing, coding, diagnosing, optimising, can now be performed by a machine faster, cheaper, and with fewer errors. So, If what you have to offer is primarily cognitive output, you are now competing with something that never sleeps and processes thousands of data points while you are reading this sentence.

BUT, what the algorithm cannot do is be human. It cannot bring genuine compassion to a conversation. It cannot feel the weight of a decision that affects real lives. It cannot express joy in a way that is entirely its own. It has no Vivek, the Sanskrit word for discernment, the ability to know the right thing to do in a situation the training data never anticipated.

My book Freedom! Let Us Begin the Journey… draws on the Vedantic PanchaKosha framework, the five dimensions of human existence from the physical body to the deepest layer of bliss and being. That framework offers students something no algorithm can replicate: a map of the interior. A language for becoming fully human rather than merely highly functional.

EduCulture says this plainly. Learn the algorithm, absolutely. Master it, use it, deploy it. And then remember that the algorithm is the floor, Humanity is the ceiling. Your kindness, your integrity, your awareness of others, your capacity for joy that is distinctly and irreducibly yours, these are what make you a person rather than a very expensive process.

The friends I kept from IIT Kharagpur are still with me. The ones whose intelligence I admired in 1997 are a memory. The ones whose character I trusted are still a phone call away.

Which one are you building, in yourself and in the students you are shaping?

EduCulture, IKS & NEP 2020: Why Universities Must Teach Self-Awareness

The most important course I did at Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta had nothing to do with Finance, Marketing, Systems or Strategy.

It was called ‘Management of Self in an Organisation”. Prof. Leena Chatterjee taught it for nearly 35 years in the Behavioural Sciences department. She was repeatedly voted Professor of the Year by students. Ask any IIM Calcutta alumnus about most important course and a disproportionate number will name that one. The course asked the one question every other course on campus carefully avoided: who are you, and how do you lead from that place? That course was IKS without being called IKS. It was EduCulture before I had a name for it.

Here is the uncomfortable reality about Indian universities in 2026. Over 8,000 higher education institutions have begun adopting IKS in curricula under NEP 2020. 30+ IKS centres have been established. The policy intent is genuine and the effort is real, yet India’s graduate employability rate is around 50% and more than half our university output struggles to find meaningful work. We are producing degrees faster than we are producing human beings equipped to use them.



The problem lies in the gap between policy and practice, between a curriculum that lists IKS as an elective and an institution that actually transmits civilisational wisdom as lived understanding. Universities in the name of appearing secular have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. They stripped out the inner formation that ancient Indian education placed at its centre.


A student of Takshashila graduated knowing medicine, statecraft, philosophy, and their own mind. Our current university model graduates a student knowing their specialisation and very little else, certainly very little about themselves.


The new role of universities in nation building is producing citizens who know themselves deeply enough to serve something larger than their salary package. Prof LinChat understood this forty years ago and NEP 2020 has now written it into policy. The gap that remains is implementation.


This is where EduCulture enters as a framework for implementation, and where my book Freedom! Let Us Begin the Journey… offers something practical. The Vedantic PanchaKosha framework, five dimensions of human existence from the physical to the blissful, gives universities a structured map for whole-person education. It is ancient, rigorous, and maps cleanly onto everything modern psychology tells us about peak performance, self-awareness, and leadership. It requires zero compromise of academic standards and zero imposition of religious belief.


India is building Viksit Bharat on the foundation of its youth. That foundation requires both technical skill and civilisational grounding. The question every VC in India should be asking: what does my institution do, specifically, to ensure a student leaves knowing who they are?

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

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?