I started my career where most things made sense, in spreadsheets.
I studied rented accounting. He worked at PWC. Public toks companies.
Audits, fiscal structures and give comfort to financiers, all anchored in a world where clarity felt as control. The numbers were my language. The truth felt measurable.
In those early years, I think the world rewarded precision.
If their models were clean, their results would follow.
It was a rational universe. And I trusted that.
Then I come to Aswath Damodaran, and his work on the assessment changed everything.
He did not teach how to value companies. Hello, he taught how to think about the value itself.
Made it clear: The valuation is not true. It is a story. An estimate. An opinion.
And more than this, what we call “value” is real only price – In the form of collective beliefs, moods and impulse.
Gold is more expectation than fresh air.
Not because it is more essential, but because we have collectively accepted price that way.
It was an alerting thought. But also a liberating one.
Because he asked me not only my models, but my vision of the world.
In my veins, I left the glass buildings and entered the ground.
I started cosmosgen. He taught thousands of students financing, accounts and audit, simplifying what I once admired for their complexity.
That teaching act was my first unleashing: when I realized how I had confused fluidity with wisdom.
(It turns out that knowing that DCF does not mean that you understand the value).
Then Kheyti came – building solutions with and for small farmers.
Now, Soul Forest – Restoring ecosystems and trying to make nature invertible.
Each step seemed a professional progress.
But internally, something deeper was developing.
The frames that once I will reverse, efficient, scalable, elegantly linear, began to feel … small.
The world no longer fit the models. Or maybe … he never did.
He had clarity of fog for his purpose.
He had a fog structure for the truth.
(And yes, I really believed that Excel fixed everything. Including climate change).
Because the real world, or air, soil, hunger and memory, does not behave like a general balance.
Breathe. Contradict. It regenerates and forgets.
It moves to the rhythm of trust, not in transactions.
I never really understood the price of water until I had to pay it.
₹ 1 To fill a bottle. Then ₹ 20 per liter. Then came the air.
Bought in oxygen cylinders Duration COVID.
Ten thousand liters of breath, tablets in ₹ 3,000 in steel.
We no longer call it air. We call it survival.
It is tragic and comic at the same time: how humans only notice value when it becomes sufficient carce to carry a price.
The forests are ignored until they are fenced. Rivers until they dry. Oxygen until it is billed.
And that’s when it hit me:
Maybe the problem is that we do not pay nature.
Maybe we just know how to set it.
Let me be clear:
This is not a capital rejection.
It is a new long one.
I have seen which capital can unlock: for farmers, forests, for families.
I still believe in its transformation of power to accelerate.
But that belief comes with a warning.
Capital must learn to listen.
Because without a soul, it becomes an excavator.
With the soul, it becomes a bridge.
The challenge is not capitalism.
It is the shallow version that we have inherited, one that prices can only make transactions and ignore what really keeps life.
Markets are brilliant in price risk.
But they are terrible in the meaning of pricing.
Most regeneration efforts do not fail because they lack funds.
They fail because they are missing Ritual, memory and emotional intelligence.
When asked to a farmer who changes practices, they are not only changing the technique, but they are leaving aside what their father once believed. That is not a change of method. It is a calculation.
When a buyer changes to the regenerative acquisition, they not only adjust the strategy, but are challenging decades of efficiency worship.
And when asked to a financier that invests in a forest, they not only assign capital, but they are asked a deeper question:
Can we continue chasing endless returns, if the same systems that make the life possible are breaking?
Real regeneration is not only ecological.
It is psychological. It is cultural. It is economical –
But only if we dare to redefine what we want to say with courage.
So what now?
We do not abandon the structure. We reconcile it.
We do not rule out business. We redesign it, to maintain stillness, complaint and belonging.
We do not pursue scale as a score.
We build things to which people and ecosystems, because they belong.
Because the son of learning that matters is not about knowing more.
It’s about carrying less certainty.
If there is a lesson that Damodaran gave me, and the forest deepened, it is this:
Real learning is not accumulation. It is the surrender.
And I’m still learning. Not only how to grow a forest. But how to value one, even if no one is still fixing it.
The writer is co -founder of Soul Forest and Kheyti (winner of the Earthshot Award)
Posted on April 24, 2025