Singapore turned 61 yesterday - forever a few years younger than my mom. I've now had more national days inside the country than outside of it, so it's a surprise that this time around I'm on a train back from Cologne, for a friend's wedding.

So this year, in lieu of the now traditional year-in-review ('21, '22, '23, '24 and '25), allow me a little time to talk about Singapore, to say happy birthday.

I keep thinking about centralized planning vs serendipity, stability vs chaos — and realising that so many of the best possibilities in my life weren't the whims of billionaires or large companies. They were expected outcomes from a country with a bigger risk appetite than it gets credit for.

Thinking about this country and the others in the world it's often compared to, I find Einstein (namesake of this piece) put it best.

Marble and wood. That's what he called the two sides of his field equation. One side chaotic and patched together (matter), the other one carved from logical necessity, exacting in its precision: spacetime.

That difference is the difference between SG and SF, between emergent behavior and calculated bets. As one of those bets, I'd love to tell you my story, but from the lens of this improbable country of marble.

Life can be strange sometimes.

I was born at a hill station near a microwave tower in rural Bangalore. 15 years later, I would end up at a high school in Singapore that was more than twice the age of the country it was in, and whose founder (Reverend William Fitzjames Oldham) was also born in Bangalore, 140 years before me.

When I first heard about a place called Singapore, it was at school assembly in a Kendriya Vidyalaya, in a small border town in Karnataka called Mangalore. The exam was in Chennai, about a day's travel, but I didn't mind taking it. I was 13: I mostly wanted the roadtrip with my dad, just the two of us and all the garbage food mum wouldn't let us eat.

Things changed pretty quickly after the exam. New faces, new people, new words (A STAR? DSTA? ASEAN?). I wish I could tell you more, but I mostly remember that the letter I signed was printed in cream triple bonded paper that smelled really nice.

I do remember hearing the word 'bond' a lot. Piecing it all back together as an adult, the big bet here was putting a lot of money and effort behind kids who couldn't legally agree to much, hoping they'd stay. When we were done with highschool, most of us did. Some of us left, some of us returned, all of us came to call Singapore home to some degree forever.

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I have always felt like I belong to so many people. I owe my life and the trajectory of it to people in the many states of India, of the boarding school in Singapore, to the aunties at Fairprice, friends and colleagues in SF and NY, and a lot more. Having been to four schools and made friends in three languages before I became the first member of my family to sit in an airplane has afforded me some perspective on the systems that we create to grow our societies.

Our societies - marble, and wood.

The natural equilibrium for this country feels like it should be trees, beaches and sand. I look around most days to see skyscrapers, gardens, exchanges, universities (plural), chemistry labs, and after 17 years it's still incredible to me that this place exists. With no resources, very very little space, and tenuous positioning, everything you get to do here feels like it's balanced on an unstable equilibrium of careful decisions.

I'd like to make the argument that the inhabitants of Singapore can afford to be risk-averse, because the country they sit in makes the risky bets for them.

From big things - like building Biopolis and CREATE (where I worked for a brief while as a student), bringing in semiconductor companies (where I did my first internship), to repeated experimentation with fundamental infrastructure, like automated ERP gantries and payment rails (almost anyone who's taken a cab here is aware of the sheer number of logos on the door). Singapore experiments so the people don't need to.

It takes calculated bets and puts capital and people into them, with accepted tradeoffs. I'm a well-documented example.

• A government scholarship found me at fifteen, and a Tuition Grant helped put me through college.

• An NUS grant let five of us (three Singaporeans, two scholars) start a company that automated fire detection with near-infrared cameras.

• NUS funding also sent me to Vienna as an undergrad, to present at one of the largest security conferences in the world.

• SGInnovate and the deep tech investment scheme made Greywing possible, through EF.

In return, I've been able to contribute to the community, build businesses here, attract investment, add employment, subtract some McSpicys and increase the number of happy moments per capita on this island.

It's not just resources, deployed decisively. Singapore has also been a wonderful home and hearth, and houses some of the smartest people I've known - some of them from here and others expatriated. Every single thing I have wanted to do - whether that is to figure out how billions of dollars are lost to bad code, light things on fire and watch them with thermal cameras, build robots for National Geographic, hack Continuous Glucose Monitors to solve ageing, build an international maritime company that could bring seafarers home, or solve the next problem facing AI - I have found the brains, the friendships and the willingness in the people.

As a builder, I've tried a great many risky ventures here, and the answers I got were never no - which might surprise anyone that sees Singapore as risk-averse. (I could also be boring - that's a real possibility too.)

In return for that top down risk, the country has managed to harness it into stability and peace at the level of lived experience.

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Chaos and serendipity are often praised - and Singapore has some of that, but definitely less than other cities. For a country that needs to actively work to stay alive, chaos is the thing you're trying to avoid.

The often undersold thing is the compounding value of peace. You can go far with hunger and grit - I know - but where you go with pure hunger and what you do can often end up some perversion of the why you started. Safety, and a stable platform to jump from and return to can have a compounding effect, if you use it well.

I'm obviously biased - having founded a company that argues for long-horizon tasks needing a stable harness for agents to work in. Took me a little while to realise I grew up in one!

§Cities are always being built

You're looking at one of my favorite things to find in Singapore. Something rare, hard to find, and not written down anywhere. Something that might not be around if you come back tomorrow.

It's a little piece of infrastructure - in this case an access crossing over a monsoon drain, with its own cute little step - that goes nowhere. It enters a small parking lot with a step down which already has entries and exits. It doesn't seem maintained, but it was built and painted well enough to last even without. I also love the cute little electric box behind with its own specific patch of grass!

Singapore has so few of them that finding one is a true joy for me. For a city that grows quickly, that is always building, it doesn't often leave rings or frayed edges at the joins of the patchwork.

I also found it on a 1 am walk - something I never worry about, whether it's me or my sister or my mom. I find that I don't keep track of the sun here as much as I do elsewhere, or my distance from home.

Trains often make me think of dad. His job as a railway engineer meant we grew up across and in-between towns, with the sounds of locomotives punctuating our days. He passed before he could make it to Singapore, but he travelled here many times through my words. I think he would have loved it in person.

It has been a privilege growing up in an improbable city, to have had the chance to be a part of a society built with intention. Happy birthday, Singapore.

Marble and wood indeed.