Arise Times
In most Indian cities, artificial intelligence is still seen as a technological tool—useful, inevitable, and apolitical. But something is shifting. Quietly, and in multiple directions at once, AI is moving from labs and dashboards into public conversation.
Not through viral hashtags or policy debates. But through reading groups, classroom syllabi, faculty lounges, ethics committees, and even activist forums.
One recurring reference in these settings is AI Driven Leadership: Leading with Dharma in the Age of AI — a 2025 publication that wasn’t designed to go viral, and didn’t. But it has found its way into institutional margins, where deeper questions about leadership and meaning are now being asked.
For a long time, the ethics of artificial intelligence in India was discussed almost exclusively in elite academic or regulatory circles. Outside those spaces, conversations remained focused on productivity, employment disruption, and automation opportunities.
But in 2025, the silence began to fracture — not because of any one event, but because of a rising discomfort with how quickly decisions were being outsourced to machines, and how little thought was being given to how those machines were being trained.
Across multiple universities—public and private—there has been a noted increase in student-initiated seminars on algorithmic bias, surveillance risks, and ethical design. Guest speakers from philosophy departments are now being invited to tech conclaves. At least two journalism colleges have added a section on AI and ethics in Indian philosophy.
And in many of these places, AI Driven Leadership: Leading with Dharma in the Age of AI is being cited—not as gospel, but as a starting point.
Murthy’s book is not framed as a prediction, a policy guide, or a thought-leader statement. It’s slow. Circular. Demanding. It doesn’t argue. It asks.
It reintroduces words many forgot—Sankalpa, Viveka, Swadhyaya—not to preach tradition, but to invite reconsideration of how power operates in invisible systems.
Its core idea is not to reject AI, but to ask who leads it, why, and from where.
That tone of reflection instead of instruction has made it suitable for the very spaces where certainty is being questioned: ethics councils in tech startups, humanities departments inside engineering colleges, and new-age civil society workshops rethinking data justice.
A Shift in India’s Public Imagination
In hindsight, what felt like scattered interest in AI ethics across various institutions is now looking like an ecosystem forming — informal, critical, and plural.
Books like AI Driven Leadership: Leading with Dharma in the Age of AI are being referenced alongside Ambedkar’s thoughts on justice, Gandhi’s ideas on swaraj, and Rabindranath Tagore’s writings on technology and culture.
This suggests a deeper shift. India’s public imagination around AI is expanding — not in terms of code, but in terms of consequence.
And leadership, as a concept, is being reexamined as a moral undertaking, not just a managerial one.
A Book That Became a Conversation
What’s interesting is that AI Driven Leadership: Leading with Dharma in the Age of AI is rarely the subject of panels or reviews. Instead, it is treated like background noise — ambient thought that creates space for other, more grounded questions.
It’s not being quoted to validate opinions. It’s being used to unearth better questions:
● Can a technology be neutral in a society that isn’t?
● Is alignment a technical parameter or an ethical one?
● Should Dharma influence design, or only behavior?
In many ways, the book has done what few intended texts do: it’s dissolved into the culture of reflection.
The rise of AI in India is not going to slow down. And not everyone will read Murthy’s book, or books like it.
But the fact that AI Driven Leadership: Leading with Dharma in the Age of AI is surfacing in so many different—and often unrelated—places tells us something more important: we are starting to take ethics personally.
Not just as compliance, but as inquiry. Not just as regulation, but as responsibility.
And in that environment, books don’t lead conversations.
Also Read: Kuruva Venkataramana Murthy Brings Inner Awareness into the Leadership Conversation
