Science · Leadership · Philosophy · Cultural Heritage

Dr Anirban Sadhu

Some lives unfold along a single path.
Others move between worlds.

Dr Anirban Sadhu speaking at an event

Between the laboratory and the library

Selected Writings

Ideas across disciplines,
held in one conversation.

Essays on science, uncertainty, leadership, Indian civilization, art, memory and the moral imagination.

01

Education & Memory

A Treatise on Examination Anxiety, Monastic Civilization, and the Theft of Intellectual Property

A comic and affectionate natural history of examination season in a monastery school—and of the lessons that survived long after the marks were forgotten.

02

Civilization & Dharma

The Teenager We Forgot: Why Nachiketa Still Matters

An ancient encounter with death becomes a meditation on courage, attention, and the questions modern life teaches us to avoid.

03

Science & Policy

From National Regulator to Global Reference Authority

A proposal for transforming India’s regulatory institutions from participants in the global system into shapers of it.

04

Art & Connoisseurship

The Making of an Eye — A Collector’s Journey

How looking becomes seeing, and how an unexpected passion for Indian painting became a way of reading memory and history.

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Cover of Notes from an Ancient Future by Dr Anirban Sadhu

The New Book

Notes from an
Ancient Future

Collected essays on civilization, memory, art, science and dharma

“There are books that look backward. There are books that look forward. This book looks into the past to ask what the future has forgotten.”

A long conversation with Indian civilization—its stories, scriptures, images, wounds and astonishing acts of imagination—and with the questions that continue to shape the modern world.

Discover the book

A Life Between Worlds

One inquiry.
Many forms.

Anirban Sadhu’s journey has carried him from monastic classrooms to scientific laboratories, from corporate boardrooms to archives of forgotten paintings.

A neuroscientist by training and a global pharmaceutical leader by profession, he writes and speaks at the intersection of evidence, uncertainty, civilizational memory and human meaning. His work is guided by a persistent curiosity: how do knowledge, action and responsibility come together?

Talks & Public Ideas

Probability, proof
and the wisdom of uncertainty.

Keynotes and conversations on drug development, regulatory decision-making, artificial intelligence, leadership and the civilizational resources we bring to an uncertain future.

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2026

Reuters Pharma · Barcelona

The architecture of uncertainty in modern drug development

Evidence is never complete. Decisions cannot wait.

Media & Coverage

External perspectives on a life of science, ideas and art.

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