I’m a writer and technology policy specialist—among other things: I also have a few other vocations—born and brought up in the intentional community of Auroville, in South India. My first book, India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India, was published in 2012 by Penguin-Riverhead, and a French edition, titled L’Inde de Demain, came out in 2014 from Albin Michel. Better to Have Gone, published by Scribner in 2021 in the USA, UK and India, received a Whiting Nonfiction award, was shortlisted shortlisted for the Tata LitLive Prize, and longlisted for the Chautauqua Prize. A Catalan edition came out in 2023, and a Tamil edition is forthcoming from Kaluchuvadu.  

I’m a former columnist for the New York Times, and write or have written for various publications, including The New Yorker (some articles), the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Economist, Granta, Foreign Policy, The Hindu, Outlook, and more. Among other topics, I write about utopia (1, 2), technology policy and regulation (1, 2, 3, 4), and sometimes about tennis.

I was an avid programmer when young, and over time, my affinity for tech developed into an interest in technology policy. I have a PhD in the field, and I’ve worked or consulted on tech policy at a number of places, including the Markle Foundation, UNDP, the GovLab (NYU), New America, and Princeton University. I’m currently a Senior Fellow at the GovLab and New America, where I work on AI in the global south; and a Visiting Research Scholar and Lecturer at Princeton, where I co-lead an initiative—and co-taught a class on—on digital public infrastructure (DPI). Among other interests, I work on digital inclusion, a more trusted Internet (identity, missing layers, etc.), and AI in the global south.

I got a bachelor’s degree at Harvard University in Social Anthropology, and a DPhil at Nuffield College, Oxford University, which I attended as a Rhodes Scholar. The DPhil was in Law, and focused on regulation to bridge the digital divide.

I’ll be adding more information on some of this work in an upcoming update to this site, which for new remains more focused on my writing than tech policy work. Thanks for checking in; come back soon.