In 2010 I was in my second year of engineering. I was planning an internship in the US, and for that I needed a passport, and for the passport I needed a bonafide certificate, and for that I had to stand in front of a magistrate for a signature.
He asked me for One hundred rupees. And when I said, that I am a student, he said just give ten rupees.
Sit with that number for a second. Not ten lakh. Not ten thousand or even one thousand. Ten rupees.
I was nineteen years old. I told him I didn't have it, and I wasn't being principled or clever, I was telling him the plain truth. I had exactly enough money for the fare there and the fare back, because that is what we had at home. My family's income at that time was five thousand rupees a month.
A magistrate. A gazetted officer and responsible for entire District / Tehsil (I am unclear since was visiting Tehsil). A man whose whole job is to sit between the citizen and the state and be the one clean thing in the room. Asking a broke nineteen-year-old for ten rupees, because he could. Because the asking cost him nothing.
I have carried that ten rupees around for sixteen years. Not because of the money. Because of what it taught me in about four seconds flat, which is this:
you will pay at every counter, in some currency, forever, and nobody around you will find this remarkable.
I decided that day I would never work for the government. I thought corruption was a government disease. I was so young. I actually believed there was somewhere else to go.
The mice
There is an experiment I keep coming back to.
In 2013, two researchers at Emory University, Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler, took male mice and exposed them to a fruity smell called acetophenone while giving them a mild electric shock to the foot. Standard fear conditioning. The mice learned to be afraid of that smell.
Then those mice had sons. The sons were raised completely apart from the fathers. They had never smelled acetophenone in their lives. They had never been shocked. They had no way to learn anything from anyone.
And when that smell reached them, they flinched.
So did the grandsons.
The researchers looked at the sperm of the conditioned fathers and found an actual chemical change on the gene for that particular odour receptor. The fear had not been taught. It had been handed down.
I am not saying Indians are genetically corrupt. I want to be very clear about that, because that is exactly the wrong lesson and it is the lesson that lets everybody off the hook. If it were in the blood, nothing could be done, and I would have no reason to be writing this at four in the morning.
I am saying something else.
I am saying that a fear can outlive the shock that created it. That a response can be inherited by people who never experienced the thing that caused it. That you can flinch at a smell you have never smelled, because of something that happened to somebody who came before you, and you will not know why you are flinching. You will just think that is how the world smells.
That is us. That is what I think we are. A country of people flinching at a shock that stopped centuries ago, and calling it common sense
Where the shock came from
We did not always live like this. That part matters, because there is a version of this argument that ends in self-hatred and I refuse to write that version.
We had the Cholas. We had the Guptas. We built things, we sailed, we counted, we made temples that are still standing after a thousand years of everything trying to knock them down. The capacity is not the problem. The capacity was never the problem.
But look at what got rewarded, for a very long time, and by whom.
Under the Mughals, there was jizya, there was tribute, there was a system where the people who did best were, very often, the people who arranged themselves conveniently around power. Sometimes through conversion, sometimes through service, sometimes just through knowing which way to bow and when. And the wealth of this place, temple wealth, treasure, generations of accumulated craft, went out through the passes to Central Asia and never came back.
Then the British came and did the same thing with better paperwork. Our cotton. Our spices. Our tea gardens. A man in London drank the finest leaf that grew in Assam and Darjeeling, and here we drank the dust.
Literally the dust. The grade that was left over after the good tea had sailed. And we still drink it, and we have decided that this is what tea tastes like.
And underneath the economics, the thing that actually did the damage: they needed intermediaries. They needed Indians to collect from Indians. And so an entire class was created whose prosperity depended not on building anything, not on being good at anything, but on standing between the people and the power and taking a cut for the standing.
That is the shock. Two hundred, four hundred, six hundred years of it. Merit did not get you fed. Proximity to power got you fed.
And what happened to the ones who tried it the other way? Bhagat Singh was twenty-three. Twenty-three. He gets a paragraph, a stamp, a road name, a movie every few years. Meanwhile the families who played it correctly, who supplied and collected and stayed useful, came out of the whole period with land and titles and standing that their great-grandchildren are still living off today.
What it looks like now
Here is the shape of it today, and I am going to keep this short, because the details of any one case are just gossip and the pattern is the actual argument.
Walk into any large enterprise in this country as a vendor and the first thing you will do is sign a document. In that document there will be a clause about kickbacks. Zero tolerance. Not permitted. Report immediately.
And then you will deal with the people inside that same building, and some meaningful number of them will have their hand out. Not dramatically. Nobody says the word. It arrives as a gift, a favour, a delay that resolves itself once the right conversation has happened somewhere else.
Both of those things are true at once and nobody in the building experiences it as a contradiction. That is the part that should frighten us. Not that people take money. People take money everywhere on earth. It is that here it does not register as an event. It is weather.
We have all agreed on a comfortable lie that corruption is a sarkari problem. When I was young I watched a relative in a PSU submit hotel bills for stays that never happened, an invoice bought for the price of the tax on it, plus ten percent for the man who supplied it. That is what made me swear off government work. I went to the private sector because I thought that is where merit lived.
The private sector is not clean. The private sector has the same hand out, just with better English and a lanyard.
And it changes what gets built. If the deal does not go to the best product, then being the best product stops being a strategy. There is a road here in Pune that people will point out to you. Built years ago, built properly, still in good condition, which in this country is close to a miracle. The company that built it, so the story goes, never got another project. A good road that lasts twenty years is a road nobody gets to rebuild, and nobody gets a cut of a road that isn't being rebuilt.
Do the work well and you remove yourself from the food chain. That is the actual incentive we have built.
The begging bowl
And then, having made it hard to build anything here, we go abroad and beg.
We take the plane, we take the delegation, we take the photographs. Please come. Please invest. Please set up here. We will give you the land, we will give you the power, we will give you the people. We will build your data centres for you.
Why the hell are we building *their* data centres? Why can't we build our own? Why can't we build our own model, on our own compute, on our own data, for our own market?
Because our engineers, trained here, on institutions paid for here, are the ones building those systems in the US and Europe. Small countries with a fraction of our population have figured out how to hire the best of us, and we call it a proud diaspora moment. Then we go and present India to them as a market. On a platter. As consumers, not as builders.
Somebody will read the history of this period in fifty years and struggle to believe it. That a country with this much engineering talent chose to be a customer.
It is the same trade the collaborator made under the Mughals, and the same trade the Company's Indian agents made. Hand over the raw material, hand over the labour, keep the commission, call it pragmatism. We have been selling this country in instalments since before any of us were born, and the reason nobody is ashamed is that we no longer recognise it as selling. It just smells like business.
And the same man who could not get a fair deal here gets on a plane, does brilliantly somewhere else, and spends the rest of his life telling anyone who will listen that this country is hopeless.
He is not wrong about what happened to him. He is just wrong about what it was.
We are not a spiritual country
We say it constantly. Spiritual country, ancient wisdom, land of dharma.
We are one of the most chaotic societies on earth, and I have come to believe it is because we have almost none of it left. We kept the rituals and threw away the content.
Look at any street. Our homes are immaculate. Spotless, scrubbed, shoes off at the door. And four feet outside the door, filth. Because the house is mine and the street is nobody's. There is no *we*. There is only mine, and outside-mine.
That is not a small thing. Almost everything else in this essay comes from that. The man with his hand out is not a villain. He simply does not experience you as part of anything he belongs to. There is his family, and there is everything else, and everything else is fair game.
When Krishna talks to Arjuna, the whole argument is about dharma, and the thing people miss is that it is not about being nice. Arjuna's dharma was to fight. Krishna's dharma in that moment was to counsel. Your dharma is the thing that is actually yours to do, done properly, done without negotiating with yourself about the outcome.
If you have a job, that is your dharma. There is no higher spiritual practice available to you than doing your own work honestly. That is the whole thing. And it is the one thing we do not do.
karmanye vadhikaraste ma phaleshu kadachana
You have a right to the work. Never to its fruits.
And the line I keep next to it, from the third chapter:
better your own dharma done imperfectly than another man's done perfectly, because another man's path is bhaya-avahah, fraught with fear.
bhaya-avahah. That word is the most accurate description of the shortcut I have ever read. Everyone who takes it is afraid. That is why they need the cut in the first place.
Why I get to say all this
I am not writing this from a nice chair.
In 2012 I used to travel between Chandigarh and Delhi, and to save ten rupees on the fare from the bus stand to the railway station, I walked it. In formal shoes, the cheapest ones, which cut into my feet so badly that by the time I reached the platform I could hardly stand. Then a local train, thirty-two rupees, fourteen to sixteen hours for a journey that takes four by road. I did that route again and again.
I graduated in 2013 with about twelve lakh of loans on my head, home loan and education loan together, and five thousand rupees a month coming into the house.
In 2016 I started my own services company and cleared every rupee of loan by then. No funding, no family money, nothing. It became a genuinely good business, seventy percent PAT, and by 2019 I should have been satisfied. I was not. I could not get past the fact that we were building brilliant systems for American and European companies who then sold them back to us at ten times the price. I could not sit in that.
So I started a product company. It failed. I lost one crore sixty-five lakh. I did not restructure it or walk away from it. I took it on my chest and paid it and some of it still paying.
In 2022 I started again, this time on the thing I actually care about, which is sovereign technology for Indian retail. Our models, built here, owned here.
I am thirty-four. I have not had a house for three years, I live hotel to hotel, some weeks I take seven or eight flights. Everything that comes in goes back into the company.
And in all of it, across every deal, I have not paid one rupee in a bribe. Not one. I have lost business for it, repeatedly, and I know exactly what it has cost me.
On removing your own pressure points
Two choices I made deliberately, and I want to explain them properly, because both get misread.
I am not married. Not because I couldn't afford to be. I could have. I chose not to take on a wife and children, because I know what that responsibility does to a man's spine.
Watch how people actually fold. It is almost never greed. It is a man with a family who owes them a good life, and one day the compromise arrives dressed as duty. I have to think about my kids. And he is not even lying. That is the terrible part. He is choosing the smaller loyalty over the larger one and it feels like love while he does it.
I did not want anyone standing behind me whose prosperity depended on me bending. So there is nobody standing there.
Same logic with money. I have stayed bootstrapped far past the point where it was comfortable, because an investor is another set of eyes on a quarterly number, another voice asking why revenue is slow, and I know that eventually one of those conversations ends with somebody suggesting we just do what everyone else does.
I may be wrong about all of this. Maybe a family would have made me stronger. But my read is simple: every pressure point you don't have is a compromise you never have to argue yourself out of. So I removed mine.
The dust
Here is what it actually feels like, and this is the only part of this I really wanted to write.
It feels like being face down on the ground with somebody's hand pressed on the back of my head. Not hitting me. Just holding me there, casually, with no particular malice. And I am trying to breathe, and what comes into my nose is the dust off the floor.
Every time I try to do the correct thing, the hand comes back down.
I want to be precise about this, because it would be easy to read it as despair and it isn't. I am not dying. I am not depressed. I am down, and I am not out, and there is a real difference between those.
What I feel is not hopelessness about my own life, which is honestly the best it has ever been.
It is grief about this place, this nation. That we had all of this, and we keep selling it, in instalments, cheerfully, and calling it progress.
That is what gets me at four in the morning. Not the money. Never once the money.
And then the sun comes and I go back to work.
Anyway
The reason I told you about the mice is that the whole point of that experiment is that it is conditioning. Not destiny. Not blood. A learned flinch, passed forward.
Learned things can be unlearned. It takes generations, it is unbelievably slow, and it will almost certainly not finish in my lifetime. But it is not sealed. That distinction is the only ground I have to stand on and I am not giving it up.
So: I am not going to pay. I am not going to become a middleman on my own country. I am not going to hand this place over as a market and take my commission. I am going to build here. Badly if necessary, slowly if necessary, but here, and mine, and clean.
Whether that ends in a one crore company or a ten thousand crore company, I have no idea. I genuinely don't. That part was never mine, and pretending otherwise is exactly how people talk themselves into the first small compromise.
Vivekananda never met me. He has shaped how I live anyway, through books, through people who read him before me, through some chain of influence I cannot even trace. That is how this actually works. You do not get to see who you reached.
So if this reaches one person, one procurement manager who doesn't sit on an honest invoice, one founder who decides not to pay, one nineteen-year-old standing in front of a magistrate who is asking for ten rupees, then it was worth writing at four in the morning.
You have a right to the work. Never to its fruits.
I am not deviating.