I started out as a civil engineer. I ended up sitting with farmers who had lost their land, fisherfolk whose livelihoods were disappearing, and informal workers navigating systems that were never built for them. That's not what I expected to find. But it's what changed everything I thought I knew about solving problems.

Over a decade, I've backed social entrepreneurs across India as CEO of Small Scale Sustainable Infrastructure Development Fund S3IDF, and I've learned this: they're not exceptional because they're talented. They're exceptional because somewhere, someone taught them to care deeply, think clearly, and act anyway — even when the problem felt too big.

That's the thing I never learned in school. And it's the thing I believe every young person deserves to learn.

I've spent over a decade investing in and advising grassroots social enterprises, and I was also on the Global Impact Investing Network's working group setting global standards for the waste and circular economy sector.

It's why I co-founded REGENRISING — to bring that kind of thinking into classrooms, before students inherit the problems I've spent my career trying to solve.

I'm not here to give you theory from a textbook. I'm here to hand you what I've learned from the ground — so you can start seeing problems the way changemakers do, and maybe, build something that matters.