Essays
Writing
Essays on artificial intelligence, learning by inventing, building products, entrepreneurship and ideas that challenge conventional thinking.
Education and Careers
The Stars Are Closer Than You Think
When I was in class 11th in a tiny village in UP, I wrote a letter to H. C. Verma at IIT Kanpur with no hope of a reply. He wrote back. That moment changed me forever.
Founder Journey
The Clubs That Said No
In my first year at IIT Roorkee, almost every student club rejected me — Music, Dramatics, the magazine. I redirected everything into computing instead. By third year, we had bu...
Building Terno AI
Domain-Focused PCA on Text Embeddings Improves Semantic Retrieval
We published a paper showing that applying PCA to domain-specific text embeddings — fitted only on the target corpus — improves retrieval accuracy by 5.2%, increases the similar...
Agentic Systems
Building an Open-Source Autonomous Agent SDK
Agentic AI systems are becoming genuinely capable. But the infrastructure for building reliable, auditable, multi-tool agents remains immature. Here is how I am thinking about w...
Beyond Common Sense
A World Without Countries
Nations feel permanent because they have been present for every moment of our individual lives. But the nation-state is a surprisingly recent invention. What would we lose, and ...
Education and Careers
What Teaching Thousands of Learners Taught Me About Intelligence
I have watched thousands of people encounter new ideas — some with fear, some with curiosity, some with both. What I have learned is that intelligence is far less fixed and far ...
Building Terno AI
Why LLMs Should Generate Code Instead of Guessing Answers From Data
When an AI is asked a question about data, it faces a choice: generate text that sounds like the answer, or generate code that computes the answer. These are not the same. Here ...
Learning by Inventing
Can an AI Teacher Help a Child Discover the Pythagorean Theorem?
What would it look like if an AI teacher guided a child toward discovering the Pythagorean theorem for themselves — rather than simply explaining it? Here is a concrete walkthro...
Building Terno AI
Why Enterprise AI Must Be Secure by Design
Many AI applications are impressive in demonstrations but become dangerous when connected to real enterprise data. Security cannot be an afterthought. Here is how I am thinking ...
Founder Journey
From IIT Roorkee to Terno AI: My Journey Through Technology and Teaching
I studied Chemical Engineering but became absorbed in computers. I worked on recommendation systems at Amazon but then founded an education company. I taught hundreds of thousan...
Building Terno AI
Why I Am Building an AI Data Scientist
Every enterprise has data. Very few have the people, time and tools to ask real questions of it. I am building Terno AI because I believe the right solution is not more dashboar...
AI and Human Thinking
AI Can Do a Lot. But Can It Think Beyond Common Sense?
Language models are extraordinarily good at learning patterns from what has already existed. That is both their power and their limit. The most important ideas in human history ...
Learning by Inventing
Learning by Inventing: The Most Powerful Teaching Discovery I Have Made
Traditional education begins with the answer. I believe it should begin with the problem. Here is why guiding learners toward discovery creates something that no lecture can — a...