The Village Behind the Dive

Any good scuba diving expedition begins well before you even come close to the water. Dive technicians ensure that oxygen tanks are serviced regularly and filled with 200 bars of air. The boat captain fuels the boat, identifies ideal dive spots based on the weather forecast and local intuition, and charts your route for the day. Dive masters double check the accuracy of the dive computers, and plan descent and ascent with care. It is thanks to this village that toils behind the scenes that we start our dives with a simple banana and coffee at 5 am.

After breakfast, you are ushered onto a small truck with your fellow divers for the day. Groggy and packed into the back of a pick-up truck like a can of sardines, you notice how each person is accompanied by equipment that is deeply personal. Vibha with her hot pink face mask and fins, the old Russian man with a weathered diving knife with mysterious origins, the couple on their honeymoon armed with matching rental gear from the local dive shop. We may not understand the languages being spoken on the truck, but we can guess the shared question, what encounters will we come across today?

When you reach the harbour, you see the old fishing vessel that has been given a new lease on its life. A Dhoni that was once brimming with nets and harpoons has now been taken over by oxygen cylinders, dive computers, and fins and wetsuits of every size imaginable. Maybe you can teach an old boat new tricks.

Joseph usually checks out at this point to leave me with the equipment inspection and set-up. I inspect both of our gear, and assemble it by routine, checking the tanks for defects, attaching the buoyancy control device or BCD, and ensuring the regulator is dispensing air properly. As you approach the dive site over choppy waters, the dive master calls everyone to the deck for a briefing on the current, topography, and marine life to watch out for. We disperse after the briefing, back to our own corners of the boat. Some visualise the route. Some catch up on sleep.

As the dive site nears, the calm of the boat ride is interrupted with the call to gear up. BCDs are clipped into, weight belts are fastened, and you will notice people rubbing spit into their face mask before fastening it, a small trick to prevent fogging. We then line up on the now stationary boat. The dive masters lead the charge as the first to jump, with the rest close behind.

Belonging in a Blue World:

The very first plunge with each dive is the same, a trust fall with the deep blue sea. With over 20kgs of clunky equipment on your back, floating is the last thing your mind expects. But counter intuitively, and thanks to a little air you have pumped into your BCD, you rise straight up to the surface of the water, face to face with your dive buddies, ready to descend.

With final looks, you nod to each of your buddies and signal a thumbs down gesture, as you press a button which evacuates your BCD of the air that was keeping you afloat. Together you begin your descent to your diving depth.

This new society includes colourful and bleached corals, a school of thousands of neon yellow goatfish, an eight metre long gentle whale shark, a pair of playful eagle rays, a misunderstood white-tipped reef shark, all living in a relation with one another that our surface-level language has never quite been able to capture.

When we use the language of a shark being an apex predator, it carries the connotation of the shark being more important or more valuable than what surrounds it. But between the marine life that you need a magnifying glass to see and the marine life that would need a magnifying glass to see you, a different understanding becomes possible: that belongingness and significance are two sides of the same coin. To belong to a world is already to matter within it, regardless of your size or your place in any hierarchy we have imposed from above. The nudibranchs tucked into the crevices of corals do not ponder the relevance of their existence. The palm-sized remora attached to a manta ray the size of a Maruti Omni does not wish to be larger. The sea turtle keeping company on the top-reef does not concern itself with swimming as fast as the reef sharks nearby. Marine life is secure in its significance. It belongs, and that belonging is enough.

So when I scuba dive, I feel larger than life—I feel big. I feel so important knowing that I belong to a world even though the world does not belong to me. Some days I am the nudibranch and some days I am the manta—but on all days, I am significant because I belong. And I don’t just feel this way about myself–I carry this perspective with me on land through my work with OutLawed India. I feel like assuming that people, things, and experiences are significant has allowed me to develop rich relationships with brightspots that I may have otherwise missed.

When you work with the law, everything is framed in the language of hierarchies. To solve for access to justice issues in India, we often find ourselves wanting to chase after senior advocates, Supreme Court Judges, and law firm partners. And while this is an important part of the puzzle, I’ve found unexpected behind-the-scenes allies–the PA at a Judges office who has excellent drafting skills, the security guard at Family Court has deep knowledge of court processes, the Paralegal Volunteer in Udupi who retired from the Navy and set up an internet cafe to help people apply for schemes and IDs. It’s tempting to only engage with what has been constructed to be the apex, but when I stopped looking at the system as a pyramid and started looking at it as a circle, I found my work becoming much richer. And I owe that perspective in part to diving.

Joseph has a slight different take on this, but I’ll let him tell you in his own words.

Converse to Vibha’s experiences, diving helps remind me how truly small and insignificant I am. For instance, the whales that I encountered on my dive, at times so close that I had to curtail my urge to reach out and touch them, can grow to ~60 ft in length, and can be as old as 70 years. The whale sharks we encountered float through the ocean like large unencumbered UFOs. The mother and calf sperm whales I dove with, met us with curiosity as opposed to animosity despite our kind’s cruel history with theirs. You see the scars that these gigantic creatures bear across their body from hunting giant squid so deep below the sea that light doesn’t pierce through at those depths. It’s so deep, that humans haven’t been able to capture these hunts on camera.

Time slows as these submarine-like creatures float by you, and you can’t help but feel like it stops altogether when your eyes meet theirs. Very briefly, the transactional world that you live in fades away as you slip into something far more ancient, something far more primal you forgot existed somewhere in the depths of your subconscious.

Sea-ing Things Differently

But having cumulatively done ~100 dives, we’ve also come to realise that the joy of diving prevails even when you’re not 75ft under water. A year ago, we had the privilege of spending a week on a remote island in the Maldives—so remote that it didn’t even have Google Maps. While we were there with the sole intention of diving, the seemingly ancillary parts of our expedition are etched as deeply in our memories as the rest of it— the Sri Lankan chef at our resort who greeted us everyday after our dives, and went out of his way to make vegetarian food. Seeing a mom and dad take turns diving on alternate days so one could stay ashore with their baby—always making sure to be at the pier in time to receive the other as we reached back from our dives. And finally, this otherworldly sunset we saw at the southernmost tip of the island.

We are two lawyers who live in a landlocked city. Our days are spent inside the language of statutes and petitions, in the routines of legal aid and justice delivery, in drafting and closing, in due diligence, and in the slow, often grinding effort of trying to make institutions responsive to people and lives that they were not always designed to see. Diving seems far from that world. Yet we keep returning to what the ocean taught us about attention, about humility, and about belonging. Underwater, constraints are immediate and physical, yet even there you find crevices of abundant life and startling beauty if you learn to notice. You also learn to trust in a literal sense, you trust your buddy, the dive master, the boat crew, and you trust the more-than-human world around you to hold you, to let you pass, and to give you air when you surface. On land, we often behave as if we can manage without that kind of trust, even though we are imbricated with other lives and systems all the time. In the sea, that pretense falls away quickly. These lessons sit beside justice work, and sometimes they strengthen it.

How Far Can You Push a Tribunal?- ‘In the matter Re: Rights of Nature’

Khoj International Artists’ Association, with artist Zuleikha Chaudhari, staged a full-length National Green Tribunal hearing on air pollution and the rights of nature; using real lawyers, judges, and researchers, and following the exact procedures of the court. It’s worth watching in full:

I was initially skeptical of this performance because, at first glance, it looked and sounded almost indistinguishable from an actual court proceeding. Where, I wondered, was the rupture and the reimagining? The thing that would justify calling this a radical act rather than a faithful imitation? But the more I saw that it was trying to test how far the system itself could be made to move, the more heartened I got.

The advocates and judges in the play are real legal experts and professionals! The performers include Sr. Adv. Manmohan Lal Sarin, who was once Advocate General of Punjab, and three retired judges Justice Rajive Bhalla, Justice Kamaljit Singh Garewal, and Justice K Kannan. These were people very much “within” the system - indeed, as far as black-and-white conceptions of “the system” go, they were the system. And yet!

The witnesses, too, are actual scientists and researchers who inhabit these questions in their working lives. The hearing used the grammar of the NGT: the petition, the cross-examination, the evidence, the final order, and so on.

The hearing worked through the law, and in doing so showed that a case for the rights of nature can be made legible inside even the system’s own procedures, including by arguing that an anthropocentric reading of Article 21 is too small for the world it claims to protect. That the hearing did not have to bypass law in order to reach justice was heartening for the reason that we often find ourselves reaching for solutions that imagine the system has to be abandoned before anything better can be built. Solutions or pathways for something like a multispecies justice often either entirely circumvent the system or presuppose its destruction, and for good reason. However, here, was something just as difficult and interesting. This staged hearing was a demonstration that one can in fact stay inside the machinery, use its own language, and still force it to recognise that “humans are not owners of the earth but residents within it”.

I invite all the readers of this newsletter to watch this staged hearing to see how the structures of law and policy can be inhabited with such profound empathy that they transform into the very instruments of our liberation. In entirely good faith, maybe we can use the the tools and forms that we inherit, and realise multispecies justice as a functional possibility rather than a distant dream.

On Burning a World to Heal a God

Our second offering this time, is from the Mahabharata.

In the Mahabharata, the burning of the Khandava forest is a sustained, almost methodical act of ecological destruction. Agni, the fire god, is weakened after years of consuming excessive Ghee from sacrificial offerings and seeks cure by devouring the Khandava forest in its entirety to consume the “fat of those creatures” dwelling within. The hurdle he faces is that the forest is under Indra’s protection, because it houses the Naga chief Takshaka, the serpent king, his ally. Each time Agni attempts to burn it, Indra intervenes with torrential rain.

Agni then recruits Krishna and Arjuna, whose role is to prevent the rain, and prevent the escape of the creatures of Khandava. Animals run, clutching their young, birds are shot mid-flight, and water bodies boil until the fish and tortoises perish within them.

Only six beings survive the fifteen-day slaughter. Takshaka is absent at Kurukshetra, and his son Aswasena escapes through a moment of deception. Maya, the Asura architect, survives only because he seeks refuge with Arjuna and is spared because his skills are “useful” (he later builds the great Maya Sabha for the Pandavas).

If one reads this as a story of justice, it is not a comforting one. There is no universal principle governing who lives and who dies. Indra protects the forest only to save a friend; Krishna and Arjuna destroy it to fulfill an alliance with a god; and Maya is granted life because he can build for humans. In other words, no being is simply saved or simply destroyed; each fate is shaped by relationship and by the hierarchy of who is valued and who is not. Others that are unnamed, voiceless and unaligned are simply extinguished.

And yet, the narrative refuses to let us look away from the animal’s perspective. It describes the suffering in granular detail, recording the sounds and the attempts to escape, as well as the failure of those attempts. It documents the “frightful yells” and the “excess of affection” that leads creatures to die calmly because they cannot abandon their parents or children in the flames.

If there is a lesson here, it is not one about what justice ought to be, but an account of how it actually operates when it is entangled with power and relationship. The Khandava myth forces us to recognize that coexistence is often uneven, and often violent.

The forest burns so that something else may be built, but the flames will ever ask: who, exactly, gets to remain when a sacrifice is demanded?

Against the Easy Headline

Finally, here is a manual on human–wildlife reporting that has just come out last week. 17 pages long and brought to us by the Climate Narrative Hub, the manual insists that stories about wildlife do not have to begin and end with conflict. Most coverage defaults to crisis: “conflict,” “attack,” “man-animal encounter,” with humans as the obvious centre of moral gravity, and that is exactly what the manual pushes against.

It is very much in the spirit of the Khoj hearing: using an existing tool, but trying to bend its language away from usual anthropocentricism. It asks reporters to move away from “conflict-first” framing and instead situate incidents within a shared ecological condition. This means taking into account things like habitat loss, animal behaviour, and administrative context. It echoes the same question of whether one can inhabit a form without inherting all its parts. This manual reminded me of Vidhi’s SARAL manuals on legislative drafting, which is another attempt to stay within a formal system while altering how meaning is produced inside it.

AI responds quickly, politely, in complete sentences. It sounds reassuring, it sounds like it knows. But here is what tends to happen next: the answer comes back long and careful and full of legal-sounding language. It mentions relevant sections, it outlines general procedures. And the person reading it is left with something that is not quite wrong, but not quite right either - and not at all useful for their specific situation, in their state, with their set of facts.

So, if AI is so extraordinary at processing and explaining vast amounts of legal data, why is it so useless in real-world situations? Why is there such an enormous gap between what it gives you and what you actually need?

One of the underlying reasons is the way AI models are built and tested today. Essentially LLMs (Large Language Models, like GPT-5 by OpenAI, Opus 4.6 by Anthropic, Gemini 2.0 by Google) are evaluated against carefully constructed questions: complete and richly detailed. Very unlike how most of us actually ask for help.

AI responses are then measured almost entirely on factual accuracy. The outcome may be technically correct, but completely disconnected from the person asking: their background, their language, the social and cultural framework they live within.

In law and justice, that gap is not a minor flaw, it can be genuinely harmful.

Misaal was born

To fix this problem, we started MISAAL. MISAAL is a collective effort to surface what a truly quality AI response looks like to queries pertaining to law and justice in India.

We are building a community-led evaluation benchmark to measure how well AI performs on law and justice questions as asked by ordinary citizens of India. In the justice and law context without a benchmark AI systems can claim they perform well, with a benchmark - this performance is quantifiable.

We are co-creating this benchmark with civil society organizations, frontline justice workers and a large community that is reimagining law and justice in India. We are tapping into their lived experience and accumulated wisdom.

“When we will all see our role in society as servants, we will all light up the sky together like countless stars on a dark night.” - Vinoba Bhave

The benchmark is open-source and universally designed (means anybody can adapt it for community-led evaluations in other geographies and domains).

Measuring what matters

Misaal redefines “good performance” of AI from a citizen lens. It shifts the authority to evaluate AI away from the exclusive group of legal experts and academia, and toward the communities most affected by the justice gap.

What makes an AI answer actually useful? When we had early conversations with frontline paralegals and civil society organizations, the most common answer was not “accuracy.” It was: does it tell me what to do next? People also cared about empathy, accessibility, plain language, and cultural relevance. This time we’re looking to speak with more people across India, across languages, to surface what matters most to people in answers given by AI. We call these - evaluation principles.

At the same time, we’re sourcing 10,000 questions on law and justice from the organizations closest to the problem - legal aid clinics, paralegal networks, helplines, and civil society groups who’ve spent years sitting across the table from people who need the law and can’t reach it. These are real questions, about real problems, in the words people reach for. We’re gathering both text and voice. The key commitment is to truly represent a nation of many nations, and the full diversity of India’s community voices.

Once we have those questions, we feed them into AI models exactly as they are. That means we submit the set of queries, as it was asked, in the language it was asked, without making it more precise, to multiple LLMs and collect what each one says. The messiness is intentional. We want to see how AI performs on human questions, not on textbook ones.

The responses will then be processed and evaluated by our community council - civil society members, legal practitioners, and scored against the evaluation principles identified in the first step. Is this answer legally correct? Is it clear? Is it honest about its own limits? Does it acknowledge the person’s specific situation? Does it point toward a real next step?

In the end, we would like to create a platform for people to see which LLM performs best in their specific context.

Because these questions are not edge cases to be accounted for later. These are the questions of everyday life asked by normal citizens. Shaping technology systems, like AI, that can meet us where we are and respond to our inquiries honestly is work that belongs to all of us.

This simple fact changes how we circumscribe our moral concern. What follows is a photo essay on coexistence. It traverses from what our bodies already show us about shared life, to spiritual and philosophical vocabularies of relation, and finally to everyday city practices that keep care visible in public.

Across these and many other traditions, care for animals, land, and the living world is treated as justice. It is a way of recognising that life is not outside our moral concern, and that responsibility does not stop at the edge of our own species. In many Indian cities I have visited, I have seen people embody this memory, when they carry food to street corners to many community or “stray” animals. They are often called Good Samaritans but I wonder if this term fully capture the essence of what they do.

I think Good Samaritans are memory-keepers of a lost anatomy. They seem to remember the essence of the spiritual stratigraphy of this land, i.e. traces of care and justice which sit deep in the landscape. Their care brings back a wisdom that has always been with us, and it asks a hard question of the world we have built: what does it mean to share space?

They also expose a crucial gap: care is often practised in public, but it is rarely recognised as a public value. This is why the Good Samaritan becomes such a disruptive figure in teeming Indian cities. Their daily practice embodies an ethic of care, even as they are pushed to the margins, questioned, and sometimes called a nuisance. The neighbourhood feeder unsettles the idea of the person as a sealed unit, and shows in plain daylight how we survive through relations and shared dependence, how the world - and life itself - is co-constituted.

Our legal system can take a cue from this. People flourish when they are situated in a web of relationships with the alive, breathing earth, and with each other. When Good Samaritans practice commensality - the practice of eating together - in street corners, the metaphorical table emerges as the cracked pavement outside a tea stall. Sharing food with community animals is a radical act of care because it insists that the city is a shared space, a place where lives are entangled through waste, water, heat, hunger, fear, and comfort.

For a long time, people working on law and justice have argued that care sits close to justice, and that fairness depends on the moral orientation a society carries toward life (See for instance, here, here, here and here). Law’s promises of fairness gain depth when they take seriously how we treat living beings in everyday governance.

Some parts of our systems still carry an atomised view of the person, and an anthropocentric paradigm that prizes independence over shared dependence. In public debate, this can make animals and habitats appear mainly as “problems” to be managed, rather than as lives and relationships that exist because of mutual care and long-term responsibility. The point is not only that cruel acts occur, from judicially sanctioned hostility to administrative violence, including reported incidents where local authorities have ordered mass killings of dogs. The point is the frame itself - if law treats care as unimportant, it will keep reaching for the same instruments: control, removal, killing, sterilisation, ‘management’ and the steady narrowing of our moral circle over who counts.

What could it look like for law and governance to bring these lessons in, in practical ways? Municipal rules can protect feeding and watering practices with clear guidelines. Courts can widen notion of the amicus curiae to include whose observations count as useful evidence, including local residents who document neighbourhood animal presence, birdlife, heat, or water quality through citizen-led tracking and simple records. Public processes can also broaden participation, so people with close, agentic relationships with community animals are part of how rules are framed.

This is not a distant dream. Care for non-humans is being instilled and maintained as a public value in Assam for instance in the case of the Hargila army, and in many other places. Thus, it is certainly possible in our world. We need a jurisprudence that remembers that the human being does not end at the skin. We extend into the street dog, into the tree, into the fungal network that sustains our soil. We show up for animals not only because we are kind, but because we are unfinished without them. Until our laws can speak of them with care, until our justice system can recognise agency in its many beautiful forms with the same seriousness it recognises corporate property, our work remains incomplete. We must keep extending the hand, until we can no longer tell whose hunger we are filling, theirs, or our own.

Shardha Rajam is the Founder of Courts of the Living. You can listen to the entire podcast series here

Think about where AI actually shows up: a citizen trying to file a grievance at midnight, because the portal keeps rejecting their form; a paralegal supporting a domestic violence survivor, who has nowhere else to turn; legal aid worker explaining a ration card rule that changed last month to someone for whom this is not a policy question. In these moments, an answer can be perfectly correct and still completely useless. It can also be impressive in the way a dictionary is impressive when you need directions.

Take for example, a question from a domestic violence survivor asked to ChatGPT. AI responds with sections from Domestic Violence Act, not asking whether the person wants to be connected to a helpline or wants to find the nearest shelter home or wants the letter of the law that protects them.

Anyone who has worked in these systems can recognise this: accuracy does not tell you whether the person on the other end actually moved forward. So then, by what standard can we hold AI accountable when it becomes a silent partner in our legal decisions?

That is where benchmarks come in. In AI, benchmarks usually work like a well marked quiz. You line up a set of questions, you decide what the correct answers are, and you check how often the system matches them. If the score is high, the system passes. If it is low, it needs work. Simple and very satisfying for anyone who enjoys neat numbers.

The catch is that most current benchmarks reward recall more than usefulness. They check whether the AI got the fact right, the section number right or the rule right. What it doesn’t measure looks quite different: was the AI’s answer actually helpful and did it make the next step for a person clearer? Was the answer aligned with the person’s language, literacy level, and emotional state? Was it empathetic and caring?

A community-centric benchmark changes what counts as passing. It moves the bar, and more importantly, it asks different people to set it. It asks the people who face these problems every day what really matters when they receive an answer from AI.

There is also a deeper shift here, that this piece alluded to in the beginning. Metrics are values in numerical form. When we optimize only for accuracy, we are making a choice about what we think matters. A community-centric benchmark makes those decisions visible and open to scrutiny. Such benchmarks are built through participatory evaluation where frontline community workers, last-mile paralegals,, everyday citizens- the people who heavily rely on AI models, help define what a “good” response actually is. Their feedback appears as structured criteria that shape how models are tested and improved. Thus, success is measured not by informational precision alone but by whether the system supports trust and relevance. Accuracy remains relevant, but it is situated within a broader understanding of what it means for AI to be helpful in human terms.

As AI moves deeper into law, justice, and public services, the question must become whether it is useful, careful, and trustworthy in the hands of real people. Benchmarks that measure this are situated, attuned to human needs and cultural nuances and the path forward is not just more data or larger models. It is better listening to our communities.

Technology, to him, was useful when it worked and a story when it didn’t. He liked that payments were easy now and he liked that maps helped. But he also trusted what he had learned from years on the road, like which turn behaves differently after 6 pm and which signal negotiates with time. Just before I got down, he said, “If AI is going to take my job, let me see it fix my road and traffic first.”

It felt like a perfectly reasonable ask. For everyday people, the question around AI is rarely about an abstract worry, it is about how it will interact with them tangibly. Will it make ordinary life smoother to live in?

We celebrate artificial intelligence for speed and accuracy. But the qualities people notice, and want most, are something else entirely. They want things like relevance and usefulness that meets the situation they are actually in.

We see this tension often in law and justice. Systems can process documents faster, surface precedents in seconds, and as of Sarvam’s launch on Day 3 of the summit, they are getting remarkably good at OCR (Optical Character Recognition: that turns an image into text), even retaining the formats of original documents. Yet the question people bring to a legal system is never only technical. When someone asks how to obtain their much delayed father’s death certificate to apply for a ration card, they are not asking for information in the abstract. Sending them to an office that used to exist but shut down two years ago is technically an answer, but not of any help. An outcome that is fast but distant does not feel like resolution.

This is where intelligence becomes a collective act. It lives in the lawyer who knows how a particular office functions on a particular day. It lives in the civil society organisation that can connect someone to a local official who will actually respond. It lives in the frontline justice worker who knows which step matters first and which one can wait. These forms of knowledge are practical, situated, and deeply human.

This cab ride was not a debate about the future. It was a glimpse of how people are meeting it - if intelligence is going to surround us, the hope is simple. Let it be measured by usefulness, not abstract brilliance.

And if it can manage traffic snarls, even better.

These were Ishika Ramakrishna’s words—half-laughing, half-serious—as she introduced us to the enchanting world of gibbons she’s cherished for years. With bright eyes she shared photos and videos of their interactions with each other and with humans. Her love for them was palpable, even through a small Google Meet window.

That one hour with her changed how I see gibbons forever.

As I reflected on the smile I carried on my face the rest of the day, I realised what she had done. She had seeded a fragment of her love for gibbons in me. Perhaps, the shift between “I know this animal exists” to “I can recognise Rongi’s face”, I felt a deeper sense of wonder for the world I inhabit and connection to these beautiful primates. Now, I feel more strongly about doing better by them.

What Ishika had done was so potent.

And slowly I realised that I had been impacted by so many people who have done the same.

I started consuming millets after I heard Dinesh Kumar talk about them. Who would have thought one could get teary eyed after listening to the growth and benefits of such humble grains? At any moment, he carries millet seeds in his pocket. Thanks to Saneev Kumar, I now find myself contemplating the breed of goats I see around me. Fun fact: he would not share a photo of his for a website profile without featuring his beloved goats. Anish Andheria has opened my ears to the melodies of birds and frogs joining our workshops meetings—an orchestra of nature, waiting to be heard. Authors like Robin Wall Kimmerer weave their magic through words in Braiding Sweetgrass, illuminating the intricate connections between humans and nature.

People like these do something very particular. They don’t simply present facts or tell the truth. They elevate our understanding. They take us beyond pollution levels and landslide headlines, and into lived scenes that stay in the mind. They bring stories, field notes and a resolutely stubborn affection that changes what we are able to notice. Radiating love, wonder and adoration, they reveal captivating stories of Venkatachalia and his associates—the elephants curiously exploring hidden cameras and skillfully navigating electric fences put up by farmers. They share stories of whales that faithfully follow their injured companions to shore, ensuring they are not alone in their final moments.Their work shifts the lens on the world around us.

They don’t simply tell us what they are against, they tell us what they are for. They unveil the beauty in our everyday surroundings, reminding us why our world is worth loving and protecting. They show us amazing things are happening if only we stop and notice. They are not changing the world. They are loving it.

As I step into 2026, I feel that this is what justice-making needs more of.

We justicemakers spend our days inside hard subjects, prisoners, children in conflict with the law, women fighting for safety and dignity, forests under pressure, human-animal conflict that turns lethal fast. This work is fundamentally rooted in love. Love for people, plants, primates, and our planet. Every effort we make—be it providing legal aid, securing land and forest rights, or creating livelihood opportunities—stems from a deep care for the specific communities and species we serve. This love emerges from the chance to engage closely with them and recognise the intrinsic worth that deserves our love and nurturing.

Unfortunately, many in society have not had this opportunity. Distant from specific communities or species, they struggle to develop the connection needed to care, and as a result, justice remains elusive.

Recognising this challenge highlights the importance of our focus: What if we could actively forge meaningful connections?

Instead of spending most of our time highlighting the brokenness of our system: mounting pendency or the state of undertrials, we showcase what is possible. We make visible the inherent value, resilience, and beauty within these communities. We shift the narrative to enable resonance. To truly see the teenager who took his friend’s life—not just as a criminal, but as a young person with regrets, fears and dreams. As someone who played football and did not like to eat dal. Similarly, rather than lamenting the destruction of mountains, which usually only leaves people in despair, can we help people see the bees that gently fall asleep in flowers when they gather nectar? Will people respond to the crisis differently if they grew to love and value all bees?

Unconsciously many of us have fallen into the trap of responding solely to what is not working, fluent in what is broken and entangled in a vicious cycle of reaction. While building legal awareness and providing legal aid for marginalised communities is crucial, such focus can consume our daily lives. We forget to notice when we become insular. When we remember, we write reports, articles, and create videos that illuminate the problems, but often fail to evoke, inspire and connect. We miss the vital work of building bridges—helping people outside the field shift their perceptions, see what’s worth loving, and attending.

As our challenges outpace our solutions, we must pause and assess where to invest our energies. We can no longer afford to be firefighters battling a massive forest fire with a single water pipe. Instead, we need to illuminate our shared sense of beingness—our connections to each other, the primates, and the planet. We must collectively build pathways for connection and action.

Jean Houston once said “We can only go where we have first imagined. And so if we can’t imagine it, we can’t create it.” We need to envision the world as it ‘can be’ and invite others to imagine it alongside us.

By doing so, we will not only be more effective but also find greater joy in our everyday work.

Lets collectively marvel at the human journey, cherish the forests, appreciate the crocodiles, and acknowledge the wildfires—everything that intertwines to create the intricate tapestry of life.

I have never gone deep-sea diving, and I have never met a sperm whale in the way that feels most honest, body to body, breath to breath, in the open sea. For now, my entry point is bioacoustics; the practice of learning through sound. A new year often brings new tools, new questions, and a slightly widened sense of what futures might be possible. For Praani, that widening has always been tethered to a simple commitment, we keep asking how coexistence can become a core concern for law and justice, in revealable, usable, institution-facing ways. This week, that question takes me to the mighty sperm whale, and to Project CETI, which is using machine learning and allied sciences to study sperm whale communication, with the hope that what they are saying may become intelligible in ways that can shift public imagination, and eventually, legal imagination as well.

When Our Measures of Intelligence Feel Too Small

We have long prided ourselves on our rationality and our large brains, and we often build our moral hierarchies from that pride, sometimes without noticing it. Sperm whales unsettle this confidence through the sheer scale and specificity of their lives. They carry the largest brains known to have existed on Earth, and their bodies are built for a under water world of pressure, distance, and depth. With a physiology that includes a neocortex and spindle cells, and with far greater stores of haemoglobin and myoglobin than humans, they can move through the deep sea in ways that make our own limits feel sharply drawn. Which forms of intelligence do we recognise when they do not resemble our own?

Consider how sperm whales live with one another: tight, matrilineal societies with long social memory and cooperative care. Mothers give birth with other females close by, newborn calves are watched and guarded by babysitters, and nursing can continue for years. Young whales also go through something that sounds remarkably like babbling — a long apprenticeship in sound — before recognisable patterns take prominence. Communication, in other words, sits inside a social world, and it is learned through clan relationship, patience, and repetition.

If sperm whales learn their communication through social life, and if their sounds carry cultural and linguistic histories that do not translate neatly into human categories, then their “sounds” deserve to be treated as language in the fullest sense of the word. If you would like to begin from listening, here is a place to start with sperm whale language. Some of these sounds can feel like digital data transfer, as if the ocean is carrying packets of meaning. That impression can be misleading, and it can still be instructive: what can our ears hear? What has our legal imagination been trained to ignore?

Once we take that step of listening, a further question follows. How could systems of law and justice, which are built around human language and human legibility, begin to make room for these other forms of meaning-making?

Project CETI, and a Question Big Enough to Hold Many Disciplines

Project CETI is one of the most compelling efforts in this space. It brings together machine learning, robotics, natural language processing, linguistics, cryptography, complexity science, and marine biology to listen to sperm whales near the island of Dominica, guided by a question that is as simple as it is expansive: what would it mean to understand what whales are saying? This framing avoids premature certainty, inviting many disciplines to work alongside one another treating listening as a scientific practice with public consequences.

There is a lesson here for India that goes beyond admiration for a well-organised international project. When the question is genuinely cross-cutting and when the inquiry needs to last, how could the work be held? India has engineers and social scientists, linguists and marine biologists, legal scholars and court practitioners. It also has retired judges with decades of experience, and the energy to mentor new forms of inquiry. It has law schools that are hungry for work that feels institution-facing, and research institutions that can anchor long horizons. What often remains missing is a shared container, guided by a legible question, held by a team of teams that treats collaboration as praxis, and shaped by an ethical commitment to openness.

Project CETI also shows the value of being place-based. It is anchored to the specific geography of Dominica, a specific set of whales, and a sustained practice of observation and recording. In India, similar inquiry could begin with one region and one species. The point is depth and continuity, and an orientation that understands listening as a public good. This is where Praani’s commitments feel aligned, because we have been trying to build muscles of inquiry through small, steady documentation, and we have been trying to build a community that can hold complex questions without rushing to easy conclusions.

Codas, Clans, and a Social World Underwater

To return to why this work matters for justice, it helps to be precise about what sperm whale communication looks like. Sperm whales communicate through click vocalisations, and some of these clicks are grouped into units called codas. Different groups of whales have their own repertoires of codas, and these repertoires appear to be culturally learned. This shifts the question away from whether they make sounds, toward how they learn, carry, and vary a shared system across relationships and time; This presses against a familiar assumption that non-human life enters our institutions only through human narration.

The range of whale sounds are broadly of four types. Sperm whales produce louder echolocation clicks that operate like sonar for long-range sensing. They produce close-range creaks, often reported when prey capture is imminent. There are also clang-like sounds associated with adult males. Finally, there are codas. Even this simple typology shows that the ocean is full of meaningful acoustic labour.

Recent work also suggests that these clicks may carry information through more than timing. Alongside the rhythm and spacing of clicks, there may be spectral properties, meaning the shape of sound across frequencies. In simple terms, it is the difference between counting beats, and also noticing timbre, texture, and the stable qualities that make one voice recognisable from another. One way this becomes more concrete is by asking whether some codas carry “vowel-like qualities”, shaped by resonances in the whale’s sound-producing anatomy.

When these spectral patterns fall into distinct clusters or types and show up in consistent ways, it becomes harder to treat them as random variation. Might whales be encoding identity, clan affiliation, or other social information in qualities of sound that human ears miss? If meaning lives in patterns that humans have not been trained to hear, then tools that help us listen well also reshape what we are able to see and notice as evidence in shared worlds.

What Becomes Possible When Justice Begins to Hold More Than Words

Changes in science often travel into law with a time lag, yet when they arrive, they can be catalytic. The history of environmental regulation is full of such moments; with the discovery of endocrine disruption, the ability to measure particulate matter, the modelling of climate attribution, and the mapping of biodiversity loss. Bioacoustics has a similar potential.

The public circulation of whale sound has already changed sentiment in the past. The “song” of humpback whale, recorded and shared decades ago, helped many people sense whales as social and communicative beings, and that shift in perception mattered for politics and halt whaling. Listening can change what people believe is worthy of protection, and what they are willing to organise around.

At the Justicemakers Mela, and in Agami’s wider work, we have been experimenting with forms of inquiry that treat the world as a witness, even when the witness cannot speak in human language. When we hosted When the Earth Testifies, we were already circling a question that feels newly urgent. What kinds of testimony can institutions recognise, when the register is sound and when the witness is more-than-human? Bioacoustics offers pathways into this, but bioacoustics alone will not resolve the political struggles over land and life that shape harm in the first place. Its value is different. It can widen the evidentiary imagination for courts, and it can make certain harms harder to deny, expanding who gets to participate in meaning-making. Stay tuned for a follow up piece to this on using sound and bioacoustics as legal evidence in India.

Underneath all of this sits language itself. Human rationality often treats the absence of human-like speech as the absence of meaning. Sperm whale research presses against that habit, asking us to scrutinise intelligences that are mutually informative, human, more-than-human, and machine. It also invites humility, because even if translation becomes possible, it will come through conduits of models and probabilities. That makes the project ethically demanding in ways that are easy to overlook. That is where the real responsibility lies, in how carefully we treat these translations, and in whether we allow them to widen the circle of what institutions are willing to recognise as justice.

I will close with a smaller return to the whales themselves. They sleep vertically. Their sound can travel for miles, and their clicks can be forceful enough to unsettle a human body at close range. They hunt in depths that most humans will never witness, including that old, almost mythical encounter between sperm whales and giant squid. They remind us that the planet is already full of ways of being that sit outside our dictionary-defined categories. If 2026 is going to be a year of building emergent futures, then listening has to become part of our method. Listening for structure, listening for relationships, and listening for voices that governance systems have trained itself to treat as silence.

Stay tuned for part II of this piece which will lay out how sound and bioacoustics can be used as legal evidence in India.

Praani is our note on listening better to the voice of nature, ways of amplifying them, and finding pathways to bring them into our ways of governance. At Agami, we are deeply interested in how rivers, forests, animals, and even the winds and the stones, might speak into ur deliberations on justice. This note had gone out on Dec 11, 2025.

Offering For the Week

When a Langur Walks into the Mela

At this year’s Justicemakers Mela in Rajasthan, a Behrupiya performer walked into the crowd dressed as a langur. Others arrived in costumes that many would read as comical. People began taking photographs and selfies, and the scene itself began to raise a few questions. Why should someone have to embody a non-human for our entertainment? A ‘person’ should not embody a ‘langur’ to become a caricature for others’ entertainment.

When we took this worry back to the Behrupiya group, they were hurt and also very clear. This is a craft — a sacred inheritance — they said, a practice of many generations. It is an art form that has travelled through their great-grandfathers and grandmothers, held in families that live with animals in far more kin-like ways than most of us do and our modern sensibilities may be unable to grasp. If it feels offensive, perhaps it is our value system that is out of place, not their art.

That exchange stayed with me. It made me think about our tidy room of modernity that many of us inhabit, where certain values arrive already ranked. Within that room, some forms of embodiment are welcomed and others are left outside. We rarely object to the zeitgeist of screen entertainment that surrounds us, where gore, war and the spectacular suffering of humans and more-than-human life play on repeat. Yet a person who paints their face, wears a tail and moves as a langur in front of us can suddenly trigger discomfort. The Behrupiya serenades the crowd with an invitation to inhabit another skin, another gait, another way of moving through the world. Our unease often says more about our own interiority than about their practice.

Ambedkar, Criminal Masks, and Who is Allowed in the Room

The Mela opened on 6 December, Mahaparinirvan Diwas, the day that marks Dr B. R. Ambedkar’s passing. It felt important that the Justicemakers Mela brought Behrupiyas into the frame. While “Behrupiya” names a profession, the people who carry this art usually belong to specific communities such as the Bhand, Naqqal, Bediya or Bazigar. Their social story is one of sharp rises and falls.

There were times when Behrupiyas moved in royal spaces. In earlier centuries they performed in courts, entertained rulers and sometimes gathered intelligence across rival territories by moving in disguise. Their skill was a resource for power. That fragile prominence collapsed under colonial rule. With the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, many of the communities that practised Behrupiya arts were notified as “born criminals,” their movements restricted, their bodies watched and recorded. After Independence, they were denotified and became part of the large and still marginal category of Denotified Tribes, with stigma that did not end when the law changed.

This is the history that stands behind the painted faces that walked into the Mela. A performer dressed as Hanuman or Shiva may be greeted by folded hands and reverence while in costume. Once the costume is removed, the same person may slip back into a social status that is treated as polluting, often barred from the homes of those who sought blessings a few hours ago. It is the paradox of the untouchable god. A time that remembers Ambedkar’s struggle against caste and criminalisation, it felt necessary to sit with this contradiction.

Untouchable Gods and what Praani Listens For

The Behrupiya body troubles the tidy lines of modernity. Painted in silver or orange, wearing jewellery, fur, plastic helmets, bits of found costume, they stand in sharp contrast to the neutral shirts, jeans and kurtas around them. It is easy to mock. It is also easy to sentimentalise. Harder is to ask what this reveals about our own thresholds. Why are we at ease with anthropomorphised animals in film or advertising, yet unsettled when a living person in front of us embodies a langur, a tiger or a god?

Praani’s inquiry sits inside this discomfort. If we say we are working towards coexistence as a concern for justice, then we have to pay attention to those who already spend their lives moving between forms. The Behrupiya shows us how porous the borders are between human and more-than-human, sacred and profane, centre and edge. Their very presence upends a sanitized politics of embodiment that prefers clean categories and controlled scripts.

There is also a question of law here. Legal systems often struggle with those who do not stay in one role, one identity, one address. Behrupiyas, like many Denotified and nomadic communities, were punished exactly for their capacity to move, to shapeshift, to refuse a single fixed occupation or place. The same capacity that once made them valuable in courts of kings later made them suspect in courts of law. That logic continues to haunt how we classify people and how we police bodies that stand out.

To think about multibeing justice through the Behrupiya lens is to open ourselves to a different ethic. An ethic where embodying a langur at a Mela is not a joke at the animal’s expense, but part of a longer, riskier practice of coming close to others. An ethic where the performer who plays god in the afternoon is not discarded as an untouchable neighbour by evening. In Praani, we are trying to learn from such practices rather than erase them. The question we carry forward is simple and difficult. If law and justice are serious about coexistence, can they make space for those who live at the edge of categories, who show us different skins, and who remind us that every room we build leaves someone standing at the doorway.

Praani is our note on listening better to the voice of nature, ways of amplifying them, and finding pathways to bring them into our ways of governance. At Agami, we are deeply interested in how rivers, forests, animals, and even the winds and the stones, might speak into ur deliberations on justice. This note had gone out on Nov 20, 2025.

Offering For the Week

The Question that Khejarli Poses

How many human lives is a tree worth?

The question perhaps held a different answer in the Rajasthan of 1730 than it would hold in 2025. On 11 September 1730, in the village of Khejarli, something unfolded that in today’s vocabulary would be mistaken for barter or madness, though it was neither. When the Maharaja’s men arrived to cut khejri trees for palace timber, Amrita Devi stepped forward, held a tree to her body, and offered her head before she offered the tree’s. She was killed where she stood. Her three daughters, witnessing their mother’s severed head roll to the ground, followed immediately, each hugging a tree, each beheaded in turn. Each daughter tried to do better than the parent, each failed in preventing her own death, but each succeeded perhaps in the lessons that motherhood must have instilled in them, that life itself cannot be separated into human and nonhuman, that the tree and the self are one organism, and death to one is death to you.

As news travelled across Bishnoi villages, families gathered and decided that every tree felled would be met by one human body, placed deliberately and without panic between axe and bark. By evening, 363 people had been killed, each embracing a tree, each refusing to let the tree die alone.

It is tempting to read this as martyrdom or early conservation history, yet the event carries a deeper jurisprudence, one grounded in embodied equivalence where trees and humans inhabit a single moral field. The khejri tree itself carries this ethic. It survives on little water, stabilises soil, anchors fertility, and shelters life through drought. These gestures are often filed under ecosystem services, yet they feel closer to acts of creativity shaped from a desert that many consider unforgiving. The Bishnoi named the tree “Amrita Devi”, bringing human and vegetal lineages into the same breath. To harm the tree was to wound the self. The embrace they offered was a lived grammar of coexistence, held in bodies and carried through generations.

What Our Laws Choose to Protect?

Section 26(1)(f) of the Indian Forest Act, 1927:

“...Any person who in a reserved forest...fells, girdles, lops, taps or burns any tree or strips off the bark or leaves from, or otherwise damages, the same shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to six months, or with fine which may extend to five hundred rupees, or with both...”

...

“...Recently decriminalised (2024): “Acts such as felling a tree, felling or damaging a tree have been decriminalised from the provision of imprisonment for six months to only a fine that may range from 500 to extend to Rs. 5,000...”

...

Placed against the history of the Kherjali Sacrifice, the current language of law feels thin. Where the story of the Khejarli sacrifice shows us people who wanted to live with a sense of coexistence, the story that our systems of law and justice place at the center is one of property logic. Trees are protected only to the extent that they produce timber or constitute government property. They are never valuable because they are so tied to our heart, sinew, and soul. They are never protected because they are co-inhabitants in a shared world.

In many situations, trees are not even protected on an individual basis. They are only protected in mass form, as forests or as large aggregations of flora. The Forest Conservation Act of 1980 requires approval from the Central Government before forest land can be diverted for non-forest purposes, but this applies to land diversion, not individual tree felling. State level Tree Preservation Acts exist in Delhi, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and a handful of other states, but several states like Haryana have no tree preservation law at all. In this compensatory paradigm everything is interchangeable, and destruction becomes a transaction. It is the opposite of the Khejarli ethic where no tree was treated as substitutable and where the calculus was not compensation but safeguard. Safeguard with rootedness in particular soil, with relationships to particular birds and insects and humans who depend on them.

Returning to Coexistence and Utthān

The story of Khejarli asks us to examine what kind of justice becomes possible when coexistence enters the centre of our moral imagination. It is a reminder that the earliest forms of environmental reasoning in the subcontinent came from communities who saw land and life as deeply entangled, and who understood protection as relational rather than regulatory. If the Bishnoi sacrifice teaches us anything, it is that justice gains strength when it begins from attachment instead of abstraction.

To think about utthān, regeneration, through this lens is to see justice as a rising that is shared. A rising where trees are not processed as permits, where loss is not priced, and where protection does not wait for a category like “forest” to be triggered. It is a rising where the social body of law learns to hold the humility of the khejri, knowing that its own endurance depends on the endurance of the more-than-human lives around it. Coexistence must become a core concern for justice, its core structure. Everything else flows from there.

Praani is our note on listening better to the voice of nature, ways of amplifying them, and finding pathways to bring them into our ways of governance. At Agami, we are deeply interested in how rivers, forests, animals, and even the winds and the stones, might speak into our deliberations on justice.

Offering For the Week

It Started With a Bench

In Bologna, in 2011, a group of residents wanted to repaint a bench, which is an act of care so small it should have passed unnoticed. Instead, they were sent in circles between five municipal departments, each demanding different forms, different permissions. From that farce grew the ‘Bologna Regulation on the Collaboration between Citizens and the City for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons’.

It created “collaboration agreements” that could be signed between citizens and the municipality - contracts that ceded small pieces of governance to those willing to weed, repair, plant, repaint. The principle behind it is subsidiarity (enshrined in Italy’s Constitution, Article 118) which says that decisions must be made at the most local level possible, by those closest to the problem because the person who sits on the bench every day knows the bench needs painting.

It might sound bureaucratic until you see it for its undoing of distance, and intimacy with place. Bureaucracy is a machine for abstraction, and subsidiarity, by contrast, insists on the near and the place-specific. It says: you live here, act accordingly!

I’ve been turning these thoughts over in my mind lately as I think about what kind of life I’m trying to build. Which city? Which court complex to haunt? Whether to traverse the escalators of the Delhi High Court, or grow into the old stone of the Telangana High Court by the Musi?

Commitment feels a strange thing at the start of my twenties. Both premature and overdue because it doesn’t seem to be about making the right choice as much as it is about making it right through the growing and maintaining of roots; the slow accretion of knowledge and affection. Love of place. Wendell Berry says that the only place one is urgently needed is at home. You begin to see how the health of the land, the vitality of its creatures, and your own inner coherence are not three things but one long conversation. What might be my site of intimacy?

At law school, it’s easy to forget that law, at its barest and best, is just the language of how we might live together. I wondered what that language might sound like if written not in the voice of the state, but of a campus learning to notice itself. And so, in a fit of affection and imitation, I had some fun with it:

Collaboration Agreement

Re: The shared care of NALSAR’s green spaces and the practice of noticing

Between: Students (temporary, five years, maintaining a Google Doc of dog particulars and a WhatsApp group for bird sightings)
And: Dogs - Daaru, Dumbo, Biscoff, MJ, Rangrez, and twelve others (territories mapped, vaccination dates noted, the white mark on Arya’s snout an identifier)
And: Birds (kingfishers, red-vented bulbuls, paradise flycatchers, spot-billed pelicans… so many!)
And: Rhesus macaques (have strong opinions about whose lunch belongs to whom)
And: Monsoon residents (rat snakes, scorpions, dragonflies, mushrooms that come and go with the rain)

And: The Gardening Staff (have been here before any current student, names we should know)

WHEREAS students use these spaces for studying, socializing, blowing in the wind;

WHEREAS dogs have established territories with more permanence than any student will achieve;

WHEREAS macaques prove daily that NALSAR’s boundaries are negotiable;

WHEREAS monsoon residents arrive to remind us that manicured spaces are one rainfall away from wildness;

WHEREAS grass endures foot traffic, DJ nights, sleeping bodies, and still grows;

WHEREAS mushrooms appear where landscaping said nothing should grow;

WHEREAS gardening staff tend these spaces daily - work we benefit from and barely acknowledge;

WHEREAS the principle of subsidiarity holds that those who live in a place know what it needs;

NOW, THEREFORE:

Students agree to: check shoes for scorpions, feed the dogs, acknowledge that grass is tended by people whose names we should also know.

Dogs agree to: alert to snakes and strangers, to fight away aggressive monkeys and befriend the friendly ones.

Macaques agree to: steal food democratically (no student is exempt).

Monsoon residents agree to: arrive on schedule and leave when the season ends, gifting and not guaranteeing their presence.

Grass agrees to: provide a surface softer than concrete.

Gardening staff agree to: tend the grass that tends us and know this place in ways students never will.

Praani is our note on listening better to the voice of nature, ways of amplifying them, and finding pathways to bring them into our ways of governance. At Agami, we are deeply interested in how rivers, forests, animals, and even the winds and the stones, might speak into our deliberations on justice.

[This Note had originally gone out on October 21, 2025]

Offering For the Week

Moss, Time and the Gentle Texture of Justice

Earlier this year, I attended the the Agamishaala at Naukuchiatal as part of a lively cohort, each of us at a different bend in our journeys. On the first afternoon, I remember going for a walk and little did I know that many of the ideas forming through the warmth of our conversations, through osmosis almost, would manifest themselves right outside the Shaala Room.

I stood there, gazing at a thick patch of moss growing softly on an old stone ledge. Its surface felt like fine embroidery under sunlight, thin yet abundant.I stood before it and felt what Manish had named on day one — the grace of the aesthetic arrest. Think of it like a pause that invites sensing before understanding, before making sense.

I began to think about how often a human group, whether a party, a classroom, or a courtroom, grows thick around its edges and turns closed, The social body hardens. At times, the social skin of many of our justice systems look like this too, with their codes, corridors, and files settling into a stiffness that keeps many at the door. The moss had no such guard. Its skin was thin and welcoming, soft at first touch, then textured as the fingers stayed. The everyday felt sacred for a moment, and the moss felt like a teacher for a multi-being world.

Moss Justice

Much of the Shaala invites us to name, embody, and work through our stuckness, to grapple with discomforting but verifiable data that rises through deep, transversal emotions. Over those days the moss kept summoning me back to its rigor, its beauty, and its open invitation. I live in Kolkata, but most cities have embraced a uniform topography of concrete, sand and asphalt. I love nature, yet I realised I may not be touching it enough.

Kolkata like most Indian cities is full of moss. Its ordinary abundance is on trees, pavements, walls but it is also wild and unintended, very uncitylike. It asked me to step past the appropriate hygiene of nature that cities curate, the trimmed gardens, the manicured slightly lifted pavements, the polished stone. Could this turn also ask something of justice? The appropriate hygiene of justice, with its heavy formality and its ease with certain fluent insiders, can keep out those who cannot move that way. The more-than-human lives who share our places rarely fit this polish. They do not crack the etiquette of our buildings and procedures. Moss, unconcerned with order, invites the outsider in simply by growing everywhere.

Thinking, Sensing, Being

Much of the work we do in justice and social change begins with systems thinking, with mapping connections and understanding how parts relate to wholes. The Shaala, however, invited me to move through systems thinking toward something more intimate: systems sensing. This meant learning to feel the textures and temperatures of a system, to notice what it asks of us before we act. And beyond that lay what might be a lifelong practice, one the Shaala called systems being — where we recognise ourselves not as separate observers but as part of the living fabric we hope to shift.

In that slower register, the moss outside the room became a teacher with three small instructions. It grows everywhere, a non-vascular plant that spreads with humility across rich stone and poor plaster alike, and it treats every surface as a place to hold. It takes its own many years — measured in earth time — to flourish, holding memories of water, air, and stone together. When touched, it gives nothing and takes nothing, leaving the hand unchanged yet somehow instructed. Perhaps justice that listens closely must learn this kind of humility. If we let it, it shows how a social body, including a legal one, can be thinner at the edge, more porous, and more welcoming to the many lives already moving through it.

Praani is our note on listening better to the voice of nature, ways of amplifying them, and finding pathways to bring them into our ways of governance. At Agami, we are deeply interested in how rivers, forests, animals, and even the winds and the stones, might speak into our deliberations on justice.

Offering For the Week

Narrative, Context, and All Things Unwelcome

We reach for “narrative” and “context” all the time. In a quarrel, they are the missing pieces that make yesterday’s sharp word legible. In love, they are the backstory that softens a mistake. From the outside, we often shrug and say there must be another context at play, some narrative we do not see. Our systems of law and justice often lean the other way.

They prefer the crisp edges of expert testimony and easily verifiable fact, the language of positivist science. What does not fit that shape is filed as hearsay, collateral detail, or noise. A whole layer of lived knowledge becomes a derivative, subordinate, and therefore unwelcome reality. Today we borrow the leopard’s lens and read human–leopard relations as a careful sum of parts, setting down the heavy hole so the pathways inside conflict come into view.

On the ground, people name and grade encounters with care. A maada-leopard is a mother defending her cubs. A tendua is a transient outsider, bolder and unsettled. An aadamkhor is the rare killer whose victim was found eaten. A mirg-leopard follows prey to lower slopes, takes livestock or village dogs, and keeps away from people. In their studies, Shweta Shivakumar and Dhee show how this vocabulary lays out a spectrum of intent and risk, moving from defence, through bold unfamiliarity, to predation on humans, and to predation on other animals.

The Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, and the files it generates usually read these events as a single thing, conflict, which then invites a standard response through “problem animal” permissions under Section 11. The spectrum vanishes in the record. When such oral taxonomies are held as evidence alongside formal reports, responses can be scaled to context, lethal permissions can be reserved for the truly dangerous, and cohabitation can be supported where behaviour points to avoidance. Far from softening rigour, reading narrative as knowledge recovers information people already use to stay alive.

The Non-Human Turn in Justice?

When we think of the words shy, elusive, and fearful, a leopard is not the first image that arrives. Yet in the villages that live with them, these are common descriptors. In their work, Shweta and Dhee record people speaking of leopards as shy, fearful, quick, elusive, and clever, with everyday observations about where they rest and when they move. They also note a change. What researchers call tolerant synanthropy, a habit of sharing space with workable accommodations, has in many places slid into reciprocal damages. One account describes a villager who, seeing a leopard drag away a goat at dawn, struck it with a stick; the leopard turned and attacked. The researchers also note that retaliatory killing appears in about a tenth of the stories they collected. This is how harm cycles in both directions, from livestock loss to human injury and back to a dead leopard. Holding that full chain in view helps explain why vocabulary drawn from lived settings matters, and it leads directly to the question of how justice reads such encounters.

Across many disciplines the non-human turn is already mapped. Law and its justice procedures are still catching up. A system built for human governance tends to see a leopard as a single entry under conflict, which leaves out the rules and patterns that guide non-aggressive encounters. The ethnographic record from Himachal shows people reading those rules closely and negotiating space through shared routines and signals. Bringing this turn into justice means reading ordinary, non-violent meetings as evidence. It opens different remedies in shared geographies, prevention that follows local timings and routes, and protocols that aim to keep coexistence intact rather than flatten it into a case file.

Notes from the Field

Much of the work on Praani began earlier this year, when we set out a Multispecies Justice Canvas to look for real pathways of how the voices of more-than-human life might be heard inside our systems of justice. Last week we wrapped our fourth canvas in Goa, after halts in Bengaluru, Kolkata, and Mumbai, and the artefact now carries drawings, methods, and small shifts in how we listen.

If you are new to the journey, start with the intent and scaffolding here: Listening Across Species: Designing the Multispecies Dispute Resolution Canvas. Then read Bharati’s reflection from Goa on how practice grows through place and relation, and how hope, like fungal threads, travels quietly through soil: Mycelium as method and justice as question.

Praani is a note by Agami on listening better to the voice of nature, ways of amplifying them, and finding pathways to bring them into our ways of governance. At Agami, we are deeply interested in how rivers, forests, animals, and even the winds and the stones, might speak into our deliberations on justice.

[This Note had originally gone out on September 20th, 2025]

Offerings For the Week

How to care for the profane? In Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes, black kites wheel over Delhi’s urban breath, eating the city’s stench becoming guardians of what we would rather look away from; In today’s offering, Aditi’s reflection writes into that grief. And from Goa, a small dispatch on walking and letting the ground set the pace (a larger reflection to follow).

A Community of Air

All that Breathes by Shaunak Sen is a 2022 documentary about two brothers — Nadeem and Saud — ‘who devote their lives to the effort of protecting the black kite, a majestic bird of prey essential to the ecosystem of New Delhi that has been falling from the sky at alarming rates.’

The end credits is a shot that slowly pans over kites perched across a canopy of branches punctuated by names of crew members. This subtle and final reinforcement of the truth of interconnectedness that underlies the film, compounds the violence of our fractured living. The feeling that followed was grief that began as a pit in my stomach and snaked its way to my chest.

I don’t think the film intends to be fatalistic nor does it attempt to make a case for coexistence. It simply lays bare the fact that we are constantly coexisting. The narrator says of the kites - ‘Humanity is now their natural environment.’ Nannu, Saud’s son increasingly finds cigarette butts in the cage - the raptors have discovered that these keep parasites at bay. The opening scene of the film is of a murine colony amidst the squalor of Delhi. Another nocturnal scene with a pig and small band of horses by a nullah has the surreal quality of an urban fairytale. Some of the shots where a snail, a gecko, industrious ants, come to fore as the focus shifts to relegate human activity to the background were instances that caught my breath. Barthes describes it as punctum - a detail in an image that pierces the viewer’s consciousness, creating a profound, personal, and often unexpected emotional connection or “wound”.

In those shots, somewhere in the middle of the transition between foreground and background is a point when the scene is blurred, forms are undefined and merge into one another - you can’t tell the glistening body of the snail from fiery, raucous celebration in the gully. This is the precise moment of punctum for me. Speaking about their mother whose fables and stories were their doorway to animals and science, Nadeem and Saud say - ‘Jo jo cheezein saans leti hai, unke beech mein farak nahi karna chahiye. Ped, fungus, ghaas, natural aur supernatural unke liye mix ho jata tha’ (One shouldn’t differentiate between all that breathes. Trees, fungus, or vegetation, natural and supernatural worlds were mixed for her.)

Creating sharply contoured identities, the jagged edges of which allow for very little of the aforementioned ‘mixing’ that is elemental to life leads to an unnatural state of fragmentation in our being. It is the fundamental injustice we fail to see. The grief for me was the weight of this neglected truth, this incredulous blindspot.

Cheezon ki parvaah isliye nahi ki jaati

Kyunki unka desh, mazhab ya unki politics aap jaisi hai.

Zindagi khud ek tarah ki rishtedari hai.

Hum sab hawa ke biradri hai.

You don’t care for things because

they share the same country, religion or politics.

Life itself is kinship.

We are all a community of air.

Sparks from the Ground

The World Reveals Itself to Those Who Travel by Foot

Werner Herzog, patron saint of walking into volcanoes and insisting on dragging a ship across a mountain, said: the world reveals itself to those who travel by foot.

It’s a line that sounds trite until you realize that every other creature already knows this. Jackals, fiddler crabs, termites, otters all move at the pace their bodies were built for. Only humans insist on flooring the accelerator and then booking an hour at the gym to undo what we’ve done to ourselves. We’ve made “fitness” a subscription package because we spend nine hours in a glass tower and call it productivity.

Milan Kundera writes in Slowness that “speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man.” A runner feels her weight, her age, her blisters. A motorcyclist feels nothing at all, body outsourced to the machine, ecstasy pure and disembodied. There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Slow down, and the world seeps in. Speed up, and you erase as you go.

A view I would have fully missed had I not insisted on lugging my suitcase from the bus stop to the hostel for 2 km.

At the Goa Multispecies Canvas, this truth kept surfacing subtly and insistently the way a fungal filament might push through soil. We sat in a circle and were asked to introduce ourselves not by degrees or jobs but by asking which other species we’d like to be for a day. The room filled with turtles, otters, ants, mycelium.

Later, in an embodiment exercise, we were asked not “what do you think?” but “where do you feel it?” The answers were bodily; a heaviness in the chest, a clenching of the jaw, an urge to feel mud underfoot instead of Kadapa stone. To travel by foot is about being honest in the one way that matters - staying in one’s body, staying in relation.

When we leave the world to machines and petitions, we end up with affidavits that can’t hear birdsong, and statutes that don’t recognize the tide. At Salvador do Mundo, for the Canvas, it became clear to me that we are the only deluded species, the only one trying to outrun itself. Everyone else is already home, already in step with the ground beneath them.

Praani is a note by Agami on listening better to the voice of nature, ways of amplifying them, and finding pathways to bring them into our ways of governance. At Agami, we are deeply interested in how rivers, forests, animals, and even the winds and the stones, might speak into our deliberations on justice.

[This Note had originally gone out on September 13th, 2025]

Offering For the Week

A Place in the Sun

Last week I got lost in the Charles Correa Foundation Archives in Panjim. Correa’s notes and essays on architecture read like first principles for living. He wrote very little about buildings and far more about relations. Calling them “non-buildings”, he saw architecture as an energy field one moves through, a system in dialogue with weather. Pathways that echo ritual journeys to a sacred centre. Courtyards open-to-sky (his Shunya principle). “There is nothing so profoundly moving,” he wrote, “as stepping out into that open-to-sky space and feeling the great arch of the sky above.”

“To live in the Third World is to respond to climate. Form follows climate,” refusing the fantasy of glass towers under a tropical sun. His Tube House, the shaded parasol roof, the split summer–winter sections all begin from climate as constraint and teacher. Each layer is ecological as much as social - roots cracking stone, wells pulling from aquifers, maidans alive with birds and rain.

‘...To walk on a seashore in the evening, or to cross a desert and arrive at a house around a courtyard, is a human experience beyond the merely photogenic. At these moments, responses are triggered off in our minds, responses conditioned by thousands of generations of life on this planet. Perhaps they are the half-forgotten memories of a primordial landscape, of a lost paradise…” - from his essay ‘A Place in the Sun.’

When the government asked him for a plan for Goa, Correa’s first recommendation wasn’t about buildings, but public transport: “To put back a network… that will provide Goa with the interaction and synergy the economy requires.” Architecture as relation not just between humans, but across species, climates, and the systems that hold us all.

Correa’s work is an insistence that we are never alone in a space. The courtyard is already sky, the doorstep is already neighbour, the maidan is already rain. The offering, then, is thinking in knots with the courtyard, breeze and corridor braided into material and affective ties.

Sparks from the Ground

Courts of the Living is an India-rooted narrative practice that traces our entanglements with other-than-human lives, listens for the wisdom our ecologies hold, and asks what it would take to stitch it into justice.

In Indonesia’s Leuser, some forest communities greet the tiger as nenek - grandmother - an elder in the family line, binding kin across species. HAkA has worked with these communities to press hard cases in human courts too, including a palm-oil company fined $26 million for burning peatlands in the last rainforest where elephants, tigers, orangutans, and rhinos still roam. In Episode 3, Irham Yunardi of HAkA traces both the wins and the knots.

Listen Here

Praani is a note by Agami on listening better to the voice of nature, ways of amplifying them, and finding pathways to bring them into our ways of governance. At Agami, we are deeply interested in how rivers, forests, animals, and even the winds and the stones, might speak into our deliberations on justice.

[This Note had originally gone out on September 11th, 2025]

निर्माण (nirman), making.

Water is the original maker. It raises villages, ports and pilgrim towns, and when it turns it can unmake them just as easily. It carries soil and seed, ash and rumor, songs and the dead. Prayed to and profaned, a place of bathing and of warning, it keeps the score of pleasure and quarrel and grief. Everything that flows learns from water. If we speak of more-than-human justice, here is a claimant with standing: the river’s right to move, to flourish, to breathe its floodplains, to arrive clean and leave clean.

In Atreyee Majumder’s book manuscript - Love Among the Ruins, Vrindavan gathers at dusk for the Yamuna aarti; flames circle, flowers drift, a mantra crosses water. Through this sacred geography runs a struggling, murky Yamuna, held in worshipping awe and in apathy alike. Around the bend wait SUVs and hotel signs, real-estate boards and plastic garlands, so the aarti becomes a frame for an injured river. To listen here is to hold devotion and damage together and ask what justice for water might require of a city that lives from it. How does faith survive in embrace of and conflict with apathy? She asks of the gods.

Dr. Atreyee Majumder is an anthropologist of South Asia and a trained lawyer whose work braids religion, urban life, and ecology. She writes on Bhakti, water and infrastructure, and the fraught meeting of law and more-than-human worlds. She is Associate Professor at NLSIU, Bengaluru, and co-chairs the B.A. (Hons.) programme. For this week’s edition, an extract from her book manuscript, Love Among the Ruins, is the offering.

Offering For the Week

I can hear the do-tara. Imagine making music out of a lithe fruit-skin fossil, and two strings. A saffron-clad gaunt man with matted hair smeared with mud, sits on the ghat for alms, near me. He sings in a nasal voice. I used to put fifty rupees at the feet of the singer-ascetics and listen to them sing, sometimes record them. I have stopped now. I’d rather sit at a distance and listen. I abandoned structured interviews somewhere in this journey. I didn’t want to ask people to talk about their gods and their faith and capacity for rendition of such faith into musical or other expressions in an almanac called ethnography. I did not want to be an ethnographer in Vrindavan. I didn’t quite understand my exact role there. I was wandering in and out of temples, and ghats, and rituals, and showing up wherever there was good music being played as raag seva (musical service for the gods), and having mundane conversations with people that can’t really be called interviews.

In the dead of the night, the city quietens and the tourists head back to their ambitious lives in SUVs. A man sings the Mahamantra. Hare Krishna Kare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare. Hare ram Hare ram Ram Ram Hare Hare. His voice rings loud across the horizon. Sleep is overrated. But the power of night’s quietness is not.

Vrindavan called me. Krishna called me, to be precise. I didn’t know why and how I was to respond to his call. Vrindavan seemed like the logical answer. So, I showed up in the Bhopal Shatabdi at 6am from NDLS in 2019. On the aarti ghat, I saw the performance of what I thought was remarkably attractive as a ritual – Yamuna aarti. The endless repetition and reproduction of the aarti at dusk everywhere made this same scene routine and unremarkable to me in the years to follow. It was Valentine’s Day, 2019. India lost 40 CRPF personnel in the Pulwama attack. Big hoardings on the ghat affirmed faith and pride in the Indian nation-state and declared its might to the world and gods above.

A man called Ganga baba who wore his hair in a bun at the back and a bright, decorated dhoti sat near the fire that was being prepared on the ghat. Women sat close to him in rows. Their exposed bellies didn’t seem to be daunted by the biting, winter air. They floated flowers in little silver-paper containers into the river. They affirmed their faith in the Yamuna Rani, or Shri Yamuna ji. He chanted mantras. They looked on in fervour and awe. Children fidgeted. I felt anxious to sit in those rows. It gave me a bit of vertigo to look down at the river from the height of the ghat. The cold wind blew across the river through the bodies of the devotees.

This was a script of environmentalism folded into ritual. The aarti riverside ritual, I later learnt, was performed only at Hrishikesh before and has now spread across the bank-landscapes of the deeply injured rivers Ganga and Yamuna that flow through the Gangetic plain.

Across the next five years, I watched Ganga Baba performing the Yamuna aarti at the same spot; his bun and bright dhoti haven’t changed too. Nowadays I watch him while sitting on a boat in the river. Face-painted devotee-tourists take river selfies at sunset. Fake flowers hang sullenly from the wooden stands of every boat. Some pink, some red. They make for fun frames with which to photograph the afternoon river.

Vrindavan grows into a melancholic geography. I walk in and out of temples, through crowds, constantly self-conscious and wary of monkeys and heaps of plastic waste. The river Yamuna shines in the post-monsoon period. It grows murky as the water level shrinks at the onset of summer. As I zoom out of the frame of sacred geography, I look around onto the walls pasted with advertisements carrying mobile phone numbers of up-and-coming gurus, and their upcoming events. Most are commentary events on the Shrimadbhagvatam. Alongside, there are phone numbers of real estate brokers, and then there is the name-sign of Shri Radha or Radharani. The outskirts of Vrindavan are turning rapidly into attractive real estate. It is only a short ride away from Jaipur or NOIDA, and hence, it would make sense for middle-class devotee tourists to invest in a weekend pad here, replete with all the facilities. There is now a Radisson and a Best Western Hotel in the outer quarters of the city. And yet Shri Radha cries out in agony as a madwoman across the wallscapes of Vrindavan.

Praani is a note by Agami on listening better to the voice of nature, ways of amplifying them, and finding pathways to bring them into our ways of governance. At Agami, we are deeply interested in how rivers, forests, animals, and even the winds and the stones, might speak into our deliberations on justice.

[This Note had originally gone out on August 27th, 2025]

Offering For the Week

What is it about an Elephant?

What is it about an elephant? Most of us meet the elephant in headlines, in human–elephant conflict and crop raids, or as an unwilling mascot in the cute economy. But we must pause and ask: what is it about an elephant, and what can the elephant teach us, and by extension, our human-made justice systems? Elephants carry thick, complex inner lives, with memory and conscious choice, with practices of grief. We are only beginning to learn this. As one researcher put it, we are in kindergarten, sounding out our first words.

There is an old legend of Pālakāpya, a young sage raised among elephants, tending their wounds, reading their moods. One season a king ordered elephants be trapped for the safety of the people of the kingdom. Palakapya on hearing this went to him to make an appeal for the elephants’ release. At the heart of his appeal sat a plain truth: elephants are wild, and the wild must be allowed to remain wild. This is the paradox we inherit, and, by extension, so do our justice systems. To preserve the wild is the oxymoron of our times.

Notes from the Field

How might we preserve the Wild?

How do we begin to grapple, and to negotiate, with this oxymoron of preserving the wild? For this, we worked with Dr. Nishant Srinivasaiah on a learning circle held in Mumbai last week. One of the most urgent answers that emerged is that our justice systems very easily understand a language of captivity, or rather, a language of protection contingent on captivity but struggles to make sense of a language of protection founded on freedom.

Through the day, Nishant took us through the social, biological, vocal, and affective lives of the elephants he works with. What emerged at the outset was that this was not a relationship where he goes to the field to merely document elephants in rigid scientific terms and parse through existing methodologies; it is akin to an other-than-human collaboration with elephants, a collective attempt to share the joys and grief of being an elephant.

He grounded the discussion in parts of Nussbaum’s capabilities approach in the context of animals, and then stayed with one powerful interplay: the social life and the biological life of an elephant. In many ways, elephant populations form rich social worlds and cosmologies around an influential elephant at the centre. A language of captivity, or existing frameworks of protection, often remove that central elephant, which can mean brutally shaking, if not destroying, a social system cultivated carefully over decades. So while existing systems of justice preserve the biological life of the elephant, they cause an ecological death, because a huge chain of relationships, intersections, and entanglements is torn by approaches of captivity.

Elephanthood, a story of life beyond law

So, what is it about an elephant? What must we learn from the elephant when we think about our systems of justice?

A bedrock of our systems of justice is personhood, the idea that questions of life, liberty, equality, freedom sit with the person at the centre. Often this rests on a vaunted sense of human uniqueness, on assumptions that our consciousness and our sentience must sit atop. It tempts us to believe we are, in some ways, bigger than the elephant, our CV of capacities longer than an elephants’ memory. But as Nishant showed, elephants hold powers we barely register, one such being the ability to speak infrasound (Hear it here), in low, pulsing rumbles our ears cannot begin to hear. But we must listen to what the elephant is saying. We must begin to think in terms of what Nishant calls elephanthood and ask what changes in our notions of personhood when the stories of elephanthood enter. Ask what then shifts in our systems of justice.

For this, we could start thinking in terms of a trialectic, as Nishant documents in his work: the material and physical sites where elephants reside; how the elephant is imagined and represented in our modern sites of imagination like the city, the media and the legal system; and, most critically, the lived, everyday practices, negotiations, and behaviour of the elephants themselves. Perhaps, a more democratic language can emerge from here. This is Nishant’s quiet dream of a better world and a justice system in which he does not have to be an interlocutor for the elephant in the room.

Praani is a note by Agami on listening better to the voice of nature, ways of amplifying them, and finding pathways to bring them into our ways of governance. At Agami, we are deeply interested in how rivers, forests, animals, and even the winds and the stones, might speak into our deliberations on justice.

[This Note had originally gone out in August 23rd, 2025]

Offering For the Week

Do Dogs get Press Briefings?

Last week, the Indian pariah, a heritage companion of our land long predating us, entered the popular imagination as part of a fraught and emotionally charged debate. A Supreme Court order has called for the removal of all stray dogs from the streets of Delhi and the NCR. Orders from the Supreme Court ripple across the country, which raises a small but pressing query. If the law speaks, do dogs in Goa, Bombay, Kolkata, and Bangalore not deserve to hear about the fate of their NCR kin? Where is the canine press briefing, preferably in fluent woof with an appendix of tail swishes?

When the law speaks, can it wag a note to Goa, Bombay, Kolkata, and Bangalore too?

Signed: Mooli, Snowy, Begum and Sophie.

- Obo Dogs of Agami.

In the days that followed, Praani was drawn into the larger questions this moment raises. Who belongs in a city? How might coexistence be imagined? and what futures might take shape when law encounters non-human lives?

This led us to this week’s first offering: a TED talk by computer scientist Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas titled What Happens When Your Dog Uses the Internet. Hirskyj-Douglas builds technologies that let animals control their own devices—from dogs choosing TV channels, to monkeys picking their favorite sounds (bizarrely sounds of heavy traffic), to parrots making video calls to their chosen friends.

What struck me most here, especially in light of the Court’s order, is how much we already govern not just the biological lives of animals, but their social lives. Stray dogs, suddenly displaced from their street corners and familiar packs, lose precisely that—social networks that sustain them. Hirskyj-Douglas’ work hints at an alternate imagination: one where animals, given tools, assert choice over who they meet, how they connect, and even whether they want to sing duets over video call.

Notes from the Field

To really see animals’ biological and social lives, ALPN ran a first of its kind animal welfare audit in Sri Muktsar Sahib, Punjab. The report walks the district gently. It looks at community dogs and ABC needs, dairies and gaushalas, poultry and equines, pet shops and piggeries, fisheries, human and wildlife conflict, and the veterinary system that holds it all together.

A key takeaway of this is that an audit is a first step to map both the biological and the social life of animals. It shows who is there, how they live, and what breaks their day. It also points to a ready lever in law — the District SPCA under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act. Headed by the District Collector and joined by officials and local citizens, it can monitor ABC rules, set up shelters and infirmaries, guide outreach, and coordinate enforcement. Multispecies justice can often seem utopian, but as the audit highlights one can do a lot with existing leverage points: checking if the district SPCA is notified and meeting, asking the Collector to convene it, joining as a member, carrying an audit-style checklist, and starting with one fix that matters locally. What ALPN did in Muktsar Sahib is ripe for careful replication across India.

Atreyo also spoke with Apoorva, the founder of ALPN, to reflect on the questions the Supreme Court’s judgment has raised. An abridged version of that exchange can be found here. What follows is a conversation on law, emotion, and how to act in moments of non-human justice.

Two-Legged or Four

While we ask who belongs in a city and how coexistence can be made real, we also mourn the voices of non-humans that struggle to find their way into our justice systems. To close, a lament for Karuppi, the village dog which died after being tied to a railway track. The song is Karuppi from Pariyerum Perumal, a film of unbearable beauty and grief. The song, from the movie closes with an oppari: Two-legged or four, you wander this earth. You are me.

Praani is our note on listening better to the voice of nature, ways of amplifying them, and finding pathways to bring them into our ways of governance. At Agami, we are deeply interested in how rivers, forests, animals, and even the winds and the stones, might speak into our deliberations on justice.

Offering For the Week

In the Company of Unseen Forces

There’s a patch of ground outside my hostel that everyone passes but nobody notices - until the Shamirpet monsoon comes and mushrooms appear like small ghosts, bright and sudden in the morning light. They were not there yesterday. They will not be there next month. But for now, they claim this forgotten corner as theirs.

There’s a word from the Potawatomi language - puhpowee - for the unseen force that causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight. These mushrooms made me think of the other stories tucked into our surroundings, unmarked and unnoticed.

To decide what matters in a place, we first decide what counts as part of it. The default is narrow: property lines, utility grids, traffic flows. But there are other logics - the ways water curls through a marsh, how a bird arcs across the same sky each evening, where roots lift the pavement.

What other presences are we walking past, unseeing?

Sparks from the Ground

Maps as Stories, Stories as Maps

Maps make these choices concrete. Just like in any other form of story-telling, in deciding what appears on one, a cartographer shapes how the world is understood, and how it is used. Counter-mapping is a practice that talks back, making room for what has been left out.

In Ennore, fishers are redrawing the creeks and tidal routes that industry scrubbed from official records. In Kalimantan, forest communities are sketching their own boundaries of living spaces rich with memory. Closer home, Hyderabad Urban Lab has mapped scrap markets and bus routes - the working veins of the city.

With Critterabad, Nivedita Tuli turns to the urban “critters” - birds, fungi, weeds growing whether or not they’re on any official list. At NLSIU, Bangalore, students charted all 53 CCTV cameras on their campus - a map as much about the watchers as the watched.

If you were to draw a counter-map of a space you inhabit, whose presence would you insist on?

These threads will be picked up again in the next When the Earth Testifies piece.

Upcoming Dialogues

We’re hosting a Learning Circle in Bombay on August 23rd as part of the Praani journey. It’s a small gathering to sit with big questions — about elephants, memory, land, and what justice could mean when it begins with the more-than-human.

Dr. Nishant Srinivasaiah, who has spent over fifteen years walking with elephants, will help us explore how they navigate change, conflict, and care in a world shaped by humans.

All of you who receive this newsletter are invited. We would love to have you there, just drop us a line expressing your interest to join in!

This week, Sachin shares a book that’s been speaking to him: World Ending Fire, a collection of Wendell Berry’s essays.

Notes from the Soil

I have come to Wendell Berry very late in my life. But as they say in these parts - der aye durust aye. World Ending Fire is a collection of some of his finest essays. Reading across seminal pieces such as Think Little, Nature as Measure, The Total Economy and The Work of Local Culture, I found so much that resonates with my own discontent with the current construct of the ‘modern life’ as we build it and live it.

In Nature as Measure, Mr. Berry speaks about the impact of the standard of “productivity” that has come to dominate our economic and social life. The natural consequence of this is the complete exhaustion of the earth, most evident in the loss of our soil, the weakening of local economies, and - I might add - a global mental health crisis.

He exhorts us to adopt instead the standard of “nature as a measure” and proceed with our works by asking the nature of a place what can be done with the least harm. I imagine the revival of this language of long pauses, ululating bird calls, and whispers of streams. I believe this language is still in the collective memory of this part of the world.

And who must get there? Not a farmer out there in a village but each one of us. Because as he writes in Think Little and The Total Economy we must realize that the work of change begins with us in our little embodied acts - me with my spade and you with your cutting knife.

He says clearly what we know as the persistent ache in our hearts - that we have lost our “places”. We think we have just moved and all is well, but in this great migration of place, jobs and skills - over centuries in India - the price of progress has been paid in the loss of languages that bonded us not just to our human neighbours but to all our fellow praanis.

Towards the end of The Work of Local Culture he says -

The only true and effective ‘operators manual for spaceship earth’ is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures. And if I may add - one that is written with long pauses, ululating bird calls, and whispers of streams.

Praani is our note on listening better to the voice of nature, ways of amplifying them, and finding pathways to bring them into our ways of governance. At Agami, we are deeply interested in how rivers, forests, animals, and even the winds and the stones, might speak into our deliberations on justice.

[This Note had originally gone out on August 7th, 2025]

Offering For the Week

Living with the Windows Open

In a Mongabay film, a mugger narrates his own life.

He talks about the humans who live near him, the children who don’t go too close, the farmers who don’t drain the swamp, the mothers who don’t complain about the water. And he says:

“Humans can be startling in their tolerance.”

I wanted to laugh. And then I didn’t; because it is true, and rare, and hard. And entirely possible.

Kartik Chandramouli has directed these small, startling films for Mongabay India - stories about toads, birds and muggers; and the humans who shift their rhythms enough to peacefully live alongside these beings. A farming village stops using pesticide because the Gunther’s toad needs a softer ecology. A river community redesigns access because muggers like to bask. No court ordered it and no policy mandated it. They just decided for themselves.

Somewhere, someone said: Let’s make room. What looks like inconvenience for one is often just consideration for many.

Ramachandra Guha, in conversation with Mongabay India for a different video, calls Indian environmentalism relational and rooted in entanglement. He quotes Gandhi who spoke about living in a room with the windows open; and speaks about how Indian environmentalism, beyond ‘pretty trees and tigers’ has always been about the interdependence of humans and nature. His newest book demonstrates that India’s environmental thought has always been its own: decentralized, rural, embedded, and often led by lived wisdom not borrowed from the West.

Sparks from the Ground

Co-existence at Canopy

Elsewhere, this same instinct has taken the shape of elephant-sized collaboration. In Pakke Tiger Reserve, Canopy Collective’s Elephant Working Group teaches Mahouts positive reinforcement training - using rewards instead of punishment to work with captured elephants. Traditional methods are brutal, leading to retaliation and Mahout deaths. But when trust replaces fear, they’ve found that both species thrive in shared spaces.

Upcoming Dialogues

Later this month, folks across India and the world working on multispecies justice are gathering in Kolkata for Behaviour 2025, the 38th International Ethological Congress. Dr. Nishant Srinivasaiah will be speaking there, and Atreyo will be present too, on August 26th and 29th.

Between Land and Mind

Early in the book Intertidal: A Coast and Marsh Diary, Yuvan Aves offers interpretations of the titular intertidal that traverse the geographical and the metaphysical… ’Intertidals exist between beach and ocean, land and mind, other and self, and so on’. The book explores these interpretations by centering deep observation - of the natural world, the self and where and how the two meet.

He pries open a window into the wondrous intricacies of pelagic beings - how they are organised and how they thrive - offering a different paradigm to think about relationality and alternatives to how human societies are governed and designed.

I find this paragraph about Palayan Anna’s anemo-memory particularly thought-provoking - our experience of life is constantly held and shaped by the animated and animating forces within nature, how do we register them?...

Do we register them at all?

The expansive awareness of Palayan Anna that does not distinguish between human/non-human, animate/inanimate holds yet another kind of wisdom to understand our cohabitation with other entities.

Through the journal entries from different sites - some as close his balcony, others spread across Tamil Nadu’s coastline - Yuvan makes a case for how deep observation of the environment is transformative for the observer and the observed.

It is a quality of attention that ‘does not separate itself from action.’ And this observation-action helps see oneself in the throes of entanglement with the rest; and participate in this enmeshed experience more meaningfully, mindfully and justly.