Sparking Curiosity and an Ethic of Care Across Continents - A Conversation with Ramji Raghavan

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

So we have influenced the larger system in a very meaningful way, both the public education system and even the private education system. And with the coming of AI and the need to become a more innovative country and all of that, I think people have seen the value of the Agastya way of teaching and learning.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. As I explore different aspects of the education transition that we need globally, and that is emerging, it's increasingly clear that schools, or what might replace them, won't be the only thing required. There is a huge amount of possibility and power in the broader ecosystem of organizations and networks taking a range of roles in enabling a more creative, meaning-rich, relational educational experience for young people and for communities. This week is a huge privilege to be able to share the story of one such organization that has been quietly getting on with incredible and impactful work doing precisely this for the last few decades at an absolutely massive scale across India. Ramji Raghavan is founder and chairman of Agastya International Foundation. Ramji leads the world's largest hands-on mobile education program for economically disadvantaged children and teachers. In 1998, Ramji left his commercial career in banking and finance to create Agastya to provide science education to over 25 million underprivileged children and 250,000 government school teachers across India. During this time, Agastya has pioneered many educational innovations at scale, including mobile science labs, lab on a bike, and peer-to-peer learning via mega science fairs for underprivileged children. Ramji has been recognized and commended many times for his amazing work and for the work of the broader foundation. You can also read more about Agastya in the book The Moving of Mountains: The Remarkable Story of the Agastya International Foundation, written by Adhiraj Sethi. As you listen, you'll hear Ramji talk in much more detail about many of these aspects, but if you're interested and would like to find out more, there's lots of links in the show notes.

Hey Tim, how are you?

Hi, hi, hi, Ramji. Yeah, good to be with you. And you? Excellent. Well, yeah, great. I am super excited to learn more about Agastya, one of the best-kept secrets of India, one might say. But hopefully I can contribute to it being a secret no longer. So really great to have you here, Ramji. Thank you.

Thank you, Tim. It's a pleasure, pleasure to be here talking to you, getting the word out about what we do and learning from people like you and from your listeners.

Yeah.

Excellent. No, that's great. Love to be part of the community. Yeah, definitely. So maybe just starting with a bit of context for people who have maybe haven't heard of Agastya and understanding your own personal journey towards this work. I mean, one of the things I liked, I heard you say that life is like a curved building rather than a straight line. So I think you've got some curved buildings at Agastya in all sorts of beautiful shapes. So maybe you could, yeah, just start with that, with a little bit of your own personal journey, how it's perhaps been more curved rather than a straight line. And how has that kind of somehow exemplified the philosophy or become, or kind of been incorporated into the philosophy of what is now Agastya?

Yeah. So, you know, the expression life is like a curved building came up quite spontaneously when I was having a Q&A with a bunch of headmasters who had come to our campus. And one of them asked me a question that no one else had before, almost stumped me. He said, I noticed that some of the buildings on campus are curved. Any reason for that? And my initial response was possibly because many of them emulate animals from nature. So one is in the shape of a lizard, the other's in the shape of a dung beetle, and so on. And then it just sort of struck me and I said, you know, maybe the more interesting thing or equally interesting point is the curve represents Agastya's journey. You know, life is actually Or life has been for me and for Augustia like a curved building. So thank you very much for asking that question because it's given me a new insight. And so as I've thought more about it, certainly my own life, I was a banker and I worked on Wall Street and in London, and you work for a bank, for a large organization. Life seems a bit like a straight line. You have certain objectives and goals. You want to ascend the hierarchy. You know, and so on. And you have ambitions, your goals are set, you've got to achieve them in a year and maybe in 2 or 3 years and slightly longer term thinking. So when I quit and quitting all that itself, I suppose represented a, a bit of a disruption. And I did it because I had a sort of childhood ambition and maybe a childish ambition to set up a school in the foothills of the Himalayas. That would nurture creativity. I read a book called Shangri-La when I was a student at school by James Hilton, and I used to think, you know, is there such a place as Shangri-La? And maybe it's in the Himalayas. And then as I grew older, I thought, why not build a school that would foster creativity in the Himalayas and create an environment like the mythical Shangri-La? So when I decided to quit my job and, you know, as because time was moving on and I said, I don't want to have any regrets in life. Let's start this endeavor and maybe build Shangri-La. That was easier said than done. Obviously, I, I faced a void and there was no 1-year or 2-year or 3-year plan. And so I had to go very much with the flow. I had no calling card. There was no institution backing me. I knew very few people in India because I'd spent 20-odd years outside India. And so I, you know, I was forced to go with the flow. Meet somebody and then meet somebody else and take notes and quiz them about their goals and get some insights from people and say, hey, now that seems to make sense. Maybe we should try this out within an overall kind of vision of creating the Shangri-La. So I stumbled into a discovery-based approach. To creating what is today Agastya. And I realized that while it was very disconcerting in the beginning because there was no sense of certainty, life was very uncertain. There was actually a lot more joy and fun and learning in living in uncertainty and in going with the flow. And that by like a, you know, like a river flows around obstacles. I was forced to do that and it was a very different way of living. And essentially I changed my own approach and philosophy of life and the foundation embraced this quality, not from me again, but because that's the only way we could grow.

Yeah.

So we had some fixed ideas about a school that would foster creativity, but we didn't have money. We got the land, barren wasteland to build this Taj Mahal of creativity, but we didn't have the money to build the buildings. And so we said, what do we do? We have no work to do. We must do something. I had no income. And we said, maybe we'll take our education to the villages. And how do you do that? We came up with the idea of a mobile science van. And that was literally flowing, you know, it was mobile all the time going from village to village. And we said, hey, this looks really interesting. Never thought of this. Let's scale it. And we began slowly to add a few more mobile vans. And then money began to trickle into the foundation. So we built a little center here and a center there on campus. And we said, you know, maybe what we need is not a school, but a school for schools. So we pivoted. So Agastya's journey is a series of, you know, almost accidental happenings, not without any thinking, because we did have a very robust vision and mission.

Yeah.

But it gave us the freedom to experiment, discover, and go with the flow.

Yeah. Beautiful. I mean, that's life, lifing, right? I mean, that is how life, life operates, but we pretend it, often we pretend it works in these linear goal-setting, much more structured environments. But just, and just to orient people, this is, we're talking about the end, late '90s at this point, are we? Historically?

Yes. When we started the foundation, late '90s.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And just also, just if I could, on your own personal kind of philosophy that you were bringing to this as well, you, as I understand it, you also had your own experience of education in a Krishnamurti-informed school from your own education. Did, did you bring that into this kind of vision for a new type of education?

Yeah, I believe so. I can't say I did it consciously. Right. I was certainly greatly influenced by Krishnamurti. I can't claim to practice what he preached or taught, but certainly both at the conscious and subconscious levels. For instance, back in the late 1990s, when hardly anyone was talking about ecology and climate change, I said, you know, my initial reaction to getting this 170 acres of barren wasteland was disappointment. And I remember on that hot day in maybe April of 2000, standing on the land, feeling rather sorry for myself. And my father laughed and said, I can see you're terribly disappointed. And I said, yeah, I was looking forward to a Himalayan meadow. And he said, listen, old boy, that's where you really come in. Your job is to create a Himalayan meadow out of barren wasteland. And that was kind of an epiphany.

Okay. You became a steward somehow.

Yeah. And because of the Krishnamurti background, it was easy for me to say, let's create an ecological preserve. Because Krishnamurti and Rishi Valley, the school I went to, Krishnamurti was very close to nature, and they had a very large eco-restoration program going back decades. So I said, you know, I knew nothing about ecology, but I said, it's a good thing to do. So over time, we should create a kind of magnificent ecological preserve here on this wasteland. So yes, the Krishnamurti philosophy about being close to nature, The other thing he used to talk about was he would say, be a great gardener or a, you know, a house husband or a housewife or a scientist or a doctor or a business person, whatever you choose to do. But first, learn to be a great human being. And so that made me think a great deal because I hadn't thought much about that when I was in competitive banking. I wasn't certainly a great human being. I was probably A somewhat soulless human being. So those ideas came to the fore and I said, you know, what does it mean to be a good human being? And let's think that through and make sure it's part of the foundation's ethos.

Beautiful. And how did that idea weave in with these? So you were going around with these mobile vehicles, so the invitation to the young people you were interacting with, with was, as I understand it, kind of hands-on learning for what science and, and engineering and maths and understanding the world through experience. Is that, is that correct?

Yes. So what we did, uh, Tim, was— I still don't claim to be an educator, and I certainly wasn't when we started Agastya. And I got a group of people together to advise me. One of them was my father, former CEO of a company. The other was the former chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission. A stockbroker, and the former principal of my old school, Rishi Valley, who was the only sort of classical educator. And even he came from an unconventional Krishnamurti background. So we approached the whole thing very differently. We didn't say, this is what we are going to do. We started to ask questions. And the first question we asked was, what is lacking in education today? And the scientists said, curiosity. And he explained why curiosity is so important at the sort of grassroots level to solve problems and at a much higher level to become innovative and creative. And he, he talked about the absence of cause-effect thinking in the education system. People were just rote learning. And he said, Ramji, your idea of creativity is right on the money. That's the need of the hour. But let's break creativity down to its components. And we said curiosity is foundational to creative learning, observing, questioning, inquiring, experimenting, learning to make unusual connections. All of this adds up to what we call innovative or creative behavior. So we said, all right, the mission of the foundation should be to spark curiosity, nurture creativity. And the next question was, is this learnable or are you born creative? And the scientist said, look, Ramji, you're a banker. I'm a scientist. I'll expose you to a couple of hundred counterintuitive science experiments, and I guarantee you in the space of 3 or 4 months, you will look at the world very differently. You will become a far more questioning individual. So can I make an Einstein or Ramanujan out of you?

No.

But on the scale of creativity or creative potential, If you are at 1 or 2 out of 10 today, I think we could take you up to a 4 or 5. And if we did that at scale, that's enough to create transformation. Mm. It's a learnable skill. Then the question was, how do we go about doing it? And we came to the conclusion, well, one of the other gaps in education seems to be a lack of hands-on learning, experiential learning. So let's focus on hands-on experiential learning. And then of course, there are many ways of doing that. And since I was— my father was an engineer, the scientist, I myself was an economics graduate and an MBA. I said, all right, you guys are pretty forceful. Let's go with hands-on STEM education to begin with. And so that's how the mission was crafted and that's how the strategy was set in place.

Fantastic. And what were you experiencing as you were then bringing that? Because essentially you're bringing that to communities that don't have that. Is that correct? In terms of public schools, rural public schools around India? I mean, you're bringing it to their doorstep in the form of these vans. So what was the interaction happening there? I mean, were you welcomed with open arms or were there challenges about what this crazy guy in a van was doing?

Excellent question. In fact, the first crazy guy in the van was a tractor driver.

Okay.

Who was kind of helping bulldoze the land and trying to make it more even. And I told him, no money for this. And if you want to keep your job, you have to convert yourself into a science teacher. And he himself came from an arts background and he was trained and he could drive the van as well. And so we said, you are our first mobile lab instructor. And we set him loose in the villages. And a few weeks later I asked him, so how's it going, Balaram? And he said, unbelievable. And I said, tell me more. And he said, well, initially the children ran away thinking I was a missionary who had come to convert them. Okay. And I said, seriously? He said, yes. But then when I opened the van and pulled out these hands-on counterintuitive science experiments, all extremely low cost.

Yeah.

Things made out of coat hangers and so on. They were fascinated and they began to engage. So it's really become very, very popular. And I didn't realize that teaching could be so much fun and I would learn so much in the process.

Brilliant.

And there was nobody looking down, you know, over your shoulder saying, how are the children's grades improved and so on. So it just turned out to be a lot of fun. So we said, all right, let's do more of this. And by and large, I'd say, Tim, no one has really objected in the school system over the last quarter century. You know, it's another matter whether you have the resources to pay for such services, which most people don't have. But besides that, it's generally been welcomed because it takes you back to, you know, having a sense of fun. In fact, one of the phrases I borrowed, I guess from somewhere, but connected it to our mission was to say our mission is to disseminate the spirit of ah, for curiosity and surprise, aha, for the spirit of creative learning, and haha, for joy in learning, which breeds confidence and improves performance. So I think most of the stuff we do has either an ah, an aha, or a haha element, sometimes two of the three. Sometimes all three, you know?

Yeah.

So I'm holding this little tippy top in my hand, which sits on its bottom cuz that's where the weight is. It costs all of 10 or 15 US cents.

Yeah.

But when you spin it, it tips over and begins to spin on its stem.

Yeah.

Very surprising, counterintuitive. And that's the power of this. There's a lot of science in this and math way beyond my ability to comprehend. So one little tippy-top can evoke that kind of response and learning. So we've, we've built a lot of such experiments. We carry them in our mobile vans and motorcycles all across India, and hopefully people are enjoying it, learning, benefiting from all of that.

I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure. Absolutely. And I mean, one of the things that sparked my interest, curiosity in Agastya was the scale at which you are now doing this. I mean, this was in '99, I think, where you started, and then, you know, 25 years later, I mean, and perhaps you could say a bit more about how the actual space, the actual physical location and the ecology has evolved, but you are, I mean, you're reaching millions of young people.

Yes, we reach about 5 million kids a year. So this is a very important point because a lot of organizations have trouble scaling, right? And people often ask me, how did you, successfully scale. And a couple of reasons. One is the people I surrounded myself with in the early years were all big thinkers. They'd run large organizations. So thinking in large numbers was almost second nature to them. They were addressing questions like, how do we transform Indian education? Right?

Yeah.

So we began to think scale from early on. In fact, the metaphor I use is we said, do we want to fill a glass with holy water? Or do we want to try and raise the level of the ocean by a millimeter? And I said, look, there are many people who are trying to fill the glass with holy water and some succeeding and some perhaps not. But anyway, the real value we would bring is if we could raise the level of the ocean even by a millimeter, uh, that will help transformation. So we embedded scale thinking early on. So even this Balram, in the mobile lab who was not educated in some top-tier institute, had not been exposed to management concepts, none of that. Even he from early on started thinking in terms of scale because I would ask him, how many children did you reach today or last week? Can you 10x that number? How would you 100x it? And so I think we've embedded that. Now there's the other side of it, which is You scale and you scale rubbish, right? Well, exactly. But so scale thinking was deeply embedded and it's become kind of second nature to most people in Agastya to think and act scale.

Fantastic. Yeah, I mean, I love that metaphor. And one of my questions really was about that idea of scaling, but with a relational and experiential approach, because I think sometimes there's an attitude towards scale, which is yeah, as you say, to put it crudely, delivering rubbish, but just reaching millions of people. And this kind of ethic of care that I've understood you really have at Agastya as the way you work, sparking curiosity and, you know, but in very relational and experiential ways. There's a, you know, there's a reality of trying to scale that to millions and losing that sense of high-touch relationality. So how did you manage not to lose that?

Yeah, so great question. So the challenge we posed to our teachers, we call them Igniters, it's a combination of igniter and educator, was we said, look, imagine you will have no more than half a dozen interactions with a child in a year. How could you possibly leave an impression on that child that will become unforgettable? Memorable? Is it even possible? So we thought through that and we came up with this notion of a pinprick moment, which is another phrase for an aha moment. We said, look, in order to do that, the interaction, we've got to use things that are simple, like the tippy top, very simple, that are unexpected. So the tipping of the top is very unexpected, concrete. Credible, if possible, there's some emotion and there's a story attached to it. So if you like this success principle, so in anything we do, we have to ask ourselves in this activity that I'm going to spend with a group of children for half an hour or 10 minutes or 5 minutes or even 1 minute, is there any element of simplicity, unexpectedness, emotion, concreteness, credibility? And if that is there, then probably we are going to have left an indelible mark on the child's mind and hopefully a positive one. And I think we've succeeded in doing that. You know, there's a story of this village girl who was hopeless in studies, and so her parents decided, her father said, young teenager, I'm going to get you married off as soon as possible. And she was horrified, went into mild depression, and a friend said, Well, why don't you come with me to the Agastya campus? And she reluctantly came. And as luck would have it, the teacher asked her to step forward, show him her hand. And that itself was kind of surprising. And he did something which I wouldn't suggest other teachers around the world do, but he pricked her finger and took a drop of blood. And she was kind of initially horrified. What's that? She literally went, ah, with a little bit of pain. And then surprise, and it was her blood, so there was emotion. And then he told her her blood group. Now, this girl, Maunika, came and spoke to her, asked the senior management of Augustia years later and said, in that pinprick, I suddenly realized that there's a world of knowledge out there that I'm not a part of. I had no idea of something called a blood group, and it was my blood. And she goes back to school and we didn't tutor her. Her grades began to go up. She goes to her father and says, would you send me to university? And he says, no. And she says, what if I came first in school? Ah, if you, if you came first, okay. He didn't believe she would, but heck, she came first in school and he was an honorable guy and he sent her to university. She became the leader of 3,000 students and then came and gave a talk to us about the Pentrich moment.

Ah, fantastic.

And we said, that is the key. So how can we replicate such moments? At scale. And that's essentially what we are doing. There are very low-cost ways of having massive impact on a child's way of thinking, positive impact. I mean, they can also be negative, but positive. And that's really what we have become pretty good at, and we need to get better and better at.

No, that's amazing.

So we don't rely on lectures and so on.

Sure. And how many of those young people are coming to you, to the campus, and how much of that is still the mobile labs and the Lab on a Bike?

So of the 5 million that we reach every year, the mobile labs and the labs on bikes probably account— and we have satellite science and innovation centers across India— probably account for about a million.

Okay.

There's another million that we impact indirectly through the teachers that we train. Okay, so we count those numbers, we track them. So that's 2 million. The campus is about 25,000 children a year. So in terms of proportion of the 5 million, it's, it's very small, but it's, it's a very impactful campus. The balanced 3 million we are doing now through television, satellite, digital interventions, and the like.

Okay. Okay. So yeah, lots of different channels. Yeah. Interesting. And how do you see, I guess, you know, in telling that story, you bring in the idea of school as such, you know, these young people are also in school and they're coming to you and they're participating in Agastya programs or, you know, maybe for short times, maybe for a longer period or coming back. How do you see the relationship between Agastya Foundation and the school system? I mean, is there a connection? Do you see it just as them running along in parallel, or is there a sense that you'd like to actually influence the formal education system?

So there is a sense that we would like to, and we are influencing the formal education system. So the education system has to be receptive to your philosophy, your pedagogy, and so on. And we go and talk to the local government and say, hey, look, this is what we can do. And typically what most of them would say is, sounds interesting, we'll make time for you guys in our schools, but we can't pay you for it. Right. So we go and find a donor or a private sector company to fund it. There are some governments who actually fund our programs. So we develop a schedule with the schools, how many visits over what period of time, how many children, which grades and all that.

Yeah.

And then we have a way of tracking our work, monitoring the impact. So that's direct interaction with the children. And then we work with the school teachers, government school teachers, and do residential training programs on campus as well as non-residential offsite training. So is working directly with children and also working with teachers, increasingly also with headmasters and school leaders, and importantly with parents. So It's kind of an integrated approach.

Yeah.

And we have different programs. And I would say, you know, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, you would hardly hear the education system, whether it was public or private, talk about curiosity and creativity. Today, any large city in India, as you enter, you'll see boards of high-end private schools advertising that, you know, this is a center for curiosity and creativity.

Yeah.

So we have influenced the larger system in a very meaningful way, both the public education system and even the private education system, even without being directly engaged with most of them, because we can't cover, you know, the entire gamut of schools across India. But the education system has responded very positively. And with the coming of AI and the need to become a more innovative country and all of that, I think people have seen the value of the Agastya way of teaching and learning.

Yeah, no, that's great. And I wanted to ask you about that, that whole kind of teacher transformation piece, because I understood that was a really significant part of the work is actually helping teachers themselves to kind of spark their own curiosity, become learners themselves. And also you were, again, as I've understood it, You're also empowering young people to become instructors as part of the process as well. So there's some, yeah, maybe you could say a little bit about that.

Certainly in terms of the young people, you know, again, this was sort of discovery-based learning. We ran a science fair or planned to run a large one sometime in 2000 in a village. And the model we had in mind was we would get some government school teachers, train them over the weekend and have them Demonstrate these science experiments to the visiting children. Great idea, except the teachers were not interested because we were not paying them anything.

Right.

And so we were kind of stuck. We were committed to this science fair. What do you do? And a couple of young girls came up to us and said, look, we are 14-year-olds and it looks like you don't have teachers to teach these science experiments. How about you train us to teach them? And us and 100 friends of ours. Can be, you know, become your teachers to run the science fair. It seemed like an outrageous idea, but we said, let's go for it. It turned out to be a great success. And we said, hey, we've stumbled upon peer-to-peer learning and we now call them our Young Instructor Leaders. Uh, let's scale this. So that's how that started. And some of the greatest impact we've had on children are people from this cohort of Young Instructor Leaders. Yeah, because they really gain in terms of confidence. You know, I remember in one of the science fairs, the vice president of one of the sort of largest tech firms in the world who was sponsoring the science fair, she had come and I said, so what do you think? And she said, well, the science and all is great, Ramji, nothing to argue about, but there's something you're doing here that's exceptional. And I said, what is it? And she said, you know, the biggest problem we have in our company is getting people to stand up and make presentations. They're nervous and tongue-tied. No one wants to do this. And here I see you are training hundreds of children from villages to learn to stand up and present and explain things, and that will really transform their self-belief and confidence. So I think that is one of the powerful results of that. As far as teacher training goes, you know, teacher training across the globe, and I did a little bit of research meeting people in the UK, the US, India, and so on. Has generally not delivered the goods.

Right.

So early on we said, why is that the case? And my father, who came from a management background, said, well, it's because the teachers are not internalizing what's being taught. So why aren't they internalizing this? And he used the analogy of a medical college and hospital. And he said, as you go to get a medical degree, from time to time you visit a hospital, diagnose a few patients. Inspect a few cadavers, saw, and come back to school. And so learning becomes very real and interactive. So why don't we embrace the teaching hospital model? So we said, okay, our campus, we locate our Center for Creative Teaching and Learning, and that's the medical college. The hospital are the laboratories we've built on campus where we get children come. So teacher training has become extremely interactive. So if we go through an idea with, you know, in constructivism with a teacher, we then say, all right, would you be prepared to go and do a live demo of what you've learned in one of our labs, which is, you know, a 10-minute walk? And the teacher says, okay. And we videotape the session and play it back and say, what do you think? And invariably the teacher goes, oops, I'm still making the same old mistakes. And yeah, you're right. I thought I'd understood this, but not in the way I'm, I've been practicing it. So that is really our philosophy, the teaching hospital model, one. Two, what we have found is, this is no great insight, I'm sure there's a lot of research on this, is to create an environment that takes an adult teacher back to his or her childhood. Okay? Create a sort of neotenous learning environment, and all of a sudden they've dropped their defenses. Their minds open up and now they're actually playing and learning. And in that process, they become more absorptive and more willing to share what they've learned in very productive ways. Again, the big question is how do you scale this? And we've found ways of doing that.

Yeah, that's fascinating too, because I think there's something very powerful about the context and how the context you're in communicates a way of being, right? You know, immediately you're back into the scripts of being the teacher, the didact at the front of the class if you're in classroom environment. But as I've seen pictures of Agastya, if you're in an environment with these curved buildings and these interactive activities everywhere and just of almost like a theme park kind of environment of play and curiosity, that communicates a whole different way of being in the world that is quite different to the scripted version of a formal education institution. So there's something interesting about what the space communicates about the way we can be.

Indeed, I think you've hit the nail on the head because, you know, again, a lot of outcomes tend to be unexpected ones. You talk to teachers after the training and say, what stands out in your experience? Many of them talk about the interactive projects and hands-on learning and so on. But more often than not, they say the number one thing was the morning eco-walk. We've never had this kind of exposure to nature. And the guy who took us on the walk explained all the herbs and plants on campus and which herb is good for what kind of human ailment. And it was fascinating.

Wow.

Another teacher said, you know, I used to— I've been teaching for 30 years, low-income kids. And I came to the conclusion that most of these kids were really quite dumb. And then I came to the campus and I found similar low-income kids coming to your campus, but they seem so turned on and inquisitive and intelligent. So the learning for me is the kids are not dumb. I've been doing something completely wrong. And so my attitude now to learning and teaching has completely changed. So as you correctly said, I think it's the environment that really makes a huge difference. It must communicate the aha. On campus. So, you know, we try and create spaces that communicate that all the time.

Yeah. No, that's beautiful. So you, we started with the wasteland that you obtained and now it's turned into a really, what I understand, a thriving ecosystem of learning and nature together.

Indeed. So, you know, again, that's an interesting story because I knew ne— next to nothing about eco-regeneration and in the early years, former environment secretary of one of the states walked into the campus and said, I can transform this land for you. It's very interesting because 3 different types of soil meet on this land, and this land has been degraded over the last 100, 200 years. I think I can restore it. And I remember telling him, well, go for it, but I can't pay you, right? Because I don't have money. And he said, well, I don't need money. I'm doing this for my soul. So I said, all right, do it. And 3 years went by and I didn't see much activity. No plants, nothing coming up.

Yeah.

And nothing. He didn't plant anything. And I said, look, Dr. Reddy, if you don't mind my saying this, I haven't seen any action. And he said, look, I've got to tell you what my strategy is. It's called gentle manipulation. You don't go into a new place and start planting things from day one. I've been waiting to see what the soil is capable of producing if you protect it, which is what I've done.

Okay.

There are lots of dormant species under the earth that have now slowly begun to express themselves. So now I have a much better idea, and I will slowly add things, keystone species and so on and so forth. Over time, we'll build the biodiversity. And sure enough, it took 2 decades. But it's happened. So that was, there was a lot of learning from there as well about what we can learn from nature. You know, I approached it as something that was inherently a nice thing to do. You know, in old Hindu philosophy, nature is one of the pathways to God or, or divinity or the supreme intelligence. But aside from that, scientists, as they joined Agastya, said there's a lot of learning of science from nature. So we can do that. And then of course, now we are in the process of creating a lot of nature-based interactive exhibits, a 10 or 12-foot-tall termite hill to communicate important management concepts like how do you create an organization that is emergent?

Wow.

You know, like, like the termite hill.

Yeah.

It may not be possible to completely emulate that, but just asking the question. Could make you a much smarter, more resilient organization. Yeah. So we are surrounded by nature and that is something I must say we have not, I won't say exploited, but used that advantage to the hilt. But we are beginning to do that now.

Yeah.

Yes.

Sounds amazing. I love that. Self-organizing systems through a termite mound. I love it.

Yes, exactly.

Amazing.

Yeah.

And gentle manipulation. I like that idea as well. But no, thank you, Ramji. This is amazing. And maybe just to finish off, if people were curious and wanted to find out more about Agastya, as we said at the beginning, the best kept secret in India, but hopefully we're doing something about that right now. You know, where would you invite people to come? I think there's a lovely book that I've started reading about the story, but yeah, where would you invite people?

So one is visit the website, www.agastya.org. Agastya.org, lots of things there and links and all that, blogs. There's the book, The Moving of Mountains by Adirat Sethi that's available on Amazon, which traces Agastya's history and kind of written in a very readable story narrative. So it is a bit thick, but it's highly readable. So that would be another way of, for those of you, your listeners who are interested in food. There's a famous Netflix serial called Someone or Somebody Feed Phil. He's an American guy who goes around the world sampling food in different parts of the world. You know, it's watched by zillions of people around the world. So his last journey or most recent journey was to India and he wanted to experience something different. So we invited him to an Agastya Science Fair. So if you're into food and if you're into Somebody Feed Phil, you might see a little bit of Agastya on that.

Oh, very good. Oh, I'll link to it in the show notes.

Yeah, yeah. Tim, there's one thing I wanted to address. You know, you talked about the ethics of care. Some years ago, I talked to a bunch of young girls in a government school and I asked them, why do you come to Agastya? They said, well, it's because of all your interesting science models and experiments. We don't have them in our school. So I said, all right, I'll gift you a set of such experiments. Will you still come to Augustia? And they thought for a few seconds and said, yes. So why? Well, because our teachers are not trained to bring these models and exhibits alive in the classroom. So your people are trained, so we'll still come to Augustia. So I said, I'll tell you what, we'll train your teachers so they will be equally competent. They'll bring these models alive in the classroom. So I guess it's goodbye, Augustia. Nice meeting you. And they said, no, no, no, no, hold on a second. We'll still come to Agastya. Yeah. Why would you do that? You have the models, the trained teachers, and they said, because the Agastya teacher is a friend. So at the end of the day, the foundation of anything we do is actually that sense of care. A lot of these kids come from difficult backgrounds, economically stressed backgrounds, perhaps some of them even psychologically stressed. And what are they looking for when they come to school? Someone there that smiles, someone that can connect with them, even if just fleetingly. And without that, as Krishnamurti himself used to say, I can see that now. You know, if you want to be a great teacher, first connect with the student before you bring all your knowledge and pedagogy and all the rest of it. So that is really important. And we try and work with our 1,000 odd Igniters across India, constantly emphasizing the importance of building connections with children and with parents, the spirit of care. That's the most important thing.

Beautiful. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I think it's so powerful. Absolutely. And it's often assumed and underemphasized how critically important that layer is to build on. Yeah, no, absolutely. Oh, thank you, Ramji. This is just Just delightful to speak and thank you for everything. I mean, huge amount of work that you've put in over the last few decades, I'm sure, and blood, sweat, and tears and joy and, but absolutely amazing. And no, it's a great honor to talk to you and be able to share more about the story. So thank you.

Thank you, Tim Logan. And open invitation, visit us whenever you can. I would love that. Come and spend some time on the campus and any of your friends and colleagues who might be interested, by all means, connect with us. We can learn from the world, you know, and also teach a little bit, but it's a two-way process. An exchange. Thank you for this opportunity.

Thank you.

Thank you, Tim Logan.

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