Category: LinkedIn

Over the past year, I’ve been sitting with a question that keeps surfacing in different forms: What kind of change are we nurturing? Not just the outcomes, but the texture of the work. The relationships, the ways of seeing, the defaults we slip into when complexity knocks.

In my previous piece for the India Development Review (IDR), I examined the tension between connection and abstraction. That framing opened up a rich set of conversations about frameworks and fungi, language and leadership, the risks of simplifying what’s meant to stay complex.

This new piece is a continuation of that thread. But it’s also a deepening. It’s about how connection and abstraction are not opposites, but interdependent. About how trust shows up not just in people, but in patterns. About what it means to lead through us rather than by us. And about what changes when we stop reaching for control and start leaning into the relationship.

Would love for you to read and share your reflections:

Featuring Rajesh Kasturirangan, Socratus Collective Wisdom Corporation, Socratus Foundation for Collective Wisdom and learned wisdom from Bamboo Being, Sue Adams, Jim Dethmer and Karen Kimsey-House

Originally written for LinkedIn on 16 May 2025. View original →

Shamnad Basheer (1976–2019) was an IP law scholar, activist, and institution-builder whose reach far exceeded his 43 years. An NLSIU Bangalore graduate with an Oxford MPhil, he founded SpicyIP in 2005 — India’s first serious blog on intellectual property law — and IDIA, which created pathways into elite legal education for students from marginalised backgrounds. He intervened in the landmark Novartis Glivec patent case on behalf of cancer patients and rewrote what public interest lawyering could look like in India. He passed away in August 2019 in an accident near Chikkamagaluru, where he had gone on a silent retreat.

Often, when we remember someone we’ve loved and admired, it’s through stories, little moments and vivid fragments. A conversation here, an act of kindness there. But there are some people for whom this kind of accounting never quite adds up to the whole.

So it was with Shamnad because every story wasn’t just a moment to recall, but a portal to transformation. Because with Shamnad, every interaction carried his deep belief that connection and care weren’t footnotes to change but were the very texture of it.

He built his world not through power or position, but through presence. Through listening. Through making space. Through asking what justice could look like if everyone felt they belonged.

I was lucky to know him, to be changed by him, and to share a few memories of him in this film. But like all lives lived with depth and purpose, no collection of stories can fully hold the whole.

Still, I’m grateful we tried.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 15 May 2025. View original →

Gian Segato’s recent piece, “Agency is Eating the World,” perfectly distils the current tech mood: AI lowers the cost of doing, so now it’s all about drive. Agency. The will to act without waiting for permission. The age of the high-agency solo founder is here.

It’s bold, confident, and deeply familiar. The Matrix-as-startup-manifesto version of reality. Or trope.

But it also made me wince. Because I’d written my own piece back in February, also inspired by The Matrix, and it landed somewhere very different.

Where Segato sees a world to hack, I see one to hold.

Through the lens of Ken Wilber’s integral philosophy, The Matrix isn’t just a parable about breaking free from illusion. It’s a gestalt. A layered whole where truth lives in the interplay between immediate needs, systemic patterns, and deeper, often invisible beliefs. Neo doesn’t become powerful by moving faster. He becomes powerful by seeing more, by learning to work across levels without collapsing them into one simple fix.

In the world I work in, social change, systems work, long messy arcs of becoming, the hardest shift isn’t from inaction to action. It’s from certainty to curiosity. From control to relationship. From “I’ll fix it” to “what wants to emerge here?”

I’m sharing both pieces in the first comment. He argues that AI has made willpower the new differentiator. I think we’ve misunderstood the point of waking up altogether.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 22 April 2025. View original →

Just read Liz Plank’s “Millennials Were The Last Generation to Have it All” and it hit me right in the nostalgia. She captures something essential about 2013-2015 that I’ve been thinking about for a while.

Remember when social media was actually fun? Before everything became content? When we posted blurry photos with ridiculous captions and nobody was trying to optimise their personal brand?

Liz calls 2013-2015 “the best two-year stretch in human history” and I’m inclined to agree. It was that sweet spot when technology connected us without consuming us. When being earnest wasn’t yet embarrassing.

What struck me was how this period coincides with what I observed in my own research on India’s civil society landscape. So many impactful organisations were founded around 2013. Clearly these weren’t just random startups – they were born from that brief window of millennial optimism when structural change felt genuinely possible. Maybe that’s why they’ve lasted. They were created because we believed we could reshape the world for the better.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 7 April 2025. View original →

Yesterday, I was pointed to this 1997 Harvard Business Review piece titled Virtuous Capital: What Foundations Can Learn from Venture Capitalists. I read it and am calling it “The Original Sin”!

Thirty years on, it feels like opening a time capsule filled with sharp insights and assumptions that, in hindsight, haven’t aged well.

The article made a case for philanthropy to borrow from venture capital—longer time horizons, active funder engagement, and a focus on organisational strength rather than just projects. And to be fair, those ideas hold up.

Three truths from then that remain true today:
– If funders want lasting impact, they must invest in strong organisations, not just short-term projects.
– Short funding cycles kill momentum and leave nonprofits scrambling for survival instead of focusing on their mission.
– The best funders are partners, not just check-writers—and yet, too often, the relationship stays distant, transactional, and burdened with bureaucracy.

But here’s where the piece shows its age:
– The idea that philanthropy should model itself after venture capital now feels… let’s say, quaint. In 1997, the VC metaphor was seen as fresh and ambitious. Today, we recognise that complex social challenges don’t follow the logic of moonshot investing. Scale-for-scale’s-sake isn’t always the answer.
– The power dynamic was barely acknowledged. The article assumes funders should be hands-on “helping” grantees, but today, there’s more awareness that the real work is shifting power, not just optimising nonprofits like portfolio companies.
– Trust-based, flexible funding wasn’t even in the conversation back then. It’s clearer now that the most effective philanthropy often looks less like a VC term sheet and more like a deep, long-term partnership without rigid, per-determined conditions.

Some shifts take decades—like moving from rigid, project-based funding to trusting organisations with unrestricted support. What’s something you once thought was a breakthrough idea in philanthropy that now feels…well…less compelling?

Originally written for LinkedIn on 5 March 2025. View original →

Conflict, not crisis. The distinction matters more than it might seem.

Crisis suggests a singular event, a problem to be solved and moved past. Conflict, on the other hand, is ongoing, systemic, woven into the fabric of how we live. And that changes everything about how we need to lead.

For years, the civil society sector has been underfunded, undervalued, and under-supported. Yet time and again, these leaders and organisations have stood as first responders to every sort of challenge. It takes a special kind of leadership to build organisations and movements on unstable ground. And I think what we’re now realizsng is that instability is becoming the default for everyone – whether in government, business, or community work. The skills that civil society leaders have cultivated out of necessity – adaptability, distributed decision-making, trust-based networks – are no longer just for those on the margins. They are the very skills required to navigate the world as it is now.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 1 March 2025. View original →

In 2021, I wrote “Love, not log frames,” a piece inspired by watching civil society step up during the pandemic. It called for greater trust and empathy in giving.

Four years later, I see something deeper. In this new piece for India Development Review (IDR), “Connection, not abstraction,” I’m grappling with how real change happens. Yes, trust matters, and yes, unrestricted funding is crucial. But I’m learning that our role in philanthropy isn’t to design solutions at all but to create spaces where communities can connect, belong, and lead their transformation.

What excites me is seeing how many of us are converging on similar insights from different paths. Whether it’s the Centre for Exponential Change’s work, Blue Ribbon Movement, Einhorn Collaborative, Agami’s experiments in justice making, Rakesh Rajani’s vision at Just Systems, what TIAL (The Institutional Architecture Lab) is working on, Brian Stout’s community of Building Belonging, Kshetra Foundation for Dialogue, or Socratus Collective Wisdom Corporation’s innovations – we’re all circling these fundamental truths about connection and emergence. In many ways, we’re rediscovering what Margaret Wheatley and others have long taught us about how living systems work and change emerges.

I owe this evolution in thinking to so many people and places and wisdom-carriers like john powell. Their stories and insights teach me that the most powerful solutions aren’t the ones we can package and scale—they’re the ones that emerge when people find each other and create together.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 19 January 2025. View original →

Max walked into our lives sometime in 2012, unannounced but unforgettable. A community dog that made Pratham Books and the Akshara Foundation his home—and us, his people.

The day he wandered in, we were all terrified. He was huge, and he was hurting. Someone, for reasons I’ll never understand, had wrapped a rubber band tightly around his ear, cutting off the circulation. The pain was evident in his eyes, but so was a quiet resilience. He lay down in the office, seeking something he hadn’t found elsewhere: trust.

It took hours for him to trust us, and for me to gather the courage to snip that rubber band off. But big dogs, as it turns out, have even bigger hearts. When I finally freed his ear, I realised Max wasn’t leaving. He chose to stay—with his slightly crooked ear that never stood up quite right again—and with us.

Max had big-dog energy. He could knock you over with a nudge, but he never meant to. He was gentle, leaning against you like you were his anchor. For a dog his size, his soul was remarkably soft—tender, forgiving, and full of love.

This space was his home, his sanctuary, for so many years. Maybe he felt it was time to move on too, in his own way.

He lived a good, long life, somewhere between 15 and 17 years. And though we’re saying goodbye now, Max, your spirit lingers in every corner you claimed, every heart you touched. You were one in a million.

Goodbye, Max. You were, and always will be, worth everything.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 4 January 2025. View original →

Forty-three applications for sabbatical support in five months. That’s not a data point — it’s a verdict on what we’ve built.

But what The Cocoon Initiative is doing feels genuinely revolutionary. Placing self-care and well-being at the heart of its mission challenges the long-held notion that self-sacrifice is an inevitable part of the change-making journey. It’s saying that your well-being matters, not just for your own sake but also for the sustainability and impact of your work.

I was particularly inspired by the initiative’s commitment to trust and autonomy. Allowing leaders to design their own sabbaticals tailored to their unique needs is a powerful recognition of their wisdom and self-awareness. This approach acknowledges the transformative potential of letting go, of creating space for organic growth and renewal.

I am glad we are having honest conversations around the challenges of this work and collectively re-imagining what supportive, human-centric leadership can look like.

Burnout, guilt about rest, and a profound appreciation for a space to breathe are experiences that unite so many in this field.

That’s why this initiative is so crucial. It reminds us that our well-being isn’t a luxury but a necessity, that taking care of ourselves isn’t selfish but an act of service—to our work, our teams, and the communities we’re striving to empower.

Also, a shout-out to The Wellbeing Project

Aaron Pereira

Originally written for LinkedIn on 5 May 2024. View original →

Leadership is not a style you adopt. It is a relationship you tend — with context, with the people you’re responsible for, and with your own assumptions about what control is for.

The attached image illustrates this spectrum and acknowledges that different industries demand different approaches. Effective leadership is about finding the right balance for your context. It’s the art of knowing when to provide clear guidance and when to step back, allowing your team’s collective intelligence to shine. I’m curious to hear your thoughts: Where does your leadership style currently fall on this spectrum? How do you navigate it to lead effectively in today’s complex environment?

HT to Rohin Dharmakumar and mathew chandy, Vignesh Vellore and Pranav Sharma for their reflections and inputs

Originally written for LinkedIn on 15 March 2024. View original →