Now
This month
on the desk.
A page of the present tense. What is open in the notebooks and browser tabs right now. Updated by hand when something changes, which is more often than the blog makes it look.
Last updated: 30 May 2026
Actively working on
- A field study on caste, social capital, and mobility in rural Tamil Nadu, now moving from the pilot into the larger survey across the same block.
- A randomised trial of a critical thinking curriculum in government schools, as research advisor, still in the measurement and design stage.
- An evaluation of violence-against-women interventions across South Asia, at proposal stage.
- Two monitoring and evaluation engagements — one in maternal and child health, one an end-of-programme evaluation using contribution analysis and outcome harvesting.
- A data project that grades field observers and audits caste representation across more than 700 districts, for a large national organisation.
- A long-form case story from a field visit to an alternative school in the Doon valley.
- Reading the 2026–27 Union Budget closely on informal and gig work and on air-quality policy.
- Quiet work on the JanVayu citizen testimony layer, pulling the archive into shape.
- The Innovation Advisory canvas suite is now its own Active venture — eight free, printable, one-page frameworks live, with a “Which canvas, when?” workflow on the hub.
- Phototales Studio is in steady rhythm — the daily mailer (one photograph and its story, every morning) is the heart of it.
- Just back from the Access to Green Finance panel in Bangalore on 26 May.
- Two recent op-eds — The Two-Test Neat Solution to the NEET Mess in TOI, and On Bihar's Border, Democracy's Missing Names in Deccan Herald. Plus a feature on the Ravish Kumar NEET deep-dive from 16:21.
Writing
- The Measurement Trap, chapter three, the one on under-counting unpaid work.
- A paper with a co-author on whether the smartphone has displaced the television as the medium that moves rural women's gender attitudes, written up for EPW.
- Regular essays on PolicyGrounds, most recently on the NEET paper leak and on India's reverse structural transformation.
- The Hate Effect, still at outline stage, taking its time.
- An essay on parenting in the age of air-quality advisories, in the head, not yet on the page.
- Two recent pieces on the blog — a synthesis essay on the canvas suite as a practice, and a methods note on running a pre-mortem against the bottom row of the Rumsfeld matrix.
Reading
- Poverty, by America — Matthew Desmond
- The 2026 Union Budget documents, slowly, with a red pen.
- Everything Katherine Boo has ever published, in rotation.
- Tomb of Sand — Geetanjali Shree, tr. Daisy Rockwell. Slow on purpose.
- An Immense World — Ed Yong, on the sensory worlds we cannot reach.
Saying no to
- New retainers until July. The calendar needs its edges back.
- Work that cannot name the person it is for.
- Anything described as “thought leadership” without a question attached.