2025: The worlds that took shape
It was the night of November 5, 2024. I was in Suwanee, Georgia, sitting at the restaurant and bar Rang Sip & Dine to follow the election results. My team had prepared three speeches for me: victory, concession, and too close to call. But by the time the race was called later that night, most people had left. I didn’t end up giving any of the speeches and just thanked people on their way out. As I went to sleep that night, I felt disappointment, pride, and relief that it was all over.
Today, one year later, I’m in a world that’s perhaps diametrically the opposite. I live in San Francisco and run Corridor, a company at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity in the heart of Silicon Valley. My life has been marked by constant movement between different worlds. I tried to make sense of this four and a half years ago, when I published my senior column in the Stanford Daily: “When two worlds collide.” In that piece, I explored the two worlds that defined my life, Indian and American. I realized that rather than being separate and distinct, each world shaped the other.
Since then, I’ve connected even more worlds: technology, politics, law, and religion. Here are the worlds that took shape.
“Protect Open-Source Software,” said a January 2022 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that I had drafted for Eric Schmidt. It was right after Log4Shell, a vulnerability in an open source software (OSS) component used in hundreds of millions of internet devices. Suddenly, everyone was concerned about OSS security. I wrote an internal memo for Schmidt Futures proposing what we should do about it. My memo was approved — and just like that, I had a $2 million budget.
I was 22, still in my first year of law school in Washington, D.C., and now had the extraordinary privilege of allocating where real money would go. We funded projects to map open source dependencies, support policy research, and give grants directly to maintainers. I learned that philanthropy does not create permanent solutions, but rather enables experiments that governments or markets could later scale. It’s a tool that buys people space to think.
I split my two and a half years in D.C. between various worlds. I worked on election security at CISA, did AI research at Stanford, and built infrastructure for early-stage startups. At law school, I co-authored my first law review article because I knew how to reverse engineer WhatsApp. I realized that being at the intersection of multiple worlds gave me an unparalleled opportunity to make an impact. At one point, I had nearly seven jobs (obviously unsustainable in the long run!), but I was learning so much and loved it. The hardest part was leaving all these commitments behind in December 2023 when I decided to run for office.
“Ashwin, can you show me around a Hindu temple?” my friend asked me in D.C. one day in July 2023. I took him to the nearby Shiva Vishnu temple in Maryland, not expecting much. But it happened to be Saturday, when they perform the Venkateshwara Abhishekam — a ceremonial bathing of the deity that I had never seen before. I was spellbound, chanting along and helping with the ceremony.
I grew up Hindu and had been practicing quietly for years: studying Sankara’s commentaries about Advaita Vedanta, chanting the Rudram every morning, and singing Thiruppugazh songs my grandmother taught me.1 But my practice began moving from something in solitude to something I wanted to share, something I found a community around. Friday evenings, I taught Bhagavad Gita classes to high schoolers. Saturday mornings, I visited the Shiva Vishnu temple for the Abhishekam. And Sunday evenings, I would lead Georgetown’s prayer sessions for Dharmic Life, a role a classmate and I stepped into after our Director of Dharmic Life left in the fall.
My relationship with my faith was tested when I entered the public eye. Right after I announced my Senate campaign, a Twitter user wrote: “dei thambi.. did you get your upanayana done? don’t be a sell out.”2 Initially, I was frustrated that someone’s instinct was to question my authenticity rather than ask about my values or what I stood for. But I decided to respond publicly and truthfully: I not only have my upanayana but do sandhyavandanam thrice a day. I added, quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., that one’s religious practices or ancestry shouldn’t matter: people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
I’m proud that the campaign gave me the opportunity to speak frankly about my own moral compass and values. When people asked me why I was running, I talked about the value of seva, or service, and how this led me to serve my community through government. In doing so, I was able to elevate my tradition and connect it to a deeper chord in the American public. “Like many Georgia politicians before him,” a reporter wrote in the New York Times, “Mr. Ramaswami speaks openly of the centrality of religion — in his case, Hinduism — to his worldview.”
In March 2023, I sat across Sam Altman at a Blue Bottle Coffee on 2nd Street — not to talk about AI, but to talk about Advaita Vedanta. I had first cold emailed him after seeing a tweet where he said he believed in the “absolute equivalence of brahman and atman.”3 Now here we were, my first time back in the Bay Area since I left Stanford in 2020. I was fascinated to hear Sam talk about how Buddhism, meditation, and spirituality is popular in the valley, and we talked about Brahman and the nature of consciousness. I suggested he join a Vedanta study group, but there were competing demands on Sam’s time. ChatGPT had just launched a few months ago. We finished our conversation and he left in a black SUV.
That summer, I watched Oppenheimer and saw another man who had drawn on Vedanta while building technology that would change the world. But he learned the wrong lessons. Oppenheimer studied the Gita to absolve himself of moral culpability around his actions. He believed that building the atomic bomb from Los Alamos was his dharma, or duty — a decision he would never regret. But what did he leave out? The Gita speaks of the imperishable self, the atman: a divine Truth from which all dharma follows. But without such a belief in a divine to ground him, Oppenheimer looked elsewhere. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” is how the Gita describes the divine form of the self. Oppenheimer used this very phrase to describe the mushroom cloud of the Trinity test. Science and technology was his divine.
My path was different. I first learned about Vedanta in middle school through Sunday classes at Chinmaya Mission. After encountering the Gita, I dedicated myself every day to waking up at 4 AM in the morning to pray and meditate. I learned Sanskrit and spent time reading and reflecting on spiritual texts in solitude. And I expressed my dedication to the divine through seva, or service to the community. I quickly realized the best way for me to contribute was to build software. When I was in high school, my local Chinmaya Mission center asked me to help modernize their online registration system. This led to further work with the global organization in India, where I built a forms framework to help other centers around the world collect registrations and payments. The system is now eight years old and has processed tens of thousands of registrations and millions of dollars in payments. This was my first experience truly building and scaling out a product. It taught me how to listen to users, work with developers, and maintain software for the long term — in the spirit of seva.
For me, writing software holds a twofold purpose: an act of service through its utility and a work of art through its aesthetic. But I had to give it up for the Senate campaign, when I stopped coding regularly for the first time since elementary school. I no longer took my laptop with me when I left home, as my free time filled up with phone calls. My GitHub contribution graph went silent. After the election, I finally logged back on to my computer. I remember typing natural language queries into Cursor, astounded by how code generation technology had progressed in just a year. Now that I’m back in the tech world, I want to infuse my work with a sense of purpose, both from my time in public service and the values I grew up with. And as AI reshapes how we write software, I want to keep bringing creativity to it.
Some worlds still demand unfinished business. I had delayed taking the Georgia bar exam by a year because of my campaign. But next came a more difficult challenge, my startup. I knew it would only get busier from there, so I couldn’t delay the exam any further. The exam was July 29, 2025. I first tried to re-read legal textbooks in between writing code, answering emails, and listening to Mahler’s Second Symphony. Predictably, that wasn’t enough. I only truly studied when I finally unplugged from work the four days right before the exam. The Georgia bar exam was the toughest academic challenge in my life, and perhaps the last exam I’ll ever take. (I passed!)
I’m still in touch with friends back in Georgia, and I’ve been doing my best to help other young people run for office. But while politicians campaign, entrepreneurs build. Today, technology is reshaping our world faster than our stagnant institutions can handle it. I want to be at the center of that change, helping to shape and secure it, rather than watching from the sidelines. When I attended the NeurIPS AI conference this December, I was quoted in The Wall Street Journal saying, “I never realized researchers partied so hard.” A different world from the campaign trail — but I’ll take it.
The past few years have also been a time of personal growth. As an undergraduate at Stanford, I focused on school and work but didn’t even talk to most students in my dorm. In D.C., I began to open up as I went from merely coding to discussing law and policy issues with my peers and colleagues. I got my own apartment and took the time to cook three meals a day. When I came back to Georgia, I was initially unfamiliar with public speaking and campaigning. But I quickly gained these skills by the sheer necessity to speak repeatedly to crowds and my love of deep one-on-one conversations.
In San Francisco, I barely cook. Life moves too fast, and somehow it’s also more full: dinners with friends, weekends taking road trips, deep conversations until three in the morning. There’s a community here that I didn’t expect to find, and a sense of energy in this city that I’ve never seen before. It’s not geography, it’s not tech, it’s focus. I used to think the goal was to connect as many worlds as possible: working seven jobs, coding while in law school, keeping a foot in every door. But there’s a difference between being at many intersections and actually building something at one of them. The first earns you a reputation. The second earns you a life. Running for office was the first time I truly gave something my all. I took a risk and lost publicly — yet because I committed fully, our campaign still made an immeasurable impact. Now in San Francisco, I’m continuing to shape a world of my own.
The Rudram is a Vedic chant in Sanskrit dedicated to Shiva. The Thiruppugazh is a 14th/15th-century collection of Tamil devotional songs praising Lord Murugan. Advaita Vedanta is a non-dual school of Hindu philosophy. For more, see “Essence of Advaita Vedanta Philosophy.”
Upanayana is an initiation ceremony in some Hindu traditions, in which one receives a sacred thread and takes on daily spiritual duties, including sandhyavandanam, a ritual performed at sunrise, noon, and sunset.
In Vedanta, Brahman is the ultimate, infinite reality underlying all existence, while atman is the individual self or soul. The central teaching of Advaita Vedanta is that these are not separate — the individual self is identical with the universal consciousness.
Ashwin, you're about 6 years older than me, but you're the youngest role model I look up to. I can't really figure out the words I'd like to say to you right now, so I'll leave them be and hope to cross paths with you someday.
Great read Ashwin!