Mumbai, India
One element, many functions.
A show. A farm. A book. A company. It's how nature designs. I simply follow it.
A show. A farm. A book. A company. It's how nature designs. I simply follow it.
Permaculture has a principle I've never been able to unlearn: stacking functions. Place one element well and it serves many purposes. A tree is never just a tree. It is shade, windbreak, food, habitat, soil being built.
Nature doesn't make anything that does only one thing. Twenty years of designing television taught me the same craft: place the right element in the right place, and let it trigger the response. Everything on this page is that one principle, carried across a stage, a field, a page, and a lab.
I was a Creative Director in non-fiction television for two decades. Dance India Dance, India's Best Dramebaaz, Guinness World Records, and many more, made with teams I'm still grateful for.
A show, made well, is never just a show. It is a stage that changes how a subject is seen. Dance India Dance did that for dance. A passion kids once had to defend at home became something whole families cheered for, together, in prime time.
My craft has always been placing the right element in the right place, and letting it trigger the response.
Permaculture gave my craft its name. The land I design is a farm, a classroom for marginal farmers, a curriculum, a demonstration site. One element, many functions, now with real soil under it.
It is also the toughest teacher I've had. On my first day on site, my Excel sheet died. Village life runs on its own clock, and rightly so. I learned to let go of rigidity and hold on to the vision.
I could design the land because I'd spent twenty years designing shows.
There is a hidden world under our feet: living soil, heroic microbes, a web run by fungi. Agents of Nature is a story world set inside it, for children aged 7 to 11.
Kids read the adventure, and then the missions begin. You need the story to solve them. Each mission connects a child deeper to the living world, until they take the oath and are certified as Agents of Nature. They don't just read the book. They join it.
The same principle again, on a page. Book one is out in the world; the next three are written. It grew directly out of the farm, the way the farm grew out of the shows.
Nature's technology. More advanced than anything we've built.
BRKthrough Media is a content lab in Mumbai, co-founded with Bimal Unnikrishnan. It's where everything above comes together: a company built on two decades in Indian television, making formats and ecosystems that change how a whole category is seen.
We've watched that happen. Dance found new credibility through Dance India Dance. A business show, once unheard of on Indian television, became a conversation at family dinner tables. That show is now ours to carry forward: Shark Tank India, Season 6, produced by BRKthrough.
Agents of Nature is BRKthrough's first original IP, published under A Hundred Tomorrows, the lab's imprint for books.
We keep asking children to save nature. It isn't working, because you don't save something you believe you're separate from. Stories can carry a child from "nature needs me" to "I am nature."
The research points the same way: what changes how a child acts is not knowledge about nature, it is the felt sense of being part of it. I've watched it happen on a farm, in a classroom, and on a page. When we see the interconnectedness, we realise we were never saving nature. We were taking care of ourselves.
If you're building something that does more than one thing, I'd be glad to hear about it.