Anjali Pujari (she/her)

How are you using education to build more sustainable and equitable communities? Tell us about your EE work and impact.

I believe education begins with listening, not to teachers or textbooks, but to wind, soil, and silence. Through my current project, I work with mentally and intellectually differently abled children in the forests of Sharavathi, designing sessions where sound becomes a bridge to belonging. Together, we listen to crickets, make music from soil, draw homes shaped like mushrooms, and create rituals that remind us that learning can be gentle, sensory, and sacred.

For children often excluded from conversations about environment or ecology, I try to open portals of wonder — where a fallen leaf or a frog’s song becomes a teacher. These experiences allow them to feel the world through vibration and rhythm, to communicate through resonance rather than words.

My practice also draws from the wisdom of sacred groves, ancient forests where every stone and insect is revered. From there, I learn how to teach not as authority, but as kin.

Sustainability, to me, isn’t a subject; it’s a way of seeing. Through art, sound, and presence, I try to cultivate that seeing,  to remind us that caring for the Earth begins with intimacy, not information.

Tell us about your journey to where you are today. What inspired you? What has your path been like?

I was born between two worlds , a farmer’s lineage and Air Force quarters, where discipline met dragonflies, and the wild was never far. My earliest teachers were ants, shadows, and the smell of first rain. I didn’t grow up learning about nature; I grew up inside it even if it was urban wilderness. 

Journalism gave me language but not life. I longed for stories that breathed — so I left the mainstream career for the forest. From living with the Jenu Kuruba and Soliga communities to building a wattle-and-daub house in Kerala, every encounter reshaped what I thought education meant. The land became my syllabus, and silence, my mentor.

Sound became my bridge back to the world. I began to play for animals, listen to rivers, and carve insects out of chalk pieces, fragile prayers for beings on the verge of vanishing. Today, in the Sharavathi forests, I work with mentally and intellectually differently abled children through Sonic Pathways, a project where we learn through sound, soil, and story.

My journey isn’t a career, it’s an ecology of listening. Each place, each creature, each child has been a note in the slow song of remembering that we, too, are nature.

A Little More About Me

1. What advice would you give to the next generation of leaders?

Never stop asking difficult questions, they keep our values alive. Let your ethics be your compass, even when the path feels uncertain.

2. Who (or what) do you look up to as inspiration?

I look up to insects, tiny architects of resilience and to the sky at dusk, whose colors remind me that change can also be beautiful.

3. Where do you feel most at peace and why?

In the forest at dusk, when light turns to sound and everything...trees, breath, memory dissolves into belonging.