Hi friend. I have been writing daily in a whatsapp group about the Thaai Manne Vanakkam journey through Tamil Nadu. It’s been very moving so far, both to experience and write.

I notice that my sense of “voice” is getting sharper, and I’m more confident with my words. And it’s fun to share. Instead of write a whole new thing for the newsletter, here’s a piece from just a couple days ago, to give you a taste of what’s been happening.

Love you!

Oct 9 2026

The yatra / payanam / journey¹ has finished its first week. Since then, we have engaged with some 400-500 people, not including any online interactions. People are now learning about the yatra from outside our immediate circles.

As we sit in meetings with different kinds of folks, an inquiry starts to regularly emerge:

What does it take to actually change someone's mind?

Our primary goal here is to listen and connect with folks across the state, but there are moments where our yatra’s collective voice - and each of our individual ones - wants to share an opinion, a perspective, a conviction.

One of these convictions is that we’re facing new realities of climate change, industrialization, and flight away from villages to cities, and the importance of natural farming.

Natural farming can genuinely help bring health the soil and produce healing and delicious food. Villagers we meet have generally agreed that if not for the urge to grow one's status and wealth, life in the village is far better than in the city.

But with climate change, I don't know.

I meet environmentalists who still believe we can "solve" climate change in another "man triumphs over nature" myth. Another success of science.

Science is important, but I see a different bigger picture: my (perhaps radical) point of view is that only nature herself will guide us out of the immense collective initiatory rite that is climate change. We must all learn to listen, especially those in positions of power.

In the meanwhile, as we wait for global corporate polluters and government stakeholder managers to learn how to listen, more people everywhere are suffering.

Everywhere, but especially villagers and laborers in places like India.

It might already be too late. In my many years of research on human ecological transformation - the journey I am currently undertaking, and the kind of work that naturally emerges in my coaching - it's not easy to give up one's compulsion to consume, nor addiction to being validated by money, status, belonging, etc.

Will the global "leaders" who have access to tools that might meaningfully shift the trajectory we're on get there in time to prevent mass suffering?

What is in time? Mass suffering due to climate change has been here for a minute. What is the exact planetary boundary after which not a single one of us can come back? Have we already crossed it?

I don't know. And a part of me doesn't want to know. This can't be mastered like it's another intellectual assignment.

Best I can do is listen.

When I listen, deeply, I don't hear despair or futility. I hear: "keep going. You are a part of something. Do your part!"

Yesterday, we visited a natural farm owned by a former Coca Cola employee who gave up his modernity life - to the chagrin of his wife and sons, who still live in Chennai - and moved back to the village.

Since we both had journeyed from corporate towards ecological interests (in different ways) there was some mutual affinity.

Amongst the farmers who joined for a kootam² there, many were skeptical of the urgency of climate change and biodiversity loss. They were wealthier than other farmer villagers we'd met, and more concerned with the commercial viability of different farming techniques. Good thing natural farming is verifiably a good investment.

Selvam Anna was doing his thing: elegantly listening while sharing his own views on village farming as a way to live in sustainable community.

Bored with the conversation, I went to sit with the ladies who tend to this farm and nearby ones for many hours a day. They were initially surprised that I wanted to sit down, but like many laborers I've met around the global interior, they showed a lot of warmth and openness almost immediately.

These Akkas and I had our own kootam.

Later, to Saroja Akka - who maintains her own reforestation and food forest project - I shared about my dissatisfaction that we seem to be spending more time with land-owner farmers, but these laborer women are just as much who want to hear!

This led to many branching topics, one of them the impact of various liberatory movements across Tamil Nadu, notably Periyar's anti-caste movement and Nammalvar's organic farming movement - of which our yatra is a descendent.

She shared with me that farm laborers in the plains of Tamil Nadu are far more aware of their rights and negotiating position than, say, the tribal villagers we met in the Nilgiri hills last week. You can see it in their bodies, their food, their vocation.

On the other side, the farm owner (coca cola guy) would have fit right in with the New Jersey Tamil (mostly Brahmin) immigrant community I grew up with. There's just a certain vibe of a modest person who, whether farming or corporate, focuses their energy on creating security through wealth generation.

My dad was one such person, and even after his death I receive love and security from what he created.

I'm lucky to have met all kinds of people in this walk of life, and this payanam is expanding my range.

There's a difference between inheritors and wealthy tech founders, between founders and well-to-do humble white-collar workers, between them and the typical village farmer, between farmers who own and work their own land and laborers to work on the land of others, between laborers and tribal people who have no choice but to be fed by the government or NGOs.

Yet, we're all sharing this land together. We're all going to be impacted, one way or another, by industrialization. Even if we try to shield ourselves from suffering through creating wealth, and yes we may well put it off while others lose their homes and lives, biodiversity loss and climate change will steal our children's future on this planet.

It is the inevitability of this that has brought me here. It is the recognition that I have no village to trace myself back to, beyond the ones we are working so hard to create in the US and the simple, yet insufficient "my parents are from Chennai."

So, rather than tending and listening to my own land, I'll strive to give voice to all of it.

Thank you for being here with me to listen. What do you hear when you put your ear to the ground?