Kabir stood in the marketplace with a torch. Not to light the way. To ask who was ready to burn.
I have carried that image with me for years. Not because I am fire. I am not. But because I have spent most of my life standing in marketplaces of one kind or another.
Boardrooms. Classrooms. NGO meetings. Grant committees. Spaces where the wrong things are being said with enormous confidence, and you know it. Spaces where mission statements on the wall have never met the decisions being made in the room.
I am a student of my journey. That is not a tagline. It is just the truth. I spend my days thinking about the systems we all navigate. How they are built. How they fail. Whom they serve. And who they quietly, efficiently, and without malice leave out.
A career spanning more than a decade across corporate, nonprofits, academia, and social entrepreneurship has given me the privilege of meeting amazing communities and developing critical knowledge on the environment and biodiversity. I have designed programs that reached people and communities across geographies.
I have sat in rooms with TATA, Canon, Chanel, JP Morgan Chase, and more. Moderated panels with a Magsaysay Award winner, Rajendra Singh (Waterman of India), and built rural development programs aligned with UN SDGs and ESG mandates.
I have read mission statements on the wall and looked at decisions being made in the room and understood, with a clarity I did not ask for, that these two things have never met.
My work has always been rooted in a Gandhian-Ambedkarite philosophy. The belief that every person deserves a dignified, informed, and empowered life.
But somewhere along the way, I started noticing something. A specific kind of tired.
The tiredness of sitting in rooms where the wrong things are being said with enormous confidence, and knowing. The tiredness of performing compassion, performing expertise, performing urgency.
Publicly, consistently, with correct grammar and appropriately diverse imagery. Until the performance is all that remains and you are somewhere behind it, very far from yourself.
We call this work. Sometimes we call it purpose. Sometimes, on better days, we call it what it is.
That is when kindness found me. Or maybe I finally stopped long enough to notice it.
I have been a Youth Ambassador to the World Kindness Movement. A role that humbled me more than any corporate title ever could. Worked with young people from across the world through UNESCO MGIEP on practising kindness. Led sessions where we did not just talk about kindness as a value. We practised it. In real time. With real people. In spaces that were not designed for it.
They just wanted to know if I would show up. And keep showing up.
Kindness is not soft. It is not performative. It is the most radical thing you can do in a world that rewards indifference. It happens when you stop treating people as beneficiaries, stakeholders, or target groups. And start treating them as humans.
That work taught me something else too. The people who taught me the most about kindness were not in boardrooms. They were volunteers. Community workers. Women weavers in Himachal. Shepherds walking trails for generations. People who had no interest in my professional identity, my credentials, or my LinkedIn profile.
So I went to the mountains. Not to escape. To find my way back. As a trained mountaineer and paragliding pilot, the journey seemed doable; my intentions were not to conquer peaks but to walk with them.
I am the kind who clicks through a lens, drawn not to the obvious, but to what happens along the way — a midnight reader who reads because the ideas won't leave him alone. I have spent years in spiritual practice, in silence, in solitude, learning to be present in a way that corporate life never taught me.
The longest journey, I have come to understand, is not across the world. It is back to yourself.
I arrived at this understanding on a trail between Gushaini and Rolla Entry Gate (GHNP), in the Tirthan Valley. Walking a path that someone else called a trek but a local shepherd called Monday morning. The women carried firewood on it. The children used it to reach school. Our guide, who has walked that path more times than he has eaten hot meals, does not trek. He walks.
There is no distinction he would make between adventure and life. They are the same path.
If you have ever felt tired of performing. Of meetings that do not mean anything. Of mountains reduced to backdrops. Of a life lived at the surface.
You might find your way to ElSi. And you might find, along the way, that the path is older than your presence on it. And that to walk it well requires you to become quieter than you have been in years.
Kabir stood in the marketplace with a torch. Not to light the way. To ask who was ready to burn.
I am not fire. But I am learning to carry a little light. And I am learning that the most radical thing you can do, in a world that rewards performance, is to simply be kind.
Without an agenda. Without a brand. Without a theory of change. Just kind.
Love & Gratitude,
Aditya
चले हमारे साथ।
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