Towards Viksit Bharat: India's tryst with Science and Technology

I met a Googler from a modern land, Who said: “Our Gemini shall rule the age.” A mighty model, trained by every hand, With all the knowledge ever stored on page, It spoke with such a confident command, That humans thought it must be right, But ask it something slightly strange, And watched it confidently invent the site, And on its polished homepage these words appear: “My name is Google, king of AI: Look at my models, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains but hype and flair, The benchmarks fade, the demos die, While users wander through the open air, And ask ChatGPT why Google can’t reply. I don’t know why but starting this article with a modern rendition of the OG poem “Ozymandias” just looked right. All of us grew up with an image of Google which filled our minds with awe and inspiration.

People often ask why I read so many books across totally unrelated genres. The honest answer is that I do not really have a strict preference. If a book promises to teach me a new way to view the world, I will pick it up. One month I am immersed in Colleen Taylor Sen’s Feasts and Fasts , discovering how trade routes and conquests quietly reshaped India’s culinary architecture. Next, I am chasing ancient cryptology across Ashwin Sanghi’s The Krishna Key . Then come psychological thrillers like Alex Michaelides’ The Silent Patient , timeless allegories like Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist , or obscure non-fiction volumes whose titles rarely surface in casual conversation: fiction, history, molecular biology, mythology. The genre never truly mattered. Until one title stopped my scroll entirely: The Singularity Is Near . I copied the product link and forwarded it to my sister with a brief note. Birthdays come and go, but once in a while a book arrives that feels less like casual reading and more like required telemetry.

“High risk, High reward!” They often say. “Ok!” I said, “I want to build an all weather drone company that can serve the Indian army even in tough conditions like those of Siachen. Let’s take the risk!” I skipped my internship season at college and started to read and research relentlessly about How to build drones? What conditions hamper locomotion in Siachen? What exactly are the needs of the Indian army? I contacted some of my professors at IIT Kanpur for their insights and contacted some army veterans to get deeper knowledge about the needs of the army. After 5 months, when most of my friends were happy getting an internship offer from their dream companies, I sat in my room sitting alone with a fool-proof plan to build a drone. “Eureka!” I happily yelled. “Let’s find a partner to work with and this plan should be sufficient to make a working prototype in the next 1 year.” I thought.

It is past midnight in a small flat in Kanpur or a shared room in Gurugram. Someone is typing into their phone. They are not typing a Google search or a WhatsApp message, but a confession, a breakup text, or a message to a difficult boss. The reply arrives in the blink of an eye. It feels warm, patient, and completely non-judgmental. It sounds like a healing therapist, right? But there is something different about this one. This confession does not simply disappear. It gets stored, broken into tokens, and becomes part of the data that improves future AI models. Nobody in San Francisco knows this person’s name. But together, millions of conversations reveal something valuable. They show exactly how a heartbroken twenty-two-year-old in a Tier-2 Indian city talks about grief at one in the morning.

What is common between Avatar and Captain America? One is a cinematic marvel and the other is from the marvel cinematic universe. But other than this, they also have one thing in common. Bioengineering. For most of my life, biotechnology meant one thing: pharmaceuticals. It was sterile labs, ten-year drug discovery cycles, and a pill you swallow when things go wrong. And for decades, that definition was perfectly fine. But the times and my knowledge as a student of bioengineering made this definition obsolete.

Yesterday I watched a 90 minute podcast where Nikhil Kamath talked about The Foundery. I then spent the next 90 minutes wondering why I have so much free time to watch something like that, just to conclude that I could turn it into an article and call the day productive. So Foundery. What initially feels like three kind and generous people with capitalistic success and ample free time coming together to “remove the struggle” from entrepreneurship. Let’s put them under a microscope, shall we?

Every technological revolution in history eventually collides with the same question: can human institutions evolve as fast as human intelligence? Dario Amodei wrote an excellent essay titled Machines of Loving Grace in which he goes on to paint a beautiful world 5-10 years after the powerful AI has been built. He describes a powerful AI as a country of geniuses in a data centre, which is smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields, such as biology, programming, and math. He expects that such an AI will help us speed up research across all the relevant domains by at least 10X, i.e., we can have 100 years of progress in the next 5-10 years after such an AI is built.

December 2022 was the time when work became easy, and ChatGPT first entered our lives. I was in college, and we had just begun exploring the tool. I remembered asking my friend, “Is this available on the Play Store?” (Believe me, it was just an online tool back then). But soon newspapers started talking about a new invention that interacts with you. Experts described it as something fundamentally different and never seen before. Back then, even having the tool complete simple tasks such as writing a story or presenting structured information felt extraordinary.

I was two hours into Interstellar last weekend, the wormhole scene, the one where humanity escapes a dying Earth by slipping through a hole in spacetime punched open by beings who have transcended three dimensions, when it hit me. Not the profundity of the film. Something much more uncomfortable. Bollywood doesn’t make movies like this. And before you reach for the obvious explanations, budget, technical know-how, the right director, let me stop you. We have all of those. S.S. Rajamouli built a mythological epic that grossed over $120 million worldwide on pure spectacle. So, What is the Real Problem? The real problem is imagination. Even if someone...

Yesterday I was trying to stalk my ex’s Insta account. I looked at the recent posts - mostly individual and some with her female friends, whom I already knew. I looked at the account of one of her best friends to get a clue from there. Still, nothing was found. After half an hour, I gave up and went back to my doomscrolling session. I liked a few reels that reverberated with my broken heart and casually gave Zucky my emotional data. While scrolling, I found a few reels liked by her, which said, “Will he ever come back?” I jumped on my bed. This was the sign I was looking for, and the algorithm God provided me with the right data to give her a call in the evening.

India imports everything it cannot live without, from countries it cannot entirely trust, through sea lanes it does not control. Here is what happens next. You remember the LPG crisis, right? For a couple of weeks, LPG cylinders became the most valuable things in the county, every restaurant was using everything except gas to cook meals and memes of LPG shortage flooded instagram. That is not bad luck. That is structural dependency, experienced in a kitchen. Now multiply that feeling by 1.4 billion people, replace the LPG cylinder with oil, semiconductors, antibiotics, and the minerals inside every EV battery and missile guidance system the country is trying to build, and you have a fairly accurate picture of where India’s economy sits in 2026.