00:30I think I had one of the best childhoods anyone could have. My father, starting at
00:35age one, he started taking me to wildlife parks across India and we would
00:40spend hours and hours and hours just watching animals and I quickly fell in
00:45love with wild India.
00:51Both my mom and dad are scientists and finding a passion and a career that you
00:57loved was more important.
01:27Came here, did fieldwork in the Western Ghats, had amazing highs and some real
01:33lows but I loved being out in the field. It ended up becoming one of India's most
01:39landmark successful resettlement projects and I realized that my
01:44interests were actually not so much on the animals themselves but really
01:48looking at the intersection of people and wildlife, foster a sense of well-being
01:53in both animals and people.
01:58India is my home and I also felt that coming back here, even though it's more
02:14challenging to work here, the work would be more meaningful.
02:27To me it was the Palatte moment in my life because in 2015 we launched it and
02:51over the years now we work in four wildlife parks across India serving more
02:56than 1,500 villages. Basically it's a toll-free number where if you have an
03:01elephant that comes to your farm or a tiger that comes and kills your
03:04livestock, you call the number, our staff arrive on the scene and help file the
03:09claim.
03:11Kids would know what a kangaroo is and what a cheetah is and a lion is but they
03:30didn't know what a gaur was, what a lion tail macaque is and what a wild dog is
03:35and our research has shown that we have increased environmental literacy and
03:39awareness by 12 to 16 percent because of our work.
04:09When I became a Rolex Laureate in 2019 it truly was a too funny moment in my
04:20life. For the first time in my life it stopped being about solutions that
04:26Americans or Europeans were designing that we Indians were copying and it
04:31became about us doing innovative work that the rest of the world wanted to
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