Forty years of work — the patents, the missions, the books, the sketchbooks, the conversations — sit on a website that doesn't yet do them justice. This is a proposal to rebuild it. Inside: an honest audit, a strategy grounded in deep research, and four directions to choose from.
The four design directions toward the bottom are stacked vertically. Scroll through each. There's no need to make a final decision now — react to what feels right and what doesn't, and we'll iterate from there.
The content underneath sampitroda.com today is rare and valuable — a primary-source record of India's telecom revolution, the Six Technology Missions, the Knowledge Commission, four decades of essays and press, the books, the sketchbooks. The wrapper around it reads like a default Squarespace template from 2017. The articles archive stops at 2014. The blog has been silent since 2022. Videos are a list of links. There is no press kit, no speaker booking, no "start here" for a first-time visitor. It undersells the man.
A homepage for Sam has to hold the inventor, the statesman, and the public intellectual at once — without forcing any visitor to read past the parts that don't concern them. Six audiences arrive expecting different things; a good homepage lets each one self-route in the first scroll.
The legacy story (C-DOT, Six Missions, "father of telecom") + current views.
Fact sheet, contact, recent statements, clarifications. A clear "Press" path.
Speaking topics, recent talk reel, booking route. Visible "Speaking" CTA.
NKC reports, Code Swaraj, archives, citations.
Podcast, books, sketchbook, "now."
Inventor / founder credentials. The Electronic Diary, C-Sam → Mastercard.
Five things visitors expect to find on a site like this — and don't, today:
All four directions carry the same content (hero with credentials, Six Missions, life timeline, three lives, library, press CTA). What changes is the register — the typography, palette, motion, and feel. Scroll each to see the hero and a follow-on section.
From the Electronic Diary patent in 1975, to the rural exchanges that put telephones in 650,000 villages, to the Knowledge Commission, to the next idea on the next page — forty years of building public infrastructure for a billion people, and the writing, art, and conversation that comes out of it.
When Rajiv Gandhi asked him to bring computing to the country's hardest problems, the answer was six missions — and the model for how India would build large public infrastructure for the next forty years.
Forty years after India's telecom revolution, the harder rewiring is institutional. We built the wires that carry the signal; we have not yet built the institutions that decide whose signal counts. This is what I have been thinking about, walking the same neighbourhoods in Chicago and Delhi I have walked for thirty years, watching the same questions return in different clothes. Public goods are not gifts. They are inheritances we owe the next generation, and they begin not with intention but with infrastructure — the patient work of building systems that outlive the people who first imagined them.
From the Electronic Diary in 1975 to the National Knowledge Commission to The Idea of Democracy — forty years of work on the systems that connect, inform, and govern modern India.
The patents that helped digital telephony replace electromechanical exchanges, and the mobile-wallet that became Mastercard's.
See the work →Two prime ministers. Three decades of building Indian public infrastructure. Chairman, Indian Overseas Congress.
See the policy →From Dreaming Big to The Idea of Democracy. Hundreds of essays and talks. Free PDFs of the books that should be free.
Read & watch →"We did not discover that India needed telephones in its villages. We discovered that nobody had ever been asked to build them."
No design direction is "wrong" here — but only one is unmistakably him. The Notebook (UI · 01) is the only direction that nobody else's homepage can copy, because nobody else has seventy years of personal sketchbooks behind their public work. The Quarterly (UI · 02) gives the essays and books the publication-grade frame they deserve. Together: a site that feels hand-made by a builder, and reads like a serious press.
Distinctively his. The doodles, the ink, the dot-grid paper, the warmth. Sets the entire visual identity. The "front of house" for first-time visitors.
Editorial discipline. Used inside the long-read pages and the books library. Gives serious writing the typographic respect it deserves.
If The Notebook feels too playful: UI · 03 — The Atelier is the safe alternative — quietly premium, unmistakably serious. If you want a bolder move: UI · 04 — The Voice is the audacious play, with the highest demand on copy quality.
Each button opens an email pre-filled with your pick. Add any thoughts in the body of the email and send. We'll iterate from there.
Or — if a hybrid feels better, or you have a different reaction entirely — write back at solanki.upender@gmail.com. We can also jump on a call to walk through the directions together.