I began my career where most things made sense — on spreadsheets.
I studied Chartered Accountancy. Worked at PwC. Took companies public.
Audits, tax structures and give comfort to the funders — all anchored in a world where clarity felt like control. Numbers were my language. Truth felt measurable.
In those early years, I believed the world rewarded precision.
If your models were clean, your outcomes would follow.
It was a rational universe. And I trusted it.
Then I came across Aswath Damodaran — and his work on valuation changed everything.
He didn’t just teach how to value businesses. He taught how to think about value itself.
He made it clear: valuation is not truth. It’s a story. An estimate. An opinion.
And more often than not, what we call “value” is actually just price — shaped by collective beliefs, moods, and momentum.
Gold is more expensive than fresh air.
Not because it’s more essential — but because we’ve collectively agreed to price it that way.
It was a sobering thought. But also a liberating one.
Because it made me question not just my models — but my world-view.
In my twenties, I stepped out of the glass buildings and into the soil.
I started CosmosGreen. Taught thousands of students finance, accounts, and audit — simplifying what I once admired for its complexity.
That act of teaching began my first unlearning: realising how often I had confused fluency with wisdom.
(Turns out, knowing DCF doesn’t mean you understand value.)
Then came Kheyti — building solutions with and for smallholder farmers.
Now, Soul Forest — restoring ecosystems and trying to make nature investible.
Each step looked like career progress.
But internally, something deeper was unfolding.
The frameworks I once revered — efficient, scalable, elegantly linear — began to feel… small.
The world didn’t fit the models anymore. Or maybe… it never did.
I had mistaken clarity for completeness.
I had mistaken structure for truth.
(And yes — I genuinely believed Excel could fix everything. Including climate change.)
Because the real world — of air, soil, hunger, and memory — doesn’t behave like a balance sheet.
It breathes. It contradicts. It regenerates and forgets.
It moves at the pace of trust, not transactions.
I never truly understood the price of water until I had to pay for it.
₹1 to refill a bottle. Then ₹20 per litre. Then came air.
Bought in oxygen cylinders during COVID.
Ten thousand litres of breath, compressed into ₹3,000 in steel.
We didn’t call it air anymore. We called it survival.
It’s tragic and comic at once — how humans only notice value when it becomes scarce enough to carry a price.
Forests are ignored until fenced. Rivers until they dry. Oxygen until invoiced.
And that’s when it hit me:
Maybe the problem isn’t that we don’t value nature.
Maybe it’s that we only know how to price it.
Let me be clear:
This is not a rejection of capital.
It’s a re-rooting.
I’ve seen what capital can unlock — for farmers, for forests, for families.
I still believe in its power to accelerate transformation.
But that belief comes with a caveat.
Capital must learn to listen.
Because without soul, it becomes a bulldozer.
With soul, it becomes a bridge.
The challenge isn’t capitalism.
It’s the shallow version we’ve inherited — one that prices only what can be transacted, and ignores what truly sustains life.
Markets are brilliant at pricing risk.
But they’re terrible at pricing meaning.
Most regeneration efforts don’t fail because they lack funding.
They fail because they lack ritual, memory, and emotional intelligence.
When a farmer is asked to switch practices, they’re not just changing technique — they’re letting go of what their father once believed in. That’s not a shift in method. It’s a reckoning.
When a buyer shifts to regenerative procurement, they’re not just adjusting strategy — they’re challenging decades of efficiency-worship.
And when a funder is asked to invest in a forest, they’re not just allocating capital — they’re being asked a deeper question:
Can we keep chasing endless returns, if the very systems that make life possible are breaking?
Real regeneration is not just ecological.
It is psychological. It is cultural. It is economic —
but only if we dare to redefine what we mean by value.
So what now?
We don’t abandon structure. We rewild it.
We don’t discard business. We redesign it — to hold stillness, grief, and belonging.
We don’t chase scale like a scoreboard.
We build things that people — and ecosystems — want to belong to.
Because the kind of learning that matters isn’t about knowing more.
It’s about carrying less certainty.
If there’s one lesson Damodaran gave me — and the forest deepened — it’s this:
Real learning isn’t accumulation. It’s surrender.
And I’m still learning. Not just how to grow a forest. But how to value one — even if no one’s pricing it yet.
The writer is co-founder of Soul Forest and Kheyti (Earthshot Prize winner)
Published on April 24, 2025
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