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By:

C.S. Krishnamurthy

21 June 2025 at 2:15:51 pm

Ekta Bhyan, Quiet Gold

The strongest lessons in life rarely arrive with drumbeats. They come quietly, sit beside us, and stay long after the applause fades. I learnt this at the recent Peakst8 Festival in the world-class Padukone-Dravid Centre for Sports Excellence Bengaluru. The venue was full of ambition, energy, loud confidence and polished success stories. Yet, it was gold-winning para-athlete Ekta Bhyan who held my attention, not by raising her voice, but by lowering the noise around her. She was an integral...

Ekta Bhyan, Quiet Gold

The strongest lessons in life rarely arrive with drumbeats. They come quietly, sit beside us, and stay long after the applause fades. I learnt this at the recent Peakst8 Festival in the world-class Padukone-Dravid Centre for Sports Excellence Bengaluru. The venue was full of ambition, energy, loud confidence and polished success stories. Yet, it was gold-winning para-athlete Ekta Bhyan who held my attention, not by raising her voice, but by lowering the noise around her. She was an integral part of a panel discussing what it takes to reach the Olympics. Others spoke of pressure, fame and sacrifice. Ekta spoke of routine. Of turning up. Of patience. There were no heroic flourishes in her words. Each sentence was measured, calm and grounded. Listening to her, I sensed a deep reserve of experience. She was not trying to impress. She was simply explaining how life had unfolded. A spinal injury, in 2003, had left her paralysed. This is usually where stories pause for sympathy. Ekta’s does not. She spoke of rebuilding, not rebelling. Of learning what the body could still do, and then working patiently within those limits. Para sport entered her life quietly, not as rescue, but as direction. Over time, she found her space in the F51 club throw, a demanding discipline where balance, precision and control matter more than force. What stayed with me was her restraint. She mentioned podium finishes only in passing. International meets, Asian Para Games, world championships, all appeared briefly and then moved aside. Even the gold medal she had earned was referred to almost casually, as one would mention a milestone on a long road. For her, medals are not destinations. They are confirmations. Steely Discipline Ekta spoke about training. It is not exciting, she said. It repeats itself. Progress hides. Muscles resist. The mind looks for shortcuts. Yet commitment must remain steady. She described days when success meant completing a session without excuses. On some mornings, it was finishing gym work despite fatigue. Evenings meant outdoor practice, carefully timed because regulating body temperature is a constant challenge after spinal injury. For nearly three years, she has not missed a single day of training. With limited muscle use and only about forty per cent lung capacity, each session needs careful planning. Her shoulders are her strongest allies. Other muscles cooperate less. Fingers offer no strength at all. Still, she works with what she has. Over the last four years, this discipline has translated into results. Gold medals at national championships. A bronze at the Asian Para Games. Gold and bronze at the World Championships in Paris in 2023. This season alone, she added gold at the Indian Open Paralympic Championships and a silver soon after. Her personal best stands at 21.5 metres, and she speaks of improving it, not defending it. There was a gentler revelation too. As a young girl, Ekta had once dreamt of becoming a doctor. She wanted to heal. Life rewrote the syllabus. Yet, listening to her, I realised she still heals. Not with medicine, but with example. Her journey treats assumptions and restores belief, quietly and effectively. Human Moment After the session, when the crowd thinned, I walked up to her with my notebook. I asked for her autograph, expecting a quick signature. She paused, asked my name, and wrote hers carefully. That small act reflected everything she had spoken about. Presence. Respect. Attention. Her daily life, she earlier shared, is not simple. She needs two people to help with routine movements, from transferring to travel. Public transport is impossible. Every trip requires planning, space and expense. Often, she bears the cost for three people, not one. Yet, she spoke of this without complaint. The harder challenge, she said, is mindset. People with disabilities are still seen as separate from the mainstream. Expectations are lowered, often disguised as kindness. Ekta resists this quietly. Her competition is internal. Yesterday versus today. Comfort versus effort. Paralysis, she believes, is a condition, not an identity. As I left the venue, the applause felt inadequate. Not because it was soft, but because her journey asks for reflection, not noise. Ekta Bhyan reminds us that ambition can change shape without losing meaning. That success does not always announce itself. Sometimes, it arrives quietly, balanced and consistent. Her strength lies not only in the distance she throws, but in the steadiness she maintains. And in that quiet balance, Ekta Bhyan offers us something rare. A lesson that stays long after the hall has emptied.   (The writer is a retired banker and author of ‘Money Does Matter.’)

India’s Research Must Break Its Western Mold

For India to thrive, innovation must spring from its own needs rather than borrowed priorities.

India, like much of the world, has been jostled by the whiplash of American trade policy. Sweeping tariffs under Donald Trump reminded New Delhi of the fragility of global supply chains. The Indian government responded with self-reliance. The mantra of ‘Atmanirbharta’ has been grafted onto everything from chip manufacturing and artificial intelligence to space exploration and weapons systems. While these efforts are laudable, they are also derivative. For all the fanfare about a sovereign research and innovation ecosystem, India is still chasing the trains long since boarded by the West.


Deeper questions

It has missed the bus before. The country was a bystander as the semiconductor revolution reshaped economies, and again when the world moved from 2G to 3G. Today’s push into electric vehicles and AI risks repeating the same error: pouring scarce resources into domains dictated by others, not necessarily aligned with India’s own imperatives. To chart a truly self-reliant course, India must ask a deeper question: what kind of research reflects its demographic, cultural and economic realities?


Western priorities are shaped by conditions alien to India. Rich countries with high per-capita incomes, ageing populations and shrinking workforces seek to automate relentlessly. Their research reflects their anxieties: labour shortages, geopolitical dominance, and the ability to fund projects with decades-long gestation periods. India, by contrast, is young, populous and resource-constrained. Its challenges are of another order.


Consider literacy. India remains far from universal literacy, yet boasts one of the highest mobile- and internet-penetration rates in the world. A semi-literate farmer in Bihar may navigate a smartphone more easily than a book. Add to this the bewildering linguistic diversity of the country, where hundreds of languages jostle for space, and the opportunities for India-centric research become apparent. Machine translation, if designed with cultural nuance, could bridge linguistic divides. A search for a uniquely Indian lingua franca might sound fanciful, but so once did Google Translate.


India’s population profile also demands a very different approach to technology. Whereas German or Japanese firms build robots to replace workers, India’s goal should be to design products and services that create work. A telling example lies in manufacturing. Cars can be assembled by machines with minimal human input. But their servicing remains labour-intensive. With imaginative design, firms could amplify such human involvement rather than eliminate it.


The “use and throw” ethos of the West has saddled the world with waste. In India, products could be reimagined to offer novelty through services by refurbishing, upgrading and customising rather than constant replacement. A car, a sofa or a smartphone could be made to feel new not by discarding the old but by tweaking its appearance or performance. This would create work for semi-skilled labour, reduce environmental footprints and curb the lure of mindless consumption. A genuinely Indian innovation agenda would take this seriously.


Battling Brain-Rot

Another looming challenge is subtler but no less urgent: the erosion of cognitive fitness. “Brain rot,” Oxford’s word of the year in 2024, captures the malaise of overstimulation—too much social media, too many screens, too little critical thinking. For a nation banking on its “demographic dividend,” the risk is stark. An intelligent but distracted youth cohort could prove a liability.


India must innovate not only in classrooms but beyond them. Just as gyms and yoga studios emerged to counter sedentary lifestyles, there is scope for “brain gyms”—platforms, both physical and digital, that exercise memory, logic, and creativity. What sounds gimmicky could become a business in its own right, especially in cities. The state, meanwhile, can nudge educational institutions to build curricula that combat cognitive decline. Such thinking is more relevant to India’s long-term prospects than yet another incremental advance in chip design.


If India’s youth are its future, its past is no less valuable. Traditional knowledge, often dismissed as superstition, deserves a harder look. China offers an instructive example. In 2015, Youyou Tu won the Nobel Prize in medicine for isolating artemisinin, a compound derived from a herb mentioned in ancient Chinese texts, which revolutionised malaria treatment. That breakthrough was not blind traditionalism; it was the rigorous scientific testing of traditional knowledge.


India’s own experience shows the risks of neglecting this trove. In 1995 American researchers sought to patent the medicinal properties of turmeric, a staple of Indian home remedies. India fought the claim by citing traditional use and won. But defensive victories are not enough. The country must test, validate and commercialise its own heritage. Whether in Ayurveda, yoga, or ancient mathematics, India has rich veins of knowledge awaiting rediscovery.


India’s innovation discourse is filled with exhortations not to “miss the bus.” But the more important question is whether the country is chasing the right bus in the first place. Replicating Western priorities risks draining limited resources into projects that do little to solve India’s most pressing problems: literacy, jobs, waste, health and cognitive resilience. A research agenda rooted in India’s own soil, by contrast, could deliver both economic and social dividends.


That requires courage from policymakers, imagination from scientists and support from investors. It also requires a shift in mindset. It is time to stop measuring success by how closely India mimics Silicon Valley or Shenzhen and start defining it by how well research improves the lives of its own citizens.


The West’s research agenda reflects its circumstances. India’s must do the same. Only then can the country stop playing catch-up and start leading in fields that matter to it most.

(Author works in the Information Technology sector. Views personal)

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