When Good Intentions Learn to Lie

A reflection on The Honest Code by Dr. Akshay Gupta

I finished this book on a quiet Tuesday evening and then did something I rarely do anymore. I closed it and sat without reaching for my phone. Just sat there, in the particular stillness that only certain books leave behind, the kind where you are not sad exactly, not moved in any theatrical sense, but something in you has shifted slightly and you are not yet sure what to do with that.

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I want to tell you about The Honest Code. But I also want to be careful, because the moment I describe the plot, something essential about it might slip away. It is set in the world of health technology and startups. There is an AI app, there are investors, there are boardroom decisions and funding rounds and a scandal that unravels publicly. And yet none of that is what the book is actually about. What it is about, underneath all of that, is something far more personal and far more uncomfortable. It is about what we owe to the things we create when we create them from a place of genuine care. Whether love, as an origin, has any power to protect something once the world gets involved. Whether intention is a shield or simply the story we tell ourselves after something goes wrong.

Dr. Arvind Rao is a dentist. Every day he treats patients who arrived too late. The damage is always preventable. The pain is always unnecessary. He carries this not with bitterness but with a quiet, steady grief that I found more moving than any dramatic scene in the book. His idea for SmileScan is not born from ambition. It is born from the exhaustion of watching suffering that did not have to happen. And I think that origin, that particular kind of tiredness that becomes purpose, is everything. Because it means that when the story eventually asks what went wrong, the answer cannot be found in greed or stupidity or a single bad decision. It has to be found somewhere more honest than that.

What went wrong was incremental. What went wrong was reasonable. What went wrong looked, at every individual step, like the sensible thing to do.

I kept returning to Mira throughout the book. Not her father, whose moral clarity is almost architectural in its steadiness, but Mira, the daughter, the engineer, the one who built the thing with her own hands and then watched it change and told herself it was still essentially the same. Her self-deception is never malicious. It is the kind that grows in the space between two genuine desires, wanting the purpose to survive and wanting the scale to happen, and believing, for just long enough, that both can coexist without either one paying a price. I recognised her in a way that made me uncomfortable. I think anyone who has ever been part of something they believed in, and watched it slowly learn a different language, will recognise her too.

There is a line Dr. Gupta returns to more than once, the way you return to a thought that refuses to finish itself. Decay spreads fastest when no one is cleaning it. He is writing about teeth. He is also writing about everything else. About the gap between what something claims to be and what it has quietly become. About the meetings where no one asks the hard question because the numbers are good and asking feels like ingratitude. About the slow, almost invisible process by which a thing built for people becomes a thing that uses them, not through any single act of cruelty but through the accumulation of small surrenders.

What this book understands, and what I think makes it genuinely worth your time, is that the opposite of honesty is rarely lying. It is comfort. It is the decision, made a hundred small times, to let something go unchecked because checking it costs more than you want to pay right now.

I have been thinking since I finished it about the difference between building something and protecting something. They feel like the same act when you are in the middle of them, but they require entirely different kinds of attention. Building asks you to move forward. Protecting asks you to stay still long enough to notice what is changing. And in a world that celebrates momentum above almost everything else, staying still feels almost countercultural. It feels, sometimes, like failure.

But Dr. Gupta’s book quietly insists that the most important work is often invisible. That caring for something honestly, without using fear as a shortcut or profit as a compass, is not naivety. It is the hardest and most necessary form of courage there is.

I closed the book and thought about the things I am part of. The things I have built or am building or hope to build. The intentions I carry and whether I am tending to them or simply trusting that because they were good at the start, they will remain good without my attention.

And I keep coming back to one question, the one the book leaves you with long after the last page.

Not whether you began with love. But whether you are still being honest about what it has become.