My journey began with doctoral studies at the Institute of Medical Sciences, Banaras Hindu University. At a time when access to resources was limited, culturing primary tumour cells and studying karyotypes felt like a significant scientific feat. Back then performing an experiment successfully was far important than worrying about the application of findings.

Starting with humble beginnings in the company of chromosomes, knocking out genes, building systems biology platforms, moving to synthetic biology, identifying policy gaps, building entrepreneurship initiaives and ultimately ending up in philosophy, may look like separate bins but they are, in fact, venn diagram of a restless human mind.

As you move from one unanswered question to another, at some point you wonder if the pursuit itself has become repetitive — constantly moving in circes while losing sight of the centre. As you get more encouraging response, perhaps mind tends to settle into a safe orbit of repetitiveness.

As you grow older and look back at the journey, you see pleasant memory edifices becoming irrelevant as the body loan goes back to the Earth and will soon turn into the top soil. The need of the hour is not to build more stories in the material world but experience the core of who you are!

Interestingly, we remove life from organisms and call the study 'Life Sciences'. I guess till one experiences the 'Life Operating System', everything else looks like window shopping. As you move from phenotype to an atom, you coin interesting terms like genetics, gross anatomy, histology, cell biology, molecular biology and biochemistry.

Chemistry is born when atoms talk to each other. When you reach the atomic level of human description, you realize that almost everything is made of space - the 'saakar' (something) made from 'nirakaar' (nothing). Perhaps this is a reasonable meeting point of spirituality and science - the study of space within !

Here is where the reductionist journey arrives at its most stunning destination — or perhaps its most humbling wall. You begin with an organism: breathing, moving, responding to its world. You reduce it to its tissues, and the tissues to their cells, and the cells to their molecules, and the molecules to their atoms and the interactions between them. And at every step, the explanation is more precise and more powerful. And yet. Something remains. Something resists the reduction. Something continues to ask the questions that the reduction is supposed to answer.

That something is consciousness. The simple, inescapable, unresolved fact of subjective experience — the redness of red, the ache of longing, the particular quality of this present moment reading these words. No molecular account has yet explained why there is something it is like to be a living thing. This is what the philosopher David Chalmers called the hard problem, and it remains hard not because scientists haven't tried hard enough, but because the conceptual tools of third-person science may be fundamentally insufficient for a first-person phenomenon.

Pawan Dhar's engagement with consciousness is the natural culmination of a career spent drilling down through the layers of life. Having arrived at the molecular level and found it beautiful but not complete, he has turned toward what the ancient Indian philosophical traditions called chit — pure awareness, the witness that observes without being fully captured by any of the observed layers. This is not a retreat from science; it is science's most honest acknowledgment of its own horizon.

The journey, as Pawan emphasizes, is still very much ongoing. Consciousness may not yield to the same methods that cracked the genetic code — but neither will it yield to those who refuse to approach it with the same seriousness, patience, and willingness to be surprised that good science demands. The frontier is wide open. The walking continues.