Catalign Quarterly - Issue #1 - June 2026

After a two-year gap, I am restarting Catalign Quarterly, a newsletter that doesn’t have a good track record of running quarterly. The motivation is twofold: it nudges me to reflect on my work, and it creates an opportunity to keep in touch with clients, friends, and well-wishers.

Crux of the challenge-based strategy: The quarter began with a day spent with the managers of Broadridge India at Lahari Resorts on the outskirts of Hyderabad. During the workshop, we explored what it means to identify the crux of business challenges, develop a response based on an internal bright spot, and design low-cost experiments to validate the response's assumptions. Thanks to Krishna Kumar of ISEC for the opportunity.

Strategic innovation: It has been fifteen years since I began teaching in the executive education programs on management of innovation at IIM Bangalore, thanks to the break given by my friend Prof Rishikesha Krishnan.  This quarter, I had the opportunity to teach in the Strategic Management of Innovation program run by Prof Sai Yayavaram in April. With the trade war and the US-Iran war in the background, it wasn’t too difficult to communicate the significance of building technology-based innovation capacity.

Designing robust interventions: I became curious when I read Joseph Stiglitz talk about robust interventions, “interventions that are simple enough that you don’t have to very fine-tune to make them work, even if you have a bad president like President Bush.” That was fifteen years ago. It became the theme of the year for me in 2011. I also gave a talk on designing robust interventions at TISS, Mumbai, the same year. Ideas don’t leave you easily. I facilitated a 2-day workshop on the same topic last April in the beautiful Kuppam campus of Agastya International Foundation for the K V Raghavan Fellows.

Design thinking: It was a pleasure to introduce design thinking to women entrepreneurs of the Goldman Sachs 10K Women program at IIMB’s incubator. And also, to the executives of Mann+Hummel and transitioning Defence officers at IIMB.

Confusion to clarity:  Thanks to the encouragement from Prof Vasanthi Srinivasan, I got an opportunity to combine two of my favorite topics - innovation stamina and mindfulness to offer sessions on “Confusion to clarity: a work-life alignment exercise”. It was well received by the executives of ComputaCenter and the participants of Tanmatra, IIMB’s flagship program for women leaders.

Young entrepreneurs in deep-tech: Last year, I wrote about my feeling that India just woke up in 2025 to realize its lack of deep-tech capacity. In January, I invited young entrepreneurs, in their teens and twenties, to talk about their deep-tech venture experiences during my course on “Managing technological innovation” at IIT Bombay. I summarized their talks recently: Dr. Darshit Parmar of Flash Cryogenics, and Khushi Chandak on her electrochrome-based startup journey. I also got a chance to interview my nephew Neel Redkar, 21, who is doing exciting work on foundational video-action models at Standard Intelligence in San Francisco (summary of the interview, Spotify podcast).

Reading & writing: While reading was scattered this quarter, I managed to finish the first part of the Ibis trilogy “Sea of poppies” by Amitav Ghosh and “Disloyal: a memoir” by Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s fixer and personal attorney for a decade. I enjoyed both books and hope to write about them. I wrote my takeaways from “The Dark Side of Camelot”, a JFK biography by Seymour Hersh, and My 3 takeaways from Richard Gombrich’s “What the Buddha thought”. My reading in the next quarter will be influenced by my preparation for the upcoming course at IIMB, “Strategic management of technology and innovation” starting in September (8^th year). But I hope to finish “Power and Progress” by Daren Acemoglu.

Trekking and retreat in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand: During the trek to Pindari glacier last month, what struck me was the adoption of solar everywhere in the mountains. In contrast, we could also see the opportunity Jio is trying to tap – that of satellite-based phones; even Pindari Baba is waiting for it at 12500 ft. We also spent 3 days at the serene Krishnamurti Foundation India (KFI) retreat at Jalna near Almoda and did a group reading-cum-reflection on his Colombo talk in 1980, “The book of life”.

My 3 takeaways from Richard Gombrich’s “What the Buddha thought”

I used to think that saying anything about what the Buddha taught two thousand five hundred years ago was bold. But people like Walpola Rahula, Thich Nhat Hanh, Bhikku Bodhi, and others have attempted it and done a good job. However, I have been highly sceptical about anything said about what the Buddha thought. That requires the knowledge of pre-existing ideas on which Buddha might have built his ideas, apart from, of course, his own contemplative insight. That looked formidable to me. Hence, I kept avoiding Richard Gombrich’s book “What the Buddha Thought”. One day in 2023, YouTube recommended that I listen to Gombrich’s talk on the same topic. YouTube recommendations are like a God-sent message of the day, isn’t it? So I listened to his 2013 talk at the University of Hyderabad. My scepticism didn’t go away after listening to the talk. However, I was impressed by his command of Pali, Sanskrit, and ancient Indian texts like the Vedas, Upanishads, and the Jain practices, which either preceded or co-existed with Buddha. I was even more impressed by his methodology. Gombrich begins by saying, “I only have fifty minutes to speak to you. And the Buddha had many more thoughts that can be expressed or explained in fifty minutes.  So if you would like to hear or learn about more of them, please read my book.”  So I turned to the book during my sojourn in coastal Karnataka at Kalyanapura and Gokarna last December. 

Main objective of the book: Gombrich's main objective in the book is to illustrate that the Buddha’s main ideological opponents were brahmins, and he used their metaphors with new meanings to attack them. In such an endeavour, understanding the historical context is very important. For example, Gombrich shows that the Buddha was familiar with the Bṛhadāranyaka Upanishad (BU) and he built upon and modified the ideas of karma and rebirth found in BU.

Here are my three takeaways from the book:

1. Asking the right question: Upanishads, the texts that carry the essence of the Vedas, emphasized the question, “What exists?” The answer to which goes into the notions of Atman and Brahman. Gombrich says, “The Buddha said that this is the wrong question.” He feels that the Buddha was primarily concerned with what we can experience, what can be present to consciousness. To Gombrich, the doctrine looks like pragmatic empiricism.

I searched to see if the Pali canon contains Buddha explicitly saying “wrong question”. I couldn’t find one. Instead, what I found were Buddha’s responses to questions related to existence or non-existence. For example, in Kaccanagotta Sutta (SN12.15), Buddha says, “‘All exists’, Kaccana, this is one extreme. ‘All does not exist’: this is the second extreme. Without veering towards either of these extremes, the Tathagata teaches the Dhamma by the middle.” 

2. Ethicization and universalization of karma: I must admit that I was completely ignorant of how Buddha innovated the karma doctrine until I read this book. And I got even more intrigued when Gombrich mentioned, “Karma is my favourite point of entry to the Buddha’s worldview”. He adds, “It is not only fundamental to the Buddha’s whole view of life, but also a kind of lynchpin which holds the rest of the basic tenets together.” The suspense deepened.

Indian society, even today, is fairly ritual-bound. As I was growing up, there would be a Satyanarayan pooja at home once every few years, and especially before or after a major event like a wedding or recovery from some illness. A religious ritual is supposed to accumulate merit (or puṇya). That was the case during Buddha’s time as well. However, the accumulation of merit depended upon the correctness of ritual, sacrifice, and ceremony, and the type of ritual varied by gender and caste. Buddha said, “It is intention, monks, that I call karma." (Cetanāhaṃ bhikkhave kammaṃ vadāmi) (AN 6.63). Buddha said the state of mind (with what intent) matters more than the correctness of the action itself. Gombrich called this ethicization of karma – i.e. karma depends on moral intention rather than ritual action.

Gombrich also says that the Buddha universalized karma. Once you say karma is moral intention, it applies to everybody and everywhere, whether you are helping, insulting, cursing in your mind, or praying for someone. Buddha said that this process of karmic merit/de-merit accumulation continues through rebirth and breaks only when one sees reality clearly, and called this cycle-break nibbāna or liberation. Gombrich shows in the book how this process of ethicization and universalization of karma had begun in Brahminism, specifically in Brhadāraṇyakā Upanishad, which predates the Buddha, and in Jainism, where non-violence (ahimsā) is paramount.

3. Fire as the central metaphor for experience as a process: What is Buddha’s most important philosophical idea? People would have different answers. Gombrich feels, “What we can experience is only process. This may be his most important philosophical idea.” And Buddha used fire as the central metaphor to communicate this.

The most popular fire-related sermon is the third, known in English as “The Fire sermon” (SN35.28) or sometimes called “The all”. In Pali, it is called A̅ditta-pariyāya, ‘The way of putting things as being on fire’. The sermon begins: ‘Everything, O monks, is on fire.’ Then Buddha explains what ‘everything’ means. It is all our faculties – the five senses plus the mind – and their objects and operations and the feelings they give rise to. And Buddha refers to three fires. Everything is on fire with the fires of passion, hatred, and delusion. Why three fires?

Fire had a major significance in the Vedic tradition. The brahmin householder had the duty to keep alight a set of three fires, which he tended daily. Buddha assigned a new meaning to each fire. In the second fire sermon (Dutiya Aggi Sutta AN 7.47), he says the brahmin should abandon the three unwholesome fires of greed, hatred, and delusion. And cultivate the three wholesome fires of one’s parents, one’s household and dependents, and holy men (renunciates and brahmins), suggesting taking care of the people around oneself.

In the first sermon, known as Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (SN 56.11) (Setting in motion the wheel of dhamma), Buddha defines dukkha as pañcupādānakkhandhā. This is generally translated as the five aggregates of grasping. Gombrich gives a different interpretation of the Pali phrase upādāna khandhā. He feels that the Buddha is employing the metaphor of fire here and trying to communicate the same message as the Fire Sermon. Upādāna, Gombrich argues, means that which fuels an active process and keeps it alive. He translates upādāna-khandhā as ‘blazing masses of fuel’.

According to Gombrich, Buddha is suggesting that life experience is not a thing but a process. It is a causally conditioned process. Our experience is like burning bundles of firewood to feed the fires of passion, hatred, and confusion. And the moment the fuel is over, the fire goes out. This is the literal meaning of the Sanskrit word nirvāna, where the verbal root vā means ‘to blow,’ and with the prefix nir, the meaning is ‘cease to burn, go out’ (like a flame). It was a pleasant surprise to see Gombrich bring out the significance of process, something I wrote about almost a decade ago, without much understanding of Buddhism.

Richard Gombrich’s “What the Buddha Thought” is not light reading. It demands delving into the meanings of Sanskrit and Pali phrases and seeing the Buddha’s context through Vedic rituals, the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and Chāndogya Upanishads, and Jain texts. The book offers a glimpse into the scholarly work of Joanna Jurewicz, the Polish linguist, and Sue Hamilton on early Buddhism. I enjoyed reading it and will keep going back to it.

Neel Redkar, 21, shares his journey on organizing hackathons, AI research, and building video action models

At 21, most students are finishing their undergraduate studies and getting busy with job applications. In contrast, Neel Redkar has already made significant contributions to building video action models and raising capital at Standard Intelligence (SI), an AGI startup based in San Francisco. The six-member team at SI recently raised $75M with a $500M valuation. Neel has published a single-author paper at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference in 2023 when he was still a teenager, and he participated in a week-long cross-country hackathon from Vermont to Los Angeles when he was 16 years old. Neel is my nephew, and I got an opportunity to talk to him while he was visiting Mumbai for his cousin's wedding last month. You can listen to the interview podcast here and interview transcript is available here. Here are some of the highlights from the interview:

From science projects to AI programming: Neel started learning Python when he was in the third grade. In eighth grade, he started using machine learning libraries while doing a science project that distinguishes trash from recyclable material and compost. Learning initially began by watching YouTube videos, but he soon realized that it was much faster to read the documentation. He says, “I knew how to program derivatives before I knew the word derivative.” By ninth grade, he became familiar with math, i.e., derivatives and matrix multiplication, required to understand machine learning algorithms. He built an application that tried to predict earthquakes in California. It had very low accuracy. However, he ended up creating a large dataset on earthquakes in California and made it public.

Organizing hackathons: In eighth grade, Neel attended a local hackathon and enjoyed it. He made new friends and joined the Slack group of their hack club. This led him to a workshop on organizing hackathons in San Francisco during the summer after eighth grade. Neel says, “I think this was really important for me,” because it was the first time he realized it was possible to raise $ 10K–$15 K to organize a hackathon by just sending emails. Subsequently, he, along with others, organized many hackathons, including some at Angel Hacks. In 2021, at age 16, Neel participated in The Hacker Zephyr, the world’s longest (3502 miles) cross-country hackathon, in which 42 kids traveled from Vermont to Los Angeles on a train converted into a hacking playground.

Independent AI research: At age 18, Neel got a Davidson scholarship to do research on creating new AI algorithms to make artificial photosynthesis & carbon capture a reality, and presented his work at the AAAI23 conference. The same year, he presented a single-author paper at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS-2023) Conference on language-to-material generation architecture for crystal discovery. Neel managed to get his own grant for traveling to New Orleans for NeurIPS. He says, “(At NeurIPS) I met tons of people who are great friends.”

Leaving UCLA and Standard Intelligence: During the Sophomore year at UCLA, Neel tried to balance three things: classes, research, and social life. However, as the year proceeded, he realized, “I am not doing well socially, I am not doing well research-wise, and I’m not doing well class-wise.” So he decided to take a gap year and joined Standard Intelligence (SI), an AGI startup in San Francisco. In the past year at SI, Neel has contributed to creating a video action model (FDM-1) that is trained on 11 million hours of video and operates on a context window of 1 hour 50 minutes. This is likely to be an order of magnitude more than what a typical LLM like ChatGPT has been trained on. And they managed to build their own data storage cluster at a fractional cost of a typical cloud provider. It is not surprising that the team at SI has raised $75M with a $500M valuation in a funding round co-led by Sequoia and Stark Capital. Neel also managed to create a demo of their video action model to drive a car in a parking lot. Neel says, “The demo attracted a lot of attention from the investor community as well as people like Andrej (Karpathy).” At this stage, he admits, “Things are going so well, there’s no reason to go back (to UCLA)”.

Being intentional and taking upside-down risks: I asked Neel for advice to the college kids who are worried about finding a job in the AI world. Neel says, “A lot of college or high school students love to defer their decisions to other people. Like, my mom told me I need to go to college.” Neel’s suggestion is to be intentional about what you do. Ask yourself, “Why am I going to college?” If the answer is “to study,” then focus on studies; if the answer is “to make friends,” then focus on making friends. He feels people should identify what their interests are, search up interesting problems in the field, do something about it, ignore everyone telling you, you can’t do it, make something, and then cold email people with the cool thing they made. “You want to maximize upside risk,” says Neel. When you send 100 cold emails, the chance is high that one will respond. He says, “By taking small risks consistently that offer you no negative consequences, you’re always going to do something interesting with your life.”

At 21, Neel's clarity about why he is doing what he is doing is impressive. I wish him all the best for the journey ahead. Hope you find this podcast useful.