Fatherhood did not slow the empire. If anything, it gave its growth a new, sharper focus. Harsh's schedule, once a monument to ruthless efficiency, now had a sacred, non-negotiable block carved into its heart: 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM. The world could burn; he would be feeding Anya her bottle and watching her try to grasp the sunbeams dancing on the nursery ceiling.
But the mind that had built Disha and Gyaan could not be switched off. It observed, it analyzed, it optimized. He found himself applying his principles to this new, tiny human variable.
The problem was sleep. Or rather, the lack of it. Anya's sleep patterns were a chaotic, non-linear system that defied Priya's gentle routines and the pediatrician's guidelines. Harsh, operating on three hours of broken sleep for the fourth night in a row, stared at the crying infant in his arms not with frustration, but with the cold, clear gaze of an engineer facing a critical systems failure.
"This is a data issue," he announced to a bleary-eyed Priya at 3 AM.
"She's a baby, Harsh, not a server," Priya mumbled into her pillow.
"Exactly. A biological system with inputs and outputs. We're guessing. We need data."
The next day, a discreet request went to the Foresight Institute's human biometrics team. Within a week, a prototype arrived: a soft, medical-grade cotton baby-gro with thread-thin, flexible sensors woven into the fabric. It measured skin temperature, respiration rate, gross motor movement, and—through a tiny, hypersensitive microphone—digestive sounds. A small, shielded Bluetooth module transmitted to a secure server.
Priya was horrified. "You're putting our daughter in a data suit?"
"It's just a smarter onesie," Harsh insisted, demonstrating its softness. "It doesn't stimulate; it just listens. We're flying blind, Priya. This gives us instruments."
Reluctantly, she agreed. For one week, Anya became the most minutely observed infant in India. Disha, the AI built to model monsoon patterns and traffic flows, was given a new, peculiar dataset. Harsh fed it the logs: feeding times, diaper changes, ambient room noise, light levels. The biometric suit provided the physiological response.
On the eighth night, Disha presented its correlation analysis. The primary disruptor of Anya's sleep wasn't hunger or temperature. It was a specific, subtle sequence of digestive cramps that occurred precisely 42 minutes after her evening feed if the formula was even 2 degrees Celsius below body temperature. A secondary factor was a drop in ambient humidity below 60%, which dried her nasal passages and caused micro-awakenings.
The solution was absurdly simple: a formula warmer with a precise digital thermostat and a quiet, ultrasonic humidifier in the nursery, programmed to activate based on the room's climate sensors.
That night, Anya slept for a six-hour stretch. Priya woke in a panic, rushing to the crib, only to find her daughter sleeping peacefully, her breathing even on the monitor. She looked at Harsh, who was watching the real-time vitals on his tablet with the satisfaction of a maestro seeing a perfect performance.
"You… you solved her," Priya whispered, a mixture of awe and unease in her voice.
"I didn't solve her," Harsh corrected softly, putting the tablet down. He walked over and looked at Anya's sleeping face. "I just learned how to listen to her properly."
The "Anya Dataset," as he privately called it, had a more profound impact than better sleep. It forced a paradigm shift in one of his newest, most ambitious ventures: "Arogya," the fledgling digital healthcare wing of Harsh Technologies.
The Arogya team had been focused on hospital management systems and telemedicine for rural clinics—macro-scale solutions. Harsh summoned the lead developers.
"You're thinking too big," he told them, pulling up anonymized graphs from Anya's week. "The future of healthcare isn't just in curing disease in hospitals. It's in preventing distress here." He pointed to the spike in respiration indicating discomfort. "It's hyper-personal, continuous, and non-invasive. I want a consumer division. Wearables for the elderly to predict falls. Smart monitors for asthmatics that track air quality in their home. Baby monitors that don't just broadcast noise, but analyze sleep patterns and flag anomalies."
He was describing a world where Disha's analytical power turned inward, onto the human body itself. It was the logical, terrifying next step: from managing a nation's infrastructure to managing its people's health.
As the team scrambled with this new directive, Harsh sat in the nursery at his appointed time, feeding Anya the perfectly warmed formula. She stared up at him with huge, dark eyes, grasping his thumb.
He had set out to change India's destiny. Now, because of this tiny, data-generating life in his arms, he was shifting the empire's focus to the most intimate frontier of all: the individual. The architect had built cities in the cloud and factories on the earth. Now, he was turning his blueprints toward the human heart, the human breath, the fragile, miraculous algorithm of life itself. And it had all started with a diaper change at 3 AM