on my flight to san francisco i sat next to a 78 year old man.
travelling alone. no wife, no children. flying out for a parkinson's research test.
he told me his wife passed away last year. but before she died, someone else had volunteered for the research program. that person's contribution led to a treatment that gave him five extra years with his wife.
five years he wasn't supposed to have.
now he was doing the same thing. giving himself to the research so someone else might get five more years too.
he said it like it was obvious. like there was no other option.
i've been thinking about that conversation since i landed.
what it looks like to give yourself fully to something knowing you'll never see the result.
Confidence doesn't come from believing in yourself. It comes from having done the uncomfortable thing enough times that your nervous system stops flagging it as an emergency. Because nothing is actually hard, it's just unfamiliar.
Anger gives stupid people a temporary feeling of power and intelligent people a permanent trail of regret. The rush feels righteous because it relieves pressure, but what it usually reveals is not strength, only loss of command.
“Greatness does not come out of intelligence, it comes from character.
Character is not formed out of smart people: it is formed out of people who have suffered.”
— Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang
Ok, so here is my take on the Fable ban, sovereign AI, Sarvam, etc.
The event is interesting as it has implications from many perspectives.
For AI users, it is clear that you should not confuse access with ownership, or adoption itself as advantage. And if the most significant tech differentiator you are leveraging has external control loops, then you have to accept you are vulnerable.
For AI talent, it is now a precedent that you would be *seen* aligning to national interests more than company interests. And even if its just a whim for now, this trend will be hard to reverse as the world gets more automated…
For AI labs, their offerings will be stratified - general purpose AI would be available as utility, but frontier AI would be gated. This is a fantastic business model for labs - *democratized* AI sucks in all the data liquidity of the world which is locked in higher margin frontier offerings.
I think for the world to be a better place, all three of the above are bad vectors. We need to have more countries and companies owning their own destinies. And in the post AI world, that means being able to use and improve AI systems within their own perimeters - what one may call Sovereign AI.
At Sarvam, Sovereign AI in India was the founding thesis a couple of years back, and continues to remain the core operating principle. From our vantage point, it is super clear that India will build, leverage, and create massive business value and societal impact with sovereign AI. The following is precisely how we at Sarvam are contributing to make that happen.
Laughter is anti-inflammatory. Crying is regulating. Hugging is immunoprotective. Singing is vagal toning. Dancing is neurogenic.
Joy is a biological necessity.
Arnold Schwarzenegger's rule on complaining:
“No complaining about a situation unless you're prepared to do something to make it better. If you see a problem and you don't come to the table with a potential solution, I don't want to hear your whining about how bad it is. It couldn't be that bad if it hasn't motivated you to try to fix it.”
Ramana Maharshi said to me, "The only spiritual life you need is not to react." To be calm is the greatest asset in the world. When you are perfectly calm, time stops. There is no time, karma stops, samskaras stop. Everything becomes null and void.
Robert Adams
If bad luck was a person, It was Krishna.
Born in a prison cell.
With chains.
Cold walls.
And fear.
The West writes self-help books after one breakup and a weekend depression.
Krishna was born with a death warrant.
His own uncle wanted him dead.
He never drank his mother's milk.
Hours after birth,
his father carried him across a mad river at midnight.
Rain above.
Death behind.
Darkness ahead.
No burning bush.
No sea parting.
No miracle announcing salvation.
No therapist with scented candles.
Just survival.
Born a prince.
Raised a cowherd.
Before he could speak,
they sent Putana.
Then Shakatasura.
Trinavarta.
Kaliya.
One after another.
As if destiny hated him personally.
And he still smiled.
People today collapse over an unfollow.
He lost everything early.
His parents.
His childhood.
His home.
And Radha.
Ah, Radha.
The part Bollywood never understands.
His closest friend Sudama lived in poverty.
Krishna could not protect everyone he loved.
Shishupala insulted him publicly.
Again and again.
Before assembled kings.
Krishna listened calmly.
Then came Jarasandha.
17 invasions.
Mathura burned again and again.
Then came the greatest tragedy.
The Mahabharata.
Krishna tried to stop it.
He went himself.
He sat before Duryodhana.
Pleaded for peace.
Just 5 villages.
Duryodhana refused.
And humanity walked into hell smiling.
18 days later, rivers carried blood.
1.66 billion dead.
Think about that.
An entire civilisation collapsing into dust.
And Krishna carried that silence.
No lamentation carved into scripture.
No prophet demanding heaven explain itself.
Just silence.
Then Gandhari cursed him.
A grieving mother blamed him for everything.
Krishna accepted it.
That is spiritual strength.
Then came the final collapse.
His own clan destroyed itself.
Drunk. Violent. Mad.
The Yadavas killed each other.
His own son died in that chaos.
Krishna watched.
Because some endings cannot be stopped.
Then Dwarka sank.
His city.
His dream.
His life's work.
Gone beneath the waves.
And finally...
The man who was greatest strategist.
The man kings feared.
The man sages worshipped.
Died alone in a forest.
One arrow.
A hunter's mistake.
No throne.
No army.
No grand farewell.
No Resurrection.
Just silence beneath the trees.
And yet...
He is called the complete being.
Not because life was kind.
But because pain never poisoned him.
That is Krishna's greatness.
Not miracles.
Not powers.
Not mythology.
Life gave him suffering.
He gave life wisdom.
Life gave him betrayal.
He gave humanity the Gita.
Life gave him war.
He gave the world detachment.
And in the middle of chaos,
he left us one terrifying truth:
"You control your actions.
Never the outcome."
Krishna did not teach escapism.
He taught endurance.
He did not teach positivity.
He taught responsibility.
He taught how to stand inside hell,
without becoming hell yourself.
That is why he still smiles.
And maybe...
That is why Bharat still survives.
Naval Ravikant: "You're going to die. It's all going to zero. What's there to stress about?"
"Stress is when your mind has two conflicting desires at once. You want to be liked, but you want to do something selfish. You don't want to go to work, but you want to make money. You have two conflicting desires, and that's stress."
Naval explains the difference between stress and anxiety:
"Anxiety is this pervasive, unidentifiable stress where you're stressed out all the time and you're not even sure why. The reason is you have so many unresolved problems that have piled up in your life, you can no longer identify what the problems are. There's this mountain of garbage in your mind. A little bit is poking out the top like an iceberg; that's anxiety. But underneath, there's a lot of unresolved things."
He shares his personal anxiety resolver:
"One big anxiety resolver for me is just ruminating on death. You're going to die. It's all going to zero. You cannot take anything with you. If you can keep that idea in front of you at all times, what's there to stress about?"
Naval reframes what "wasted time" really means:
"What is wasted time? Everything is wasted time in a sense because nothing matters in the ultimate. But in each moment, it's the only thing that matters. So if you're doing something you want to do and you're fully there for it it's not wasted time. If your mind is running away, wishing you were somewhere else, anticipating the future, regretting the past, that's wasted time. That's time you're not present for."
He concludes:
"People get worried about dying and no longer being here. But they don't realize that so much of their life is spent not being here in any case."
The AI ponzi scheme goes like this:
Everyone is generating all these long ass docs and then passing them off for others to read
Then the person receiving is like, wtf this is way too long, and hands that into an AI to read and summarize
Then they are generating a long ass response back
and this cycle goes like that forever. and we call this work now 😅
The token lords watch this from their towers nodding and grinning.
CEOs are quietly realizing the AI replacement plan has a problem.
Two problems, actually.
One: the token costs for running AI agents are now exceeding what they were paying the employees they fired.
Two: when the tokens run out, the AI stops. Just stops. No continuity. No workaround. Just a spinning wheel where your workforce used to be.
You fired humans to save money and bought a subscription that bills you into a corner.
The employees you let go knew what to do when things broke.
The AI just invoices you for the outage.
And then there’s the permission problem nobody wants to talk about.
To do its job, the AI agent needs access. Full access. Your systems, your patents, your contracts, your future plans. Everything you spent years building, handed over to a process that has no loyalty, no discretion, and no skin in the game.
You didn’t hire a replacement.
You gave a stranger with no soul the keys to everything you own.
Enjoy.