The rights of children are not yet acknowledged as the key driver for human progress and development and hence they are not getting priority in economic, social or political discourse.

My wish would be that if we discover another civilisation, it will teach us that the differences between us humans are insignificant, and that we should treat each other with respect, as equal members of the same species. When you're not the smartest kid on the block any more, you maybe don't feel so significant.

We have engineered a world where going into leadership or public office creates huge worry. That's a problem as it means that the people who go forward for these roles are those for whom power is the reward, not doing the work.

There was no single spark that got me into science. My parents were both scientists, so I was exposed to that world from an early age. I remember noticing that science was international – in our house in India, we would have visitors from many different countries and I found that fascinating.

There is a naïve form which doesn't recognise the bubble, and thinks that real-estate will go up forever. There is then a second order overconfidence where someone recognises a bubble but feels they will escape it when other people don't.

Without a doubt, even when an influencer is reaching out to a million followers about fashion, they are still communicating with a million people. That's a staggering degree of influence.

The more pronounced a group identity is, especially when an identifiable outgroup exists, the more likely individuals are to dehumanize those not in their group.

How did we survive for thousands of years without modern medicine? What was it that we inherently had that was protecting us? And as I went deeper and deeper in that area and in that research and in that study, what I came up with was microbiome.

Strategy is, in large part, institutionalised belief. The question is whether your organisation has any mechanism for examining those beliefs — or whether they're just the water everyone swims in, invisible and unquestioned.

Consider the adoption rates of various technologies: for telephone and electricity, it took approximately 15 years to jump from a 50% to 75% market share. With the advent of the internet and computers, that span dropped to 10 years. Television achieved this in only 5 years. But smartphones? They shattered all records with a mere 3-year period.

Our brains are adept at concealing our motives from ourselves, convincing us that we are not as interested in status as we might actually be. This self-deception, paradoxically, enhances our ability to argue our lack of interest in status, which, in turn, can ironically increase our standing within the social group.

Researching the story of empire didn't make me hate Britain, rather it gave me a deeper sense of belonging because it made me realise that we (brown people) have been here for centuries.