The Subverse

The Subverse, presented by Dark ‘n’ Light is a podcast that uncovers the hidden and marginal in stories about nature, culture and social justice. From the cosmic to the quantum, from cells to cities and from colonial histories to reimagining futures. Join Susan Mathews every fortnight on a Thursday for weird and wonderful conversations, narrated essays and poems that dwell on the evolving contingencies of life.

Defying Gravity: Bird flight, culture and evolutionary grooves 10/22/2025

Defying Gravity: Bird flight, culture and evolutionary grooves In the final episode of the season, Susan Mathews speaks with Antone Martinho-Truswell, a fascinating behavioural ecologist, Operations Manager at the Sydney Policy Lab, and Research Associate at the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia. His Substack is called and he is author of The Parrot in the Mirror: How evolving to be like birds made us human (2022). The book, and this episode, considers the parallels between the ‘evolutionary grooves’ of the extremely advantageous traits of humans and birds—the former, by becoming the cultural ape, and the latter through flight. Antone explains how one trait that is advantageous leads to a number of adaptations that support it. For example, how human babies are born underdeveloped, and humans have cultures that care for children for a long time in order to support the big brain that we need to grow. Taking us through the evolution of birds, Antone describes how, in dinosaurs like T-Rex, small raptors and Archaeopteryx, scales evolved into feathers which smaller dinosaurs probably began to take advantage of with glides and long leaps. And, over time, the bodies of these creatures became entirely specialised for flight. They spoke about relative lifespans. Birds live two to ten times as long as mammals of a similar size. The reason is flight. The most obvious advantage is that it’s much easier to escape predators, but birds live longer even when there are no predators around. This is because of K-selection and r-selection. K-selection is a live-slow-die-old strategy, and r-selection a live-fast-die-young strategy. An adaptation like flight starts a virtuous cycle where, since it is much more likely that a bird makes it to the next breeding season, evolution selects traits that enable it to live longer. Movement itself, Antone stresses, is a pretty impressive biological feat. While microorganisms and water-dwelling creatures like coral are bathed in the medium that sustains its life, and plants are rooted in a life-sustaining substrate, wrapping all of the incredibly complex chemical reactions of life in a waterproof bag like a dog or a human is incredible. And then adding the third dimension of flight is a difficult feat because the animal has to fight gravity itself. The evolutionary advantage is huge because it's rare, and it’s rare because it's hard to do. But such a drastic advantage can also have other implications. Antone’s article in Aeon, considers why, even though birds have a lot of the same raw materials for a robust and complex culture—intelligence, communication, long overlapping lives, knowledge passed down through the generations—they have not developed one. Evolution never aspires to anything, only responds to inadequacy, and so, he hypotheses, birds don’t need culture because flight is such a powerful adaptation. The more advantageous the adaptation, the less likely it is that a different way of life evolves. Similarly, in humans, while there are some incremental changes to our genes, our complex culture, with its welfare, science, and other innovations, has taken away the pressure to do things differently. Even if there is an apocalyptic event that takes away all of our technology, we're still going to have all of the abstract components—like writing and money—that give us significant advantages. But just as this capacity lets us build concepts like democracy, it also enables us to build complex concepts like ‘enemies’ and ‘hate’ in ways that few other creatures can. Finally, while narrow sustainability—energy consumption, resource use—is important, Antone persuades us to think of broader sustainability. We need to consider the physical space and the resources that we and our cities use, and, rather than fencing in nature, find ways to live that are continuous with the rest of nature. This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance. More about the guest: Antone Martinho-Truswell’s work focuses on animal minds and learning, and on human behaviour and interaction with the natural world. He is particularly interested in birds and cephalopods, intelligent species whose evolutionary history differs dramatically from that of mammals. His academic work has been published in Science, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Current Biology and Animal Behaviour and covered in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Times and New Scientist, among others. He also writes on longstanding questions in biology and animal behaviour for Aeon and the BBC. You can find him on Instagram . /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/38738785

Floating on an Ocean of Air: Exploring the intersections of art, activism and science 10/15/2025

Floating on an Ocean of Air: Exploring the intersections of art, activism and science In episode four of The Subverse, host Susan Mathews talks with Joaquin Ezcurra, an intrepid and adventurous cartographer, marine technician and web developer. Since 2017, Joaquin has been actively involved in , an open-source, experimental practice and movement for eco-social justice founded by artist Tomás Saraceno and carried forward by a growing global community since 2015. Aerocene uses art, site-specific installations and augmented reality sculptures to promote climate change awareness. Joaquin has been involved in its aero-solar flight operations, digital strategies, website development, app development, communications, acts as a community liaison, and documents the movement through thousands of images and videos. Air and the atmosphere, Joaquin reminds us, are the ultimate commons. As Evangelista Torricelli, the inventor of the barometer, famously said, we live at the bottom of an ocean of air. But today, the air is highly controlled, for political, military and commercial reasons. Aerocene imagines a utopia, allowing us to dream of a world in which we may take more time and a more winding route to reach our destination; and our destinations themselves may change. Over the last decade, Aerocene has had projects on six continents, 37 countries and 158 locations, and a total 218 flights. It has evolved from an art and science project to an art and activism project. Joaquin emphasised however, that the story of the movement is not only one of triumphs but failures and learning. The need for safety came into focus early when, while piloting an experimental flight, Tomás Saraceno fell from a significant height, sustaining injuries that required surgery. Since then, the Aerocene community has embraced the highest aeronautical safety protocols and only involves professional balloon pilots for aerosolar free-flights. A milestone for the Aerocene movement was the 2020 flight of the . A team comprised of Argentine and foreign pilots, the indigenous communities of the Salinas Grandes fighting for their rights, and BTS fans, in the middle of the salt flats of Argentina were witness to a flight that broke 32 FAI world records for altitude and distance. The flight was piloted by Leticia Marqués, a kindergarten teacher turned professional balloon pilot. It was livestreamed around the world, carrying a message chosen by the local First Nation communities: ‘water and life are worth more than lithium’. It was, as Joaquin describes, a sight never seen; a compelling intersection of science, art, activism and music communities coming together. We then discussed the issues with the ‘green transition’, which is a shift to electric vehicles in Europe and other countries in the guise of environmental concerns. However, the mining of lithium, which is fuelling this shift, is destructive, and needs extractive infrastructure so vast that one can only comprehend it from a plane or a satellite. It is destroying the salt flats of Argentina, a crucial wetland that serves as a migratory hub for birds in the Americas. In 2023, the Aerocene community gathered in Alfarcito, Argentina, where some of the country’s top environmentalist, sociologist lawyers, philosophers, artists, writers and poets issued a declaration based on the idea of the rights of nature for the Salinas Grandes in Alfarcito. This hasn’t stopped mining companies, but these efforts have stood along these communities and slowed the advance of mining in this region. Geopolitics has long been rooted in land ownership, projected upward into the air, and down into the earth. But the atmosphere is more than a void above the land. Recognizing the rights of air means acknowledging its agency in sustaining life. We need to move away from this colonial capitalist view and increase the connections in our lives. Aerocene’s , a free and open source project, to build a living museum with nothing more than a few thousand plastic bags and many volunteers, is the perfect tool for this. It brings people together and reminds us that when you have this strong, local connections, as Joaquin says, magic happens. This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance. Read more about Aerocene in our interview with Claudia Aboaf, a writer, teacher and astrologer who has worked closely with the collective. More about the guest: Joaquín Ezcurra is a cartographer, artist, and researcher whose practice explores alternative ways of seeing and representing natural phenomena, combining science with sensitivity in the context of the climate emergency. He has collaborated with leading cultural and scientific institutions worldwide, and since 2017 has been a core collaborator with the Aerocene Foundation and the worldwide Aerocene community. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/38590515

Configurations of Air: Matter, Traces and Making a Landscape 10/09/2025

Configurations of Air: Matter, Traces and Making a Landscape In episode three, Susan Mathews continues her conversation with Mădălina Diaconu, a researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria and author of Aesthetics of Weather (2024). Mădălina works on environmental aesthetics, urban aesthetics and phenomenology of perception. Please listen to the first part of this conversation in episode two to hear about the need for a holistic view of our immersion in the atmosphere, thermic auras, and multisensory perception as the basis for empathy. Our conversation began with tornadoes, their radical dynamic form that makes air visible and creates a figure that is both perfect and dangerous, an ambivalence which diverges from the classical experience of beauty as harmony. There are other figures of the sky like clouds, lightning and the rainbow, but Mădălina was drawn to the tornado’s uncontrolled genesis and evolution as it challenges the assumption of the Anthropocene that humans can manipulate and domesticate everything. She spoke of the limitations of equating materiality with solid matter. Water and air are also material, as are light and other electromagnetic waves, radiation and other phenomena. Mădălina invites a shift not just of how matter is conceptualized, but of the traditional representation of matter as something passive that can be manipulated by humans to instead recognise that we are not the only form of matter who can be assigned activity or agency. The conversation then moved on to an interrogation of the human fixation on landscapes. Mădălina introduced the concept of landscapability to capture our tendency to compose, through analogy, a landscape even when land may not be present, say on the Arctic ocean as we are surrounded by air, water and ice. She also highlighted the values conveyed within our definition of landscapes, including emotional value such as patriotism, of topophilia. This theory of landscapes is also contextually informed by its origins in landscape painting in Italy and central Europe—a theory emerging from a different culture would not have the same principles. For example, one formed in the Amazonian forests would not have the particular principle of panoramic views. Mădălina’s study also includes work on the tactile aesthetics of cityscapes. A city is full of microclimates. On a hot summer day, you can enter a building and experience shadows and, in the last century, air conditioning. A glass houses can cultivate tomatoes earlier than the climate outside allows. This lack of a monotonous thermic landscape is a performance of civilization but so is paradoxically the creation of blandscapes such as shopping malls. The question of how to cope with and mitigate the consequences of climate change is not only for philosophers, but for architects and urban planners. The solution is not to build more capsules for a select group who can afford them; we need to develop strategies of common survival. Finally, we discussed the idea of traces. Mădălina spoke of how a trace is a kind of material signature left by someone or by something. They are not ruins but remainders. Traces are present, while also suggesting an absence. Some traces are more enduring than a life itself. Waste is also a trace, though an unwanted one. Some of these waste traces are incontrollable and some, like radioactive waste, are indestructible. Mădălina closes by urging us to pay attention to the things that surround us in everyday life, all worthy of our time and attention, that could open the doors of our perception to truly atmospheric living. This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance. More about the guest: Mădălina Diaconu studied Philosophy (PhD, PhD) and Theology (MA) in Bucharest and Vienna. She teaches as Dozentin at the Department of Philosophy and as lecturer at the Department of Romance Studies of the University of Vienna. She is member of the editorial boards of Contemporary Aesthetics, Studia Phaenomenologica and polylog, a magazine about intercultural philosophy. She authored eleven monographs and (co)edited several books on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, the ontology of art, the phenomenology of the senses, the aesthetics of touch, smell, and taste, urban sensescapes, environmental ethics, animality, atmosphere, and eco-phenomenology. Her latest book is Aesthetics of Weather (Bloomsbury 2024). You can read more about her work . /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/38521330

Under the Weather: Atmospherics, Aesthetics, and Thermic Subjects 10/09/2025

Under the Weather: Atmospherics, Aesthetics, and Thermic Subjects In episode two, Susan Mathews speaks to Mădălina Diaconu, a researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria and author of Aesthetics of Weather (2024) who works on environmental aesthetics, urban aesthetics and phenomenology of perception. Re-defining aesthetics to mean not just beauty but perception, Mădălina spoke of weather not just as a frontal experience, but our immersion in the atmosphere, the very medium of our life and existence as it permeates our porous bodies and sensitivities. We experience it not as thinking subjects, but as living beings. While it is, in principle, a commons that is available to all, its perception and access is socially, culturally, politically conditioned. Aesthetic perception converges with scientific knowledge within the ethical consideration—we simply cannot enjoy a natural catastrophe. There is a communication of vessels between our moral and our aesthetic being. She spoke of how imagination throws us into the past, but we can also project ourselves into the future. And this is what at least some environmentally committed artists do, as they imagine the earth after the collapse of civilization, a paradoxical posthumous imagination. Mădălina shared her long fascination with what were philosophically known as the ‘lower senses’, including olfaction, and the need to go beyond Western philosophical frameworks. Smells are extremely evocative. The sense of temperature, usually subsumed in tactility which is a vast spectrum of perception in itself, deserves a separate theory. While sight has just two sensory organs, with temperature, we have the whole body, its surface and its depths. And the thermic ‘aura’ of every living being extends beyond the boundary of the thermic subject. We then spoke of Herman Schmitz’s concept of the body’s tendencies to narrow and to expand, the epicritic and the protopathic, in breathing, in response to pain. Mădălina brought to focus the tendency to subordinate the richness of perception of our everyday life and of art to a merely ocular experience. But in reality, we experience, say architecture, not merely as visual but also thermic, clothing also as tactile, perfumes not merely as olfactory but evoking a feeling, say of refreshment. And this goes deeper with performing arts such as dance where, as spectators, the tendency to focus on the visuals, leads to a deficit of empathy and a disregard for other aspects of the dancer’s experience such as heat and pain. In visual arts and fine arts, thermic considerations could destroy the art itself, or be used by the artist to form or deform materials. As Mădălina said, we need to expand our traditional aesthetic concepts to account for this richness of experience. Join us with your thermic body and enjoy the fleecy, cloudy edges of our conversation. This is part one of the conversation. Listen to part two in episode three to hear our conversation about tornadoes, traces and landscapes. This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance. More about the guest: Mădălina Diaconu studied Philosophy (PhD, PhD) and Theology (MA) in Bucharest and Vienna. She teaches as Dozentin at the Department of Philosophy and as lecturer at the Department of Romance Studies of the University of Vienna. She is member of the editorial boards of Contemporary Aesthetics, Studia Phaenomenologica and polylog, a magazine about intercultural philosophy. She authored eleven monographs and (co)edited several books on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, the ontology of art, the phenomenology of the senses, the aesthetics of touch, smell, and taste, urban sensescapes, environmental ethics, animality, atmosphere, and eco-phenomenology. Her latest book is Aesthetics of Weather (Bloomsbury 2024). You can read more about her work . /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/38521090

Currents of Change 10/02/2025

Currents of Change We kick off season five of The Subverse, focused on the element of ‘air’, with host Susan Mathews in conversation with Dr. Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, India. Roxy has made breakthrough contributions to the research, monitoring, and modelling of climate and extreme weather events over the Indo-Pacific region. His work has advanced the scientific understanding of monsoon floods and droughts, terrestrial and marine heatwaves, and cyclones, facilitating the food, water, and economic security of the region. His recent research focuses on developing climate-smart health warning systems that integrate climate and health data with AI/ML to enable early action and long-term planning. Roxy actively collaborates with citizen science networks, local governments, and media to bring science to society. Roxy starts by explaining that the average atmospheric temperature rise of 1.2 to 1.5 degrees doesn’t tell the whole story. 93% of the heat produced by anthropogenic climate change is absorbed and contained by the oceans; the heat we feel is only 7% of it. Even this is also not equally distributed over time or space. The tropics, and regions like India which are surrounded by warming oceans, experience more heat. The changes in gradients in the temperature affects the paths of atmospheric jet streams and ocean currents that distribute heat, which changes the rhythm of the seasons, intensifying monsoons and increasing heat waves. The Indian Ocean, bordered by 40 countries that are home to a third of the global population, is warming faster than other oceans and moving to a near permanent marine heat wave state. Corals, on which 25% of the marine biodiversity depends, are the first to die in these heatwaves, losing their protective symbiotic algae. And this affects the numbers and species of phytoplankton, which produce half the oxygen we breath, and there are cascading impacts through the food chain. He emphasises, however, that climate change is not the only factor in these changes. Industrial fishing has resulted in more depletion of fish than temperature changes. Flooding in India is caused not just by climate change but also rapid and unplanned urbanization and other local changes, but politicians will only blame the former. In the USA, they don’t focus on climate change because they have a historical responsibility. The world is polarized and the narratives around climate change are selective based on alliances, but we need to have a comprehensive view. There is hope, Roxy says. If we can use the data that we have to understand the heat waves over the land and ocean, we can adapt and safeguard the ecosystems and our own lives. If we act now, we can have different socioeconomic pathways for the future. Data is key to making these changes. Roxy’s pet project is to make every school in India a weather station, starting with tools as simple as a plastic bottle to measure rainfall, because if children grow up with an awareness of how the climate is changing, they can adapt. While a lot of the focus is on climate mitigation, this is outside the scope of the individual, or even a single country, and the necessary global cooperation doesn’t exist. Roxy reminds us, however, that adaptation is something that can and needs to be done locally. We can track local data, project this data into the future, and prepare our homes, farmlands, and our daily life for a climate changed world. Roxy is that unusual blend of rigorous scientist and amazing science communicator, who speaks with empathy, heart and an outlook prioritizing action and deeds. This conversation was also proof of something I have found in this elemental journey in the past few years. Quoting John Muir, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance. More about the guest: Roxy Koll did his Ph.D. in Ocean and Atmospheric Dynamics from Hokkaido University, Japan. He is a Lead Author of the IPCC Reports and the former Chair of the Indian Ocean Region Panel. He received the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar (National Science Award), the highest recognition in the field of science, technology and innovation in India, from the President of India in 2024. He was conferred a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and was awarded the AGU Devendra Lal Medal for outstanding research in Earth and Space Sciences in 2022. He is among the top 2% scientists ranked by Stanford University. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences awarded him the Kavli Fellowship in 2015 and the NRC Senior Research Fellowship in 2018. The Indian Meteorological Society felicitated him with the Young Scientist Award in 2016 for his research on the changes in the Monsoon. You can follow Roxy on , , and . Read more about his work . /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/38436795

Sami Ahmad Khan 09/29/2025

Sami Ahmad Khan In episode three of season four, host Anjali Alappat sits down with writer, academic and documentary producer, Sami Ahmad Khan. He is the author of Red Jihad: Battle for South Asia (2012), Aliens in Delhi (2017), and the monograph Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction (2021). Sami was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar and his fiction has been the subject of formal academic research and a part of university syllabi in India and the US. His overview of Indian SF has been translated into Czech and his short story has been translated into Marathi. His creative and critical writings have appeared in leading academic journals (Science Fiction Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, Foundation), university presses (MIT Press, University of Wales Press), and trade imprints (Gollancz, Hachette, Bloomsbury, Routledge, Rupa, Juggernaut, Niyogi). Sami is also the recipient of a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Fellowship (University of Oslo, Norway), a Fulbright FLTA grant (University of Iowa, USA), and a UGC-MANF Senior Research Fellowship (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India). He currently discusses life and Science Fiction at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, where he teaches MA and PhD-level courses on SF, as well as supervises PhD research on Indian SF. In this episode, we discuss our love for pulpy science fiction, T-rexes, Black holes, and the Bermuda triangle, thought experiments, being a fan, genre conventions, and the future of Indian science fiction. You can follow Sami on X Read Sami’s Work: Books 1. 2. 3. University of Wales Press (2021) Edited Collection: 1. Routledge (2025, co-edited with Merve Tabur) Short fiction: 1. . Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature. Jan-Feb. 2024. 2. “”, The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction II. Hachette (2021) 3. “”, The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction. Gollancz (2019) 4. “”, Muse India (2016) Podcast: 1. Academic articles: 1. “”. The Journal of Popular Culture, 56(2). 341-355. (2023) 2. “. Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research. 6(2). 25-37 (2019) 3. “,” Science Fiction Studies. 43(3), Indian SF. 479-495 (2016) 4. “.” Journal of Science Fiction. 1(1) 17-31 (2016) 5. “” Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction. Ed. By Yoshinaga, Guynes and Canavan. MIT Press (2022) /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/38381620

The Amazing Morphs of the Golden Cat 09/25/2025

The Amazing Morphs of the Golden Cat In this final instalment of Cataplisms, we join conservation anthropologist Sahil Nijhawan and his collaborator Iho Mitapo in the Dibang Valley on a journey that is both spiritual and scientific. Iho and Sahil are founding members of the Dibang Team, a biocultural conservation initiative led by the Idu Mishmi, the indigenous inhabitants of the Dibang valley, that takes a multi-pronged and multi-disciplinary approach. It has established an ancestral storytelling program (Taju Taye), piloted a program that adapts the traditional system of shamanic learning to present-day socio-economic realities (Igu Aahito) and pioneered community-led conservation and research. In this audio story, Iho details the creation story of his Idu Mishmi community, one which deems man and tiger to be brothers. Meanwhile, Sahil fills us in on their camera-trapping expedition that resulted in a sensational deep-forest revelation. His team discovered a unique adaptation that might be critical to the survival of the elusive Asian golden cat, a beautiful mid-sized feline listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN. Click here to see their discovery vibrantly illustrated in a comic by artist Sudarshan Shaw. Sahil and Iho’s research takes place in the sprawling Dibang valley in Arunachal Pradesh, India. The valley lies in the embrace of the Eastern Himalayas Global Biodiversity Hotspot, where new species, like the orchid are continuously being discovered. The culture of the Idu Mishmi is credited for preserving the diversity of this land. However, today the Valley is threatened by infrastructure projects, including 17 mega dams proposed along the valley’s eponymous river. Local and national opinion on these projects is divided, but one thing is certain—if these are greenlit the social, cultural and ecological fabric of the region will be irreversibly changed. With such looming threats to their habitat, the fate of the Golden Cat and myriad other species remains uncertain. You can learn more about the work of the Dibang Team on their and read about the Save Dibang Valley movement . The audio story was produced by Tushar Das. You can find him on and his work on the website. About the narrators: Iho Mitapo is an Idu Mishmi from Lower Dibang Valley, Arunachal Pradesh. He has been conducting research on Dibang Valley’s biocultural diversity since 2014 in collaboration with anthropologist Sahil Nijhawan. Iho is the first certified river guide from the Idu community. In 2017, he founded a home-grown ecotourism venture, Dibang Adventures, with the aim of preserving Dibang’s unique landscape while engaging unemployed local youth. He is a member of the Dibang Team, an Idu-led biocultural conservation initiative. He also co-coordinates the activities of Elopa-Etugu Community Eco-Cultural Preserve (EECEP)—a Community Conserved Area spanning 76 km2 in his ancestral land, one of the most biodiverse parts of India. Iho was awarded the prestigious Sanctuary Wildlife Service Award in 2018 for his tireless work and contribution towards the conservation of his homeland. He has delivered talks at several national and international fora and has inspired films and articles on Dibang Valley’s story. He is also a farmer and a father of two wonderfully curious young Idus. Sahil Nijhawan is engineer turned conservation anthropologist. For more than a decade, he has conducted interdisciplinary research in Latin America, Southern Africa and India. He is interested in human-wildlife relations, big cat ecology and conservation, camera trapping methods, indigenous/local concepts of nature, animism and shamanism, hunting sustainability, ritual ecologies, and locally-led conservation. His ongoing research and collaborative conservation work in Northeast India began with his doctoral research which studied the ecological, cultural and political relations between wildlife and the Idu Mishmi people of the Dibang Valley of Arunachal Pradesh, India. Future work will expand research into other ethnic communities within Northeast India to understand the factors that lead to local conservation. He is particularly interested in newer ways of integrating cutting edge technologies with local knowledge and classical ethnographic approaches, research capacity building in NE India and collaborating with local people, artists and educators towards inclusive, ethical and reflexive approaches to conservation research and writing. Sahil is affiliated with ZSL, National Geographic Society, UCL Anthropology, and the ICCA Consortium. He enjoys travelling, learning languages, baking and growing his own food. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/38352240

Rashmi Devadasan, Rakesh Khanna & R.T. Samuel 09/22/2025

Rashmi Devadasan, Rakesh Khanna & R.T. Samuel In episode three, we chat with Rashmi Devadasan, Rakesh Khanna, and R.T. Samuel, the brilliant minds behind The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, which has been making waves in the Indian speculative fiction scene. Rashmi Devadasan is a writer with over twenty-five years of experience in indie publishing, Tamil feature films, and Indian English theatre. At Blaft, she has been part of the selection, editing, design and production of the company's fiction in translation, comic book anthologies, original fiction, and zines. She is the author of Kumari Loves a Monster, a picture book created with the artist Shyam. Her short stories were part of an anthology titled Strange Worlds! Strange Times! Amazing Sci-Fi Stories, published by Speaking Tiger. She is a fan of fungi, moss, lichen, cephalopods, and jellyfish. Rashmi also draws gentle, mostly cuboidal-shaped sample collector robots that do research on a cacti-covered asteroid. You can find Rashmi Devadasan on Instagram . Rakesh Khanna grew up in Berkeley, California, of mixed Punjabi and Anglo-American heritage. He co-founded Blaft Publications in Chennai with Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, who is also his wife, in 2008. The company publishes translations of Indian fiction, folklore, weird fiction, and graphic novels. Rakesh is the co-author of Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India, the editor of Blaft's Tamil Pulp Fiction and Gujarati Pulp Fiction anthologies, and co-editor of The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF. Sometimes he edits mathematics textbooks. He is interested in marine invertebrates, demonology, topological graph theory, and banging on things to see what they sound like. You can find Rakesh Khanna on Instagram . R.T. Samuel is an editor and independent cultural producer working between London and New Delhi. R is the co-editor of the collection, The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, helmed by a viral fundraiser that made it the second-most successful Indian publishing campaign in Kickstarter history. The book involved working with nearly 30 authors, translators and artists for close to two years, and features stories from more than six different languages and diverse mediums. From 2021-23, R was also the writer and broadcaster behind the hugely popular (20k plays and counting) underground political and cultural education podcast Clear Blue Skies S1. A lapsed investigative and culture journalist, R is currently pursuing an MSc in Anthropology and Professional Practice at University College London and is always happy to talk about 80s SFF, public radio, futures literacy and Indian hip-hop. You can find R.T. Samuel on Instagram . In this episode, we discuss the lack of understanding around caste, what’s missing from the Indian SFF scene, the challenges and thrills of putting together an expansive anthology, the importance of translated fiction, Enid Blyton's undeniable influence, and more. Links to Rashmi Devadasan’s work: Links to Rakesh Khanna’s work: Links to R.T. Samuel’s work: (Essay) (Essay) /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/38295760

Gautam Bhatia 08/21/2025

Arcx - Gigi Ganguly 08/14/2025

Crooked Cats: The Truth Behind Beastly Encounters 05/28/2025

Crooked Cats: The Truth Behind Beastly Encounters In this episode of Stories from the Subverse, Nayanika Mathur, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford, delves into the conflict between big cats and humans. Nayanika’s book, Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (2021), was a key source of inspiration for , which examines the intersections of capitalism through a feline lens. In this piece, Nayanika focuses on the governance of nonhuman animals, their entanglements with humans, and what the consequences are. Mathur talks about the two types of big cats—the seeda saada (straightforward) ones who are scared of humans and keep their distance, and the crooked cats – the adam khor (maneaters) who prey on people. The reasons why some cats become man-eaters, while others avoid humans, are widely debated. Hypotheses include that the cats have come from elsewhere, due to hunting and poaching, or that they’re children of other man-eaters. This uncertainty has consequences. For example, the tiger Ustad, who resided in Ranthambore, was moved out of the sprawling environment of the national park to be confined in a zoo on the suspicion of being a man-eater. This move stirred a national controversy, eliciting an emotional outpouring and contradictory viewpoints. Ustad’s life may have been restricted without cause. How does one govern the unknown? Given the precarious status of most big cat species, the fact that hunting crooked cats is the standard solution of the Indian state becomes even more fraught. Especially, as Mathur underlines, when it is difficult to identify which cat is the crooked one. Drastic measures are often taken posthumously to ostensibly abide with the laws of the land and justify a kill. Mathur emphasises the need to think more deeply about our entanglements with the non-human, revise our laws and institutional practices, and give up our crooked ways. This audio story is part of the Cataplisms project. You can learn more about it . This story was produced by Tushar Das. You can find him on and his work on the website. About Nayanika Mathur Nayanika Mathur is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies as well as Fellow of Wolfson College at the University of Oxford, UK. Educated at the Universities of Delhi and Cambridge she is an anthropologist with an interest in studying the state, ethnographic methods, nonhumans, and the climate crisis. At Oxford Nayanika is co-director of a research network ‘’ which explores the ways through which climate change poses a profound challenge to how the academy – from forms of writing and modes of teaching to disciplinary divisions – operates. Nayanika is the author of two monographs – Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy, and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (Cambridge University Press 2016) and Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (Chicago University Press, 2021). The first is centred upon the study of bureaucrats and the second on big cats, though they are often confused. In her argument on the governance of big cats this connection - between the paper tiger that is the Indian state and the crooked cats that are entangled with the planetary crisis – becomes, one hopes, clearer. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/36742180

Fragmented Forests: Raza Kazmi Talks Capitalism, Conservation, and Charismatic Wildlife 03/27/2025

Fragmented Forests: Raza Kazmi Talks Capitalism, Conservation, and Charismatic Wildlife In this episode of Stories from the Subverse, we present our first Cataplisms audio story. The Cataplisms project examines our multispecies entanglements, critiques capitalism, and acknowledges the cataclysms at our doorstep, all through a feline lens. In this episode, we hear from someone personally and professionally invested in the fate of big cats and the forests they live in. Raza Kazmi is a conservationist, writer and wildlife historian, who focuses on East Central India. His childhood in Jharkhand’s Palamu region, surrounded by the forest’s flora and fauna, including tigers and leopards, ignited his passion for protecting these cats, and his connection with forest landscapes. Kazmi illustrates how industrialization and capitalism have threatened India’s tigers and other wildlife. A web of mines, dams, and other infrastructure projects within forest areas and critical wildlife corridors pockmark the forests of East Central India. This has fragmented habitats and disrupted migration routes, disorienting animals like elephants and tigers and exacerbating human-wildlife conflict. Kazmi shares that the lack of charismatic wildlife makes it easier to divert forest areas for more mining projects. Both people and animals who depend on these forests are adversely affected. He delves into the drastic decline of animals, including tigers and leopards, in Palamu due to hunting coupled with the expansion of industries, which has pushed these animals to the brink, crossing an ecological Rubicon, and making urgent conservation intervention critical. Kazmi also talks about the lack of charismatic wildlife, or animals with mass appeal like tigers and elephants, in the area and how that can make it easier to divert forests for more mining or urbanisation projects. The destruction of these ecosystems thanks to expansion and hunting, has led to desperate circumstances. Raza shares the story of a male tiger’s five-year trek across multiple states in search of a mate. The tiger’s struggle underscores how capitalistic development has fragmented natural corridors, forcing wildlife to navigate human-dominated spaces rather than the jungles they belong in. But not all hope is lost. Kazmi emphasizes the pivotal role that local communities play in conservation. They are essential for saving tigers and other wildlife from the destructive forces of industrialization. He believes that, “if the forests are there, there will always be the hope of the wildlife returning.” About Raza Kazmi Raza Kazmi is a conservationist, writer, wildlife historian, storyteller and researcher. His fields of expertise include India’s wildlife and forest administration history, conservation policy and conservation issues afflicting the insurgency-ridden east-central Indian landscape. His writings appear in national newspapers (The Hindu, The Indian Express), online media houses (The Wire, FiftyTwodotin, RoundGlass Sustain) as well as various magazines and journals (Frontline, Seminar, The India Forum, Journal of Bombay Natural History Society, Sanctuary Asia, Cheetal, etc.). He has also contributed essays to edited anthologies. A recipient of the New India Foundation Fellowship for 2021, he is currently writing a book tentatively titled To Whom Does the Forest Belong? The Fate of Green in the Land of Red. He works as a Conservation Communicator with the Wildlife Conservation Trust, and also teaches as a Guest Faculty for Wildlife Management at the Forest Guard Training Schools in Chaibasa and Ranchi in Jharkhand. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/35884705

Botanical Reckonings: Reclaiming the Embrangled Vegetal from Colonial Bonds 12/11/2024

History, Naturally: Earth, Climate and Human Cycles 11/28/2024

Plastic Worlds: From Synthetic Universality to Queer Kin 11/14/2024

A Creature Called Earth: Movers, Shakers, and Rainmakers 11/04/2024

Earthly Matters: An Ecosophical Approach 10/17/2024

Earthly Matters: An Ecosophical Approach We're back with The Subverse. In this episode of the season, host Susan Mathews talks to writer and ecological thinker about the current crises in modern cosmology. Ecosophy, which acknowledges the living earth, is a way to address this arrythmia and our current alienation from the earth to which we belong. Aseem Shrivastava is a writer, teacher, and ecological thinker with a doctorate in Economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has lectured across the world on ecological issues emanating from globalisation. Shrivastava speaks of the present moment as an existential crisis, not just an intellectual crisis or a crisis of culture. During this fundamental upheaval in human affairs, the first thing you need to do is look at where your feet are. We need to ask fundamental questions about how we got here, and also address the terminal crisis in modern cosmology itself. “Without Nature, we are not.”- This is the start of an article Shrivastava wrote in The Open Magazine in 2021. He quotes Rilke and writes, “it appears that in the process of arising within us, the earth has dreams for us!” This earth is our only home, so he asks, “Are we ready to abandon her for the greener pastures of another planet that the space fantasists never fail to promise us? In a gentle defiance of the European Enlightenment vision, let us seriously consider the possibility that Rilke is right, that perhaps the Earth does have dreams for us, in the manner that a mother has dreams for her children. And like a mother’s dreams, the earth’s hopes for us must have power.” Ecosophy, unlike environmentalism or ecology, fundamentally tackles things like earth alienation and looks at the content of our vanishing relationship to the natural world in its full physical and metaphysical depth. We need a new mythos, and we can learn from Rabindranath Tagore in this context. Through his poetry, music, stories, plays and letter, the mythos is all there and you don’t need to go to science to find the meaning of life. We have a world that is arrhythmic, out of sync, not to mention suffering from psychic, cognitive and spiritual arrhythmia too. We need to understand the real roots of the crises we face, the limits of our knowledge, question our need to dominate and control and, in the end, face some heart reckoning and atonement. Aseem Shrivastava has taught at prestigious universities in India and the West and offered courses on Global and Indian Ecosophy at Ashoka University. He has been guiding and mentoring a number of graduate students and young people working in the realms of Philosophy, Ecosophy, Ecology, and Economics. He is the author (with Ashish Kothari) of the books ‘Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India’ (2012), and ‘Prithvi Manthan (2016). He is currently at work on several books on Ecosophy:‘The Grammar of Greed: Reflections on a Fatal Ecology’, ‘The Alphabet of Ecosophy: A Grammar for Twilight Modernity’, and ‘For Love of the Earth: Modernity, Ecosophy, Rabindranath Tagore’. All these works dialogue with the ecological challenges of 21st century global modernity. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/33496022

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Seeding Life on Earth: Cosmic Gifts, Ultimate Outsiders and Bringers of Light 06/06/2024

Seeding Life on Earth: Cosmic Gifts, Ultimate Outsiders and Bringers of Light In this episode, we are in conversation with , a planetary scientist based at ETH Zürich and the University of Cambridge. Craig’s work spans the origins, evolution, and distribution of life in the Universe. In this podcast, we chat about cosmic dust, the origins of life on Earth, and phosphorus—a key element for life, known as the ‘bringer of the light of day’, and its more fiendish nickname, “The Devil’s Element”. In a paper published in Nature Astronomy in February 2024, Craig and his colleagues note that life on Earth probably originated from “reservoirs of bio-essential elements” such as phosphorus, sulfur, nitrogen, and carbon. But our earth rocks are relatively poor in reactive and soluble forms of these elements. So where did they come from? Apart from meteorites and asteroids, they could have also found their way to earth through cosmic dust, mineral grain aggregates of less than 3 mm derived from asteroids and comets. And glaciers provide settings capable of both locally concentrating cosmic dust and initiating closed-system aqueous prebiotic chemistry in cryoconite holes, self-sustaining puddles or lakes. In a more poetic turn, we talked about meteorites, which has been termed by Elizabeth Grosz as the ultimate outsider, a cosmological imponderable that might burst through the perceived limits of the known. Craig noted that these materials speak at a deeper level about where we come from and how we should live. Potentially, all life derives from these cosmic gifts. We are really made of stardust. Everything about meteorites and their eviscerated metallurgic intensity speaks to their incredible durability. We then moved on to Craig’s PhD thesis on phosphorus, the backbone of DNA and our metabolism. It cycles through ecosystems in a mostly closed loop as organisms live, die and decay. This remarkable element, crucial for global food production, allows our civilization to flourish. However, with its overuse, we now face the dangers of fertilizer run-off such as algal blooms which can lead to ocean anoxic events which have been correlated with mass extinctions. For four and a half billion years, life has recycled minerals and resources, but we humans take them for granted. We churn through these resources, dump them in the oceans and move on. It can’t end well. Outside of research, Craig writes science fiction as well as science communication articles on a wide range of topics. If you want to hear more from Craig about all of the above, you can follow him on Twitter/X for updates. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/31629107

Broken Grounds: Geology, Race and Counter-Gravities 05/23/2024

Broken Grounds: Geology, Race and Counter-Gravities In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with , Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Her transdisciplinary research addresses the colonial afterlives of geology and race as a site of planetary transformation and social change. Her research is published in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and Geologic Life: Inhuman intimacies and the Geophysics of Race (Duke University Press, 2024). The conversation centres around the science of geology and its epistemic and field practices. In her book Geologic Life, Yusoff notes that geology, which emerged in the late fifteenth through nineteenth centuries as a Eurocentric field of scientific inquiry, was a form of earth writing riven by systemic racism, complicit in the building of colonial worlds and the destruction of existing earths. The origin stories of earth and scripts of race are natal twins. Both mineralogical material and the subjugated person, such as on racial lines, were categorized as ‘inhuman’. She approaches this work not through a linear historical geography but through undergounds (as footnote, mine, appendix, subtending strata, and stolen suns) that reveal subterranean currents. Part of the task is to bring this whiteness down to earth through counter-gravities such as insurgent geology, non-fossil histories and questioning stratification. Broadly, Black, Brown, and Indigenous subjects whose location is the rift have an intimacy with the earth that is unknown to the structural position of whiteness. This inhuman intimacy represents another kind of geo-power: the tactics of the earthbound. So, whether it be through growing food, or making music such as the Blues, or the earth as a revolutionary compatriot, there have always been persistent resistances against these racialized relations. Yusoff speaks of the paradigm of the mine, which encapsulates this presumption of extraction. She speaks of how material value is stabilized in the present from skyscrapers to palm plantations, but both inhuman mineral “resources” and subjugated labouring people are relegated to the underground. The mine has also inspired carceral forms such as the prison complex. For a more reparative geophysics, we need to embrace practices that don’t start from the division between bios and geos and actually understand the earth and minerals as part of a kin relationship with a more expansive understanding of how the human comes into being. The separation between biology and geology is purely a kind of historical effect of disciplines and disciplining practices. These changes are even more important in the Anthropocene, where we have what she terms as a “white man’s overburden” with tech bros or predominantly White Western men deciding the future of Earth. Geobiology is a relational affair, and we need to see geology as a praxis of struggle and earth as iterative and archiving of those struggles. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/31429572

Fractured Ecologies: Caste, Indigeneity and Nature in India 05/06/2024

Fractured Ecologies: Caste, Indigeneity and Nature in India In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with an anthropologist studying wildlife conservation with an interest in human-animal relations and community-based conservation. Her monograph Tigers are our Brothers: Anthropology of Wildlife Conservation in Northeast India was published in 2021. She has written extensively on issues of caste and indigeneity in the environmental sciences and academia in India. Ambika completed a PhD thesis in Anthropology from the National University of Singapore in 2016, and currently teaches at IIT, Gandhinagar in India. Susan and Ambika speak of how social hierarchies impact what ‘earth’ means to its various inhabitants. For some a safe haven, for others a dangerous, hostile place. In the Indian context, this is evidenced by the deliberate invisibility of caste in environmental studies and in Indian academia. The exploitation of nature and the perpetuation of caste hierarchies are inextricably linked, with purity and pollution playing significant roles in determining access and exclusion. The lives and livelihoods of people of marginalised communities are often entwined—in a daily connection or a daily struggle—with the fabric of nature itself. Caste and class determine access to land, water, forest, pasture land. The ‘environment’ is conceptualised as apolitical and asocial, like a kind of a local terra nullius. The social is absent from environmental studies and discourse. Nature is seen as separate from, and devoid of, humans. Indigenous worldviews, like that of the Mishmi in Arunachal Pradesh, where Ambika has worked, challenge this dichotomy, seeing instead a continuum of human, non-human, and spirit worlds. However, for a long time, wildlife conservation research and practice has ignored these communities and their knowledge. The conservation model of ‘protected areas’ is offshoot of the dominant ‘development’ practices. The state and scientists view the forest as a place to be measured and mapped, assigning it economic value. Both protected areas and infrastructure like dams and highways cut through geographies inhabited by indigenous peoples, making them ecological refugees. The same notions of purity and pollution lead to the idea that people need to be evicted in order to conserve, a dark history of our national parks in our country. In finding answers to how we can approach repair and reparation in these academic and other conflict zones, Ambika speaks about the need to shift power structures, change our classrooms, to push for diversity among students, teachers and practitioner, to revamp our syllabi and be active in frontline activism. Dr. Ambika Aiyadurai is trained in natural and social sciences with masters’ degrees in Wildlife Sciences from Wildlife Institute of India and Anthropology, Environment and Development from University College London funded by Ford Foundation. In 2017, she was awarded the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship. She has two co-edited volumes, Ecological Entanglements: Affect, Embodiment and Ethics of Care (2023) and More Than Just Footnotes: Field Assistants in Wildlife Research and Conservation (2023). She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IITGN. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/31140588

Sonic Earth: Life, Loss and Listening 04/25/2024

Sonic Earth: Life, Loss and Listening We start Season 4 of The Subverse, which will focus on “Earth”, with a conversation with , a writer and biologist. We focus on his latest book, Sounds Wild and Broken, which explores the story of sound on Earth. It was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction and the PEN E. O Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. In it, David writes about how, three and a half billion years ago, sunlight found a new path to sound: life. The wonders of Earth’s living voices emerged after hundreds of millions of years of evolution that unfolded in communicative silence. From the ancient cricket Permostridulus which bears the earliest known sound-making structure, a ridge on its wing, this sonic creativity was spurred on by some amazing marvels, anatomical and otherwise. They range from insect wings and flowering plants to ciliary hair and even human milk. Now, both land and water are far from silent; fish drum and twang, whales sing, birds chirp and wings buzz. The sonic diversity of the world is rooted in the divergent physical worlds and social lives of animals and the happenstances of history. Every species has a logic, a grammar, to its sound making. And still, the process of hearing is one of unity at the cellular level. Sound also travels across oceans, creating a sort of global unity in sonic communication. Sound is ephemeral, instantly dissipating, and yet can be older than stone. So, in listening to animal voices around us, we are taken back into deep time and legacies of sonic geology. But it is also a ledger of loss. Our species is both an apogee of sonic creativity and the great destroyer of the world’s acoustic riches. As we get noisier, we diminish sonic soundscapes, bequeathing the future an impoverished sensory world. This sensory crisis is an important measure of the environmental crisis, and a powerful untapped tool for environmental justice. How do we create a poetics and politics of listening? We tend to think of experiences of beauty and of creativity as somehow separate from politics and ethics, but Haskell points out that they are deeply intertwined. We are embodied sensory beings. As a species, we need to gather and celebrate the voices of non-human beings. Technological advances have allowed us to record these soundscapes to check on the health of ecosystems. But when we get too reliant on technology, we ignore the wisdom of the people who have lived in the forest for centuries and don’t need gadgets to gauge the health of the forest, or to protect it. David spoke of the generative capacity of sound which comes from life and interconnection. He closed with an invitation to take a few minutes of each day and listen, without judgement or expectation, and let sound do its work. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/30982298

Movement, Mountains, Metamorphosis and Music 02/19/2024

Movement, Mountains, Metamorphosis and Music In today's episode, we bring you Stories from the Subverse. Siddharth Pandey, a writer, artist, and historian, extols the wonders of moving, and allowing oneself to be moved. The simple act of walking becomes radical, with the potential to shirk Nazi commands in Munich, to reclaim fresh air and majestic mountain views from imperial exclusivity in Shimla, to change, create and stir the imagination. As he moves through the mountains, Siddharth challenges their apparent immobility, not just in the liveliness that they host and nurture, but in their very genesis. Every step he takes literally shaping perceptions and perspectives, the scene constantly adjusting itself, illustrating another gift of movement: the affordance of variety, of diversity, and of perpetual newness. A transformative magic Siddharth explores in his book, Fossil. Attuned also to non-generative transformation, Siddharth tackles the ostensible contradiction in celebrating the glory of mountains as we hurtle forward into the maw of the Anthropocene. Drawing on the work of Harvard critic Elaine Scarry, he shows how beauty “decentres”, for we are no longer the focus. Our initial focus on the beautiful object is followed by a cultivation of care; an act of movement in a growing field of relations. Music is an important expression of the innate rhythms and cadences of these landscapes. From the Himachali folk songs that Siddharth’s mother sang to him in his early childhood, to the sense of vastness and longing so typical of the desert panoramas of Rajasthan, or the uplands of Celtic Europe. Earthy tunes that seemed to literally stem out of the landscape they sang of. Mountains far near and far inspired a need to compose. And Siddharth heeded that call, creating tunes that captured journeys through his beloved Himachali landscape and beyond. Some of these tunes are generously intertwined in this story. This story was produced by Tushar Das. You can find him on Instagram and his work on the Brown Monkey Studio website. We also thank Vaaka Media for their logistical support. Music in this story: The piano compositions in this story, A Ride to Annandale and a fragment of Flow, have been composed and performed by Siddharth Pandey. The Himachali folk song Udi Jaaya has been performed by the folk artist Anita Pandey (on the vocals) and Siddharth Pandey (on the piano). About Siddharth Pandey: Siddharth Pandey is a writer, cultural historian, visual practitioner and musician hailing from the Shimla Himalayas. Educated in India and the UK, he holds a PhD in Literary and Material Culture Studies from the University of Cambridge. His first book Fossil was published in 2021, and was a finalist for the 2022 Banff Mountain Literature Awards. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/30009923

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