This is a tribute to Padmanabhan’s works on the holographic principle which have consistently enunciated the profound philosophy that the classical equations of gravity themselves hold the key to understanding their holographic origin. I discuss how this can be realised by reformulating Einstein’s equations in AdS as a non-perturbative RG flow that further leads to a new approach towards constructing strongly interacting QFTs. For a concrete demonstration, I focus on the hydrodynamic limit in which case this RG flow connects the AdS/CFT correspondence with the membrane paradigm. © 2017, Springer International Publishing AG.