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8 issues exploring the ideas, systems, and people reshaping India’s future.

8 issues

Innovation PolicyAugust 15, 2026

Forget Jugaad. Dr. R.A. Mashelkar Has A Better Word For What India Actually Needs.

Zero patents for 39 years, then everything changed — inside the framework India's most decorated scientist calls Affordable Excellence.

Thirty-nine years. Zero US patents. That was the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune, before 1989 — not a single American patent to its name in nearly four decades.

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10 min read

Institution Building9 min read

We Built 1,400 Universities. We Forgot Why.

Fifty-five years across every kind of Indian university there is — on infrastructure, freedom, and what actually makes an institution great.

Last year, I went to Somaiya Vidyavihar University to personally invite Prof. V.N. Rajasekharan Pillai, then Vice-Chancellor, to be Chief Guest at the Padma Vibhushan Dr. Rajagopala Chidambaram Memorial Honour, an occasion close to my heart.

July 27, 2026

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Leadership Development7 min read

Indian schools build great followers. Then call them leaders.

The kid with the loudest voice and the best marks isn't the leader. She's spent 40 years proving it's almost always someone else.

I have a confession. For the past couple of years, visiting schools across India, I played a quiet game with myself: walk into a classroom, scan the room, and ask who here is being built into a leader. The answer was always the same kid — loudest voice, best marks, most visible badge on the blazer. I assumed the adults in the room knew something I didn't. That centuries of schooling had figured this out before I arrived.

July 6, 2026

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Institution Building6 min read

India wants to build 50 world-class universities by 2047. He built one, with NO MONEY, NO RANKING AND NO DEADLINE.

The institution that taught India to build industry.

I sat down with Professor M.M. Sharma, the man who ran UDCT in Mumbai, the place that basically gave India its chemical industry. I walked in with my questions ready. I walked out re-thinking all of them.

June 19, 2026

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Student Wellbeing6 min read

Does your child want to come to school tomorrow?

Most school founders track board results, JEE numbers, trophies, and fee collection. Those things matter. But they are the result of something deeper.

The thing that drives all of them? A child who wakes up and actually wants to go to school. A child who feels safe, curious, and like themselves when they're there. That one feeling — hard to measure, easy to sense — predicts almost everything else.

May 28, 2026

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Admissions Strategy7 min read

You're probably mis-selling CP. Here's the fix.

The IB Career-related Programme isn't the consolation prize. Positioning it that way is the single most expensive mistake your admissions team makes.

Walk into almost any IB school's admissions conversation and ask how CP gets introduced to a family. Nine times out of ten, you'll hear something like: "It's similar to the DP, but more practical — a good fit if the full DP feels too intense." Translation for the parent: your child isn't DP material.

May 26, 2026

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School Leadership8 min read

You built a great school. You forgot to build what comes after you.

India's school succession crisis isn't coming. For hundreds of founders, it's already here — and most won't see it until it's too late.

The single biggest crisis in Indian school education right now isn't curriculum or fees. It isn't even teacher shortage — though that's real. It's succession. Brilliant principals who built institutions from the ground up are retiring. And in most schools, there is no second layer of leadership ready to take over. Not because it wasn't possible. Because building that layer felt, gradually, like giving away control.

May 25, 2026

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Education & Leadership8 min read

Your school has a ₹8 crore lobby and a ₹8 lakh teacher.

Guess which one is leaving.

Every year, hundreds of schools across India post job listings for teachers they should never have lost. The positions opened because a competitor called with a better offer, because a new principal arrived and made a long-serving teacher feel like a new hire, because a policy got implemented overnight without so much as a conversation with the people who would have to execute it. The school posts the listing, runs the interviews, hires someone, spends months training them, and then does the whole thing again in eighteen months when that person leaves too.

May 19, 2026

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Every conversation.Every story.

Forget Jugaad. Dr. R.A. Mashelkar Has A Better Word For What India Actually Needs.

We Built 1,400 Universities. We Forgot Why.

Indian schools build great followers. Then call them leaders.

India wants to build 50 world-class universities by 2047. He built one, with NO MONEY, NO RANKING AND NO DEADLINE.

Does your child want to come to school tomorrow?

You're probably mis-selling CP. Here's the fix.

You built a great school. You forgot to build what comes after you.

Your school has a ₹8 crore lobby and a ₹8 lakh teacher.

Don’t miss the next conversation.

Every conversation.
Every story.