Dharma as a Guiding Light

My mother woke me early one March morning with four words that will always haunt me: “Papa had a stroke.”

When I arrived in India a week later, my mother asked if I wanted to see my father, and I told her I needed sleep. That was an excuse. I was scared of seeing the person who had always felt like our anchor lying helpless in a hospital bed. So I stayed on a plastic bench and watched other families wait. Nobody needed to explain why they were there. In that corridor, our lives were different, but our fear was familiar.

I did not leave that hospital with a startup idea. I left with a sharper sense of what a system feels like to the people inside it. Rules have a purpose. So do records, reports, and institutions. But when they become the whole experience, it is easy to lose sight of the people they are meant to serve.

A path I did not plan

When I was twelve, I was asked to memorize verses from the Bhagavad Gita for a competition. I wanted to know why reciting the words mattered more than wrestling with them. The idea of dharma, or purpose, stayed with me, though I have never believed purpose arrives as a fixed job title. I think it takes shape through the work we choose, the work we resist, and what we learn from both.

For years, that work was filmmaking. I took unpaid gigs and production assistant jobs, sometimes on projects I did not connect with. I learned to adapt, to work with difficult personalities, and to finish what I had started. When I worked on Matchmaker Motel, I could see how much of that unglamorous experience had prepared me for a project I cared about. The detours had taught me something.

I also spent four years in construction. In trailers and site meetings, I listened to people with decades more experience than I had. They were often right. But I also saw how experience could end a question instead of opening one. Being young did not make my view correct; it did make me willing to ask whether the system everyone knew could work differently.

I did not follow a conventional route into software or artificial intelligence. For a long time, I treated that as a weakness. Now I see why it matters to my work: I am willing to look at a problem from more than one discipline, and I know how much I still have to learn.

What I am building

Mind Light began with a question: why do organizations doing essential work have to fight their own tools to understand and explain it?

Nonprofits manage donations, grants, programs, spending, and outcomes across systems that rarely tell one coherent story. Staff spend time assembling reports for funders when that time could go toward the work itself. The people can be committed and the mission can be real, while the incentives still pull attention toward what is easiest to report instead of what is most useful to know.

I want Mind Light to help connect the money that comes in, the decisions about how it is used, and the evidence of what happened next. That means preserving sources and approvals, showing what is known and what is still uncertain, and giving people a way to question a decision. An outcome should not become “proven” because software generated a confident sentence about it. The organization, its partners, and the communities involved need to be able to recognize the account as true.

At its smallest, giving is a relationship: one person helps another and can see what changed. Scale makes that harder. A donor often receives a thank-you letter and, months later, a report. A nonprofit has to reconstruct the path between the two. Better infrastructure could make that path more visible without reducing a person’s life to a metric.

The question behind the technology

I have always been drawn to the idea that no one is born bad. I also know that good intentions do not cancel incentives. Money and power shape what people and institutions do, including institutions built to help others. Technology can intensify that problem. AI could make it easier for a few organizations to accumulate leverage while everyone else loses agency.

It could also remove some of the administrative work that keeps people from paying attention to one another. That possibility is why I am interested in AI, but possibility is not proof. A useful system should help a person find the source of a claim, understand why an action was proposed, and decide whether to approve it. It should not ask them to trust an opaque answer because it sounds fluent.

Machines do not care about a family in crisis, a child who needs a scholarship, or a community trying to keep its doors open. People do. The technology I want to build has a smaller job: help their care travel through an institution without getting lost.

Before my father died, he told me to take this light and shine our family name. He believed in a future for me before I could show him evidence for it. I still carry that belief, along with a promise connected to building a school in the part of India our family comes from. His confidence did not remove the hard work ahead. It gave me a reason to do it.

I cannot claim that Mind Light has solved these problems. I can say what I am trying to build and what standard I want to hold it to. Ambition without discipline is just a statement. The work is to make the records credible, keep people in control, listen when the system falls short, and earn trust through what it actually helps them do.

My route here was not straight. It brought me through film sets, construction sites, a hospital hallway, and questions I still cannot answer neatly. I am building Mind Light because I believe those experiences belong in the work: the craft of telling a story, the patience to understand a system, and the responsibility to remember who the system is for.