Takshashila Institution — Strategic Studies Graduate

Dipankar Sarkar
Dipankar Sarkar · · 3 min read

The Takshashila Institution

I am a graduate of The Takshashila Institution — India’s leading school of public policy and strategic studies — and a participant in its Cogitatum on “Bringing Back India’s Most Wanted” (March 14-21, 2018, with Distinction).

Programmes Completed

Graduate Certificate in Strategic Studies (February – May 2018)

A structured programme covering the conceptual, historical, and analytical foundations of strategic studies with an India focus.

  • CS1 — Basics of Strategic Studies: Concepts and Methods — Frameworks for analysing statecraft, deterrence, coercion, and grand strategy.
  • CS2 — Arthashastra: Indian Strategic Thought — Reading Kautilya’s Arthashastra and Indian realist, Dharmic, and contemporary strategic traditions on their own terms.
  • CS3 — Introduction to Policy Analysis — Structured methods for policy problem definition, evidence appraisal, and option evaluation.
  • Weekend Workshops — Practitioner-led sessions on contemporary national security questions.
  • Composite Final Examination — Capstone integrating the three courses.

Special Credit Course — Inside Xi’s China (August – September 2018)

A focused 1-month study of the People’s Republic of China under Xi Jinping — political economy, foreign policy, civil-military fusion, and the implications for India and the Indo-Pacific.

Cogitatum — Bringing Back India’s Most Wanted (March 14-21, 2018)

An intensive 8-day workshop (Distinction) on the legal, diplomatic, and operational tools available to bring economic offenders and fugitives back to India. The Cogitatum format is the Takshashila signature — small cohorts, scenario-based learning, expert practitioner briefings.

Why Strategic Studies, Why Takshashila

I came to Takshashila as a technology founder. I left with a frame for understanding what technology is for at the level of state and society.

Two threads pulled me in:

  1. The founder-as-citizen problem. Running five startups, you make a hundred decisions a week about hiring, capital, and product. You also make a hundred implicit decisions about the world you are helping to build. Strategic studies forces you to articulate that second layer and to take responsibility for it.

  2. India’s technology moment. India in 2018 was — and is — building the technology stack for a billion-person digital economy. The questions of sovereignty, standards, and security that come with that are not engineering questions. They are policy questions. Takshashila is where those questions are taken seriously in an Indian context.

How I Use It

I apply the Takshashila frame in three ways:

  • As an angel investor and advisor. I look at defence-tech, sovereign-AI, and Indo-Pacific infrastructure deals with a sharper lens. What is the policy environment? What is the geopolitical tail-risk? What does the export-control regime look like?
  • As a founder. Boom Labs and the Web3 work I do benefits from a serious grounding in cross-border legal architecture, sanctions, and MEV/DePIN policy. The DePIN and MEV-mitigation papers I have written on arXiv directly extend into the same problem set.
  • In my writing. My Substack is where the technology-and-strategy work is published long-form. Pieces on AI governance, technology sovereignty, and Indo-Pacific policy sit alongside the engineering essays.

Further Reading