wandering
& witnessing
I am Shalini, environmental scholar, educator, media practitioner, and poet, navigating the urgent space where our environment, our cities, and our stories collide; and this little space on the internet is a portal to all that I have witnessed and chronicled.
एक नदी, कितनी राख
कब स्वाहा हुयी कहानियां
कुछ बह गयी
कुछ रह गयी
Our most cherished stories and identities don’t die in a crash. They are not lost in a dramatic event, but are silently, ritually consumed by flowing time until all that’s left is ash (sacred, yet appears fluffy). They burn — slow, silent, sacred. Yet, in that very acceptance, a silent, un-narratable essence remains—the river itself, and the witness who asks the question. Not the tale. The witness. Us.
To the fellow wanderer,
Welcome.
In some sense, I am a historian of modern India, but I am really a detective of human experience. My work lives in the space between the cold archives and the warm, messy pulse of everyday life which you can read in my Notes from Fields and Frontiers.
For me, research is an act of witnessing. I travel with people through stories, memory, and silences, while inhabiting the bridges—between science and policy, between academia and the community, between the written word and the spoken memory.
Research Projects is a window into that journey—a space for rigorous scholarship, curious questions, and the stories that official records often miss, where the rigour of science, the wisdom of oral history, the power of film/media, and the truth-telling of poetry, and co-creating the tools — museums, oral histories, films, science communication—that communities and policymakers can use to fight back.
I find teaching another act of such witnessing, becoming a culmination as well as a starting point of my many wanderings and passions. These continually lead to Experiments in my classroom.
I write reports, and I write poems. A nut in a nutshell, as I call myself.
My work isn’t just about studying disasters and injustice; it combines scholarship in environmental humanities with the creation of digital platforms and institutional systems to foster engagement, care, and resilience within academic and public communities. My wanderings through places, people, poetics and publications have all shaped my experiences as an academic.
Welcome. May we find resonance.