Project Bhaskar and the culture quotient of society

A Culture + Tech Lab

For over a decade now, it has been my dream to build a lab - a place where rapid experimentation, prototyping, MVPs are at the core. When I started thinking about this in 2015, software development was expensive and slow, making rapid iterations impossible. The idea of a lab seemed far cry because you needed sufficient capital and talent density to iterate at scale.

Cut 2026, this is no longer the case. We are in an era where software is the cheapest commodity and is only limited by human imagination and taste. Since AI is writing most of our code, culture tech now only needs willingness, imagination and experience. A tech lab, focussed on building powerful technology driven experiences for everyone, without a large balance sheet backing it, is suddenly feasible.

We now live in a world where you can iterate rapidly on ideas, test your hypothesis and throw things out without emptying your bank account. But a lab does not exist in isolation. It needs a thesis, a niche, a domain.

Why the world needs culture tech labs?

Culture is the very soul of our society. It is what gives us identity, makes us human and keeps us humane. Yet culture is the most neglected, misunderstood and misrepresented thing today. In a world dominated by algorithms and powerful digital products, culture is becoming the handmaiden of the rich.

Historically software labs have been built on the back of capital intensive, high value domains such as fintech, e-commerce, hardware or agriculture.

Culture is often the neglected poor cousin which rarely gets a mention when we talk about Tech Labs. Culture has neither had the capital access, nor the attention of the general public to command large capital investments that can run a technology lab. And thus the problems related to building great immersive cultural experiences, solving for challenges faced by culture in the age of AI, and the need for making culture accessible for all, have gone largely unaddressed.

With Project Bhaskar we decided to change this. We decided to throw the weight of 20 years of our collective experience in building technology businesses and tech products, and assemble a team that is by definition multi disciplinary and culture focussed.

What is our vision with Project Bhaskar?

Since culture lives within, shapes and is shaped by society and social systems, Project Bhaskar also has the mandate to use technology to study, understand and demystify our societies better. This includes our education and economic systems, our history and above all our climate.

The lab will focus on doing research, building products and creating experiences that will force people to engage with culture, economy and climate. It will help us understand why things are the way they are and what comes next.

At Project Bhaskar, we don't see art, music, books, paintings, films as separate from public policy, education, economy and global warming. All these variables, and others, form a intricate interconnected web in which we humans coexist. Thus when we say culture we mean more than just art, history, books, music. We mean the sum total of all things that allows me to communicate to you today in this moment and for you to be able to introduce yourself as who you are, when you meet someone.

From the time of the bhimbetka cave paintings, man has tried to capture nature and her wonders. And this constant endeavour to capture and tell stories of nature is what has led to the creation of shared cultural experiences. Whether that is the bani thani paintings of Kishangarh, the kalbeliya dance of the desert people or the tales of from Puranas, culture has gotten created as man responded to and changed his surroundings.

Our promise to ourselves and to the public is to protect existing cultural heritage by bringing them into the digital world and in front of the general public, but making them interactive physical experiences, and also by documenting them for posterity. We also aim to bring out deep dives, explainers and interactive products that help general public understand complex phenomenon thats happening in the world around us in a simple, lucid manner.

For far too long, a shareholders value driven narrow version of technology has been peddled to us, and we have not understood or thought of an alternative version. Project Bhaskar looks at building organisations, businesses, where the core definition of value creation is not in sheer dollars alone, but as long term social impact and trajectory change.

Culture needs as many custodians as it can get because it is all that will be left behind of us when we go the way of the dinosaurs. Project Bhaskar is one such custodian.