"And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."
At the very beginning of the #Baahubali journey, @Shobu_ garu had Mrs. Lakshmi Shobu handwrite this quote from The Alchemist and gave it to @ssrajamouli.
We all know what happened next...
#BaahubaliTheTorchbearer
The heat has been brutal this past week. Temperatures hit 45° in Nagpur, 44° in Ahmedabad, 43° in Prayagraj, 42° in Delhi. Even Bengaluru hit 37°. And we're still in April 😬
A big contributing factor behind rising temperatures is the loss of forest cover, and India has lost a lot of it. Back in 2020, we met the team behind Farmers for Forests (F4F). Their idea was to do agroforestry at scale. The challenge is that farmers can't afford to wait years for trees to pay off, and most tree-planting projects don't survive the first monsoon. The idea was ambitious, and we at @RainmatterOrg backed them early.
Most tree-planting in India is monoculture, just rows of one species. But a plantation isn't a forest. F4F plants multi-layer agroforests with fruit, timber, shrubs, intercrops, and native species, trying to mimic what an actual forest does.
Six years later, they've gone from 50 acres to 5,000 acres and have just secured funding to reach 40,000 over the next three years. Compared to traditional crop farming, per acre, they're seeing ~4x carbon sequestration, ~3x farmer income, and meaningful improvement in biodiversity and soil health. Still early days, but promising.
Those numbers needed to be verifiable. So F4F built TreeLens, an open-source tree-tracking system that uses drone imagery to measure carbon sequestration, tree height, and biodiversity across thousands of small farms. 15 other organisations now use it.
The hardest problem in agroforestry is time. Fruit trees take 5 to 7 years to pay off, and most small farmers simply can't wait that long. So F4F is now working with the government and the larger ecosystem to design financial instruments like carbon bonds and first-loss guarantees that protect farmers while the trees grow.
Really glad we backed Arti, Aditya, and Krutika early.
Giancarlo Esposito so perfectly captured the essence of a psychopath as Gus in Breaking Bad: he’s quiet & calm on the surface- he’s nice to your face- but if you step in the way of what he wants by even one inch, he will obliterate you without thinking twice. All-team villain.
I turned 36 this year 🙋🏼♂️
The advice I would give my 26 year old self?
1. Avoid car loans
2. Put in extra work (50+ hours a week)
3. Drink more water
4. Network with people 2–3 steps ahead of you
5. Be okay with letting go of old friendships