On 29 March 2025, at INSIGHT — The Talk Show, organised by the Computer Application Department at VSICS, I argued the against side on the motion "Nationalism and Government Policies in India."
Three arguments I actually made
- The risk of extreme nationalism distorting policy decisions.
- The need for critical thinking over blind allegiance to any single framing.
- How excessive nationalism can hinder global collaboration and progress.
Why an engineer should care about debate
Every rebuttal in that room sharpened the same skill that matters in a code review, a client pitch, or a hackathon judging panel: defending a position under direct, immediate pushback, in real time, without a rewrite. You don't get a second draft in a debate, and you often don't get one in a client meeting either.
As someone passionate about tech, business and leadership, this shaped my resume less than it shaped my resilience and my readiness for rooms where the answer isn't already agreed on.
Where this started
GenAI engineer and AI product builder with 2+ years shipping production-grade AI systems: RAG pipelines, fine-tuned LLMs, hybrid retrieval and multi-modal apps across vision, speech and OCR, architected end to end from ingestion to deployment. Leads engineering for SCULT INDIA's 14-member team, founded the 500+ member TechVerse Enclave community and has mentored 200+ students. Three hackathon first prizes: Changethon 2025 (IIT Roorkee), Product Genesis at Vividhotsava 2025 (CSJMU Kanpur) and BYTEBATTLE (MeetKats).
Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges. Email pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.
