Mahalingam Balaji hails from a lineage of Vedic scholars and Agnihotries who moved to a secular occupation one generation ago. He had a successful career in the corporate sector for nearly three decades, having held many leadership positions in India and abroad. As a corporate leader and research director, he is well known for his thoughts on leadership and extensive experience in setting up global research and analytics teams and mentoring research teams at scale. Currently, he is incubating a think tank to articulate the Bharatiya civilizational world-view in a contemporary context to develop institutional mechanisms to aid research on Bharatiya parampara tradition. The urgent focus is to challenge the hate narrative against practitioners of Sanatan Dharma, especially the Brahmin community. He writes under the pen name Asi.