Tuesday 17-07-2026 marked one year at kanthari. After twelve months of learning, debates, simulations, and countless discussions, I’ve reached a remarkable conclusion.
I know fewer things for sure than when I arrived. But that is progress as it comes in mysterious forms. The biggest learning for me, the change in the unit through which I observe the world.
One of the recurring themes throughout the year was that outcomes often emerge without intention. Nobody set out to create inequality during simulations, yet inequality emerged across carefully chosen global changemakers. Nobody deliberately excludes people from systems, yet systems quietly privilege some while constraining others. I have become less interested in asking who is responsible and more interested in asking what conditions made a particular outcome predictable.
The same applies to social change, I believe. I arrived believing that changing reality meant designing better interventions. Increasingly, I think the harder task is understanding the reality that already exists. Most failed interventions are not failures of execution; they are failures of perception, perhaps. We solve the reality we imagine instead of the one people actually live.
Perhaps this is why we at kanthari spend so much time unsettling assumptions. Every meaningful conversation this year seemed to begin by removing certainty rather than adding knowledge. That process is uncomfortable because it forces us to admit that many of our strongest convictions are inherited rather than examined.
I suspect this has been my greatest learning.
Not fundraising. Not on how to take engaging sessions.
Simply learning to delay conclusions. To observe a little longer.
To ask one more question before proposing an answer.
It turns out that changing the way we see reality may be the first act of changing reality itself. I have to sit down over the weekend to recollect what else I have learnt last year, and that would be a wonderful exercise in itself.
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