This run started as a simple family visit. As visits go, they are rarely simple. My maternal uncle and aunt visited us from Chennai, with a packed itinerary stitched together by my nephew. It wasn’t a pilgrimage of faith. I said yes because I’m increasingly curious about how much history and heritage sit quietly off regular tourism circuits. This trip happened to be between Mysuru and Bengaluru.

We began with Chamundi on Thursday evening, just before Aashada preparations turn the hill into a controlled zone of barricades, security, the works. Ended the day with a stroll through Sand Art Museum and along Devraj Urs Road.

A note on distances: this wasn’t a linear route, so instead of exact kilometres for each stop, here’s a rough sense of range—most of Thursday and Friday sat within a 50 km radius of Mysuru, while Saturday and Sunday moved within roughly 60–70 km of Bengaluru.

Instead of narrating each one, here's the full list — worth clicking through on your own time. The links shared below are only a starting point.

Temples visited (in order):

Thursday:

• Chamundeshwari Temple, Chamundi Hill, Mysuru

Friday:

• Cheluvanarayanaswamy Temple, Melkote

• Yoga Narasimha Temple, Melkote

• Nambi Narayana Temple, Thondanur

• Venugopalaswamy Temple, Thondanur

• Nimishamba Temple, Srirangapatna

• Srikanteshwara (Nanjundeshwara) Temple, Nanjangud

• Agastyeshwara Temple, T. Narasipura

• Gunja Narasimha Swamy Temple, T. Narasipura

Saturday:

• Ranganatha Swamy Temple, Magadi

• Someshwara Temple, Magadi

• Old Madiwala Someshwara Temple, Bengaluru

• Kodanda Rama Swamy Temple (108-ft Vishwaroopam), Ejipura

Sunday:

• Bhoga Nandishwara Temple, Nandi village

• Rangasthala Moksha Ranganatha Swamy Temple, Chikkaballapur

While the weather stayed merciful—no harsh sun, no punishing rain—the itinerary didn’t fully account for driver fatigue. Though I was the only one behind the wheel, I was grateful the queue was short in most temples.

I came back from this run more struck by how densely layered this region is. The real discovery happens when you realise that abundance has been there all along, just off your regular route.

All images in this post are mine.

Hydroponics and aeroponics remained paused, late and stuttering monsoon made it the right call. A reset rather than a restart. New sowing is lined up for this weekend.

Microgreens broke the quiet. A batch of wheatgrass and radish, three trays between them, is now underway. Small and deliberate, but a return to something that works.

The bees are holding. Stable, unspectacular, doing what bees do.

On animal husbandry front, things are moving carefully. Legal groundwork and CA advice are shaping the terms of what a serious engagement would look like.

June also took me to Hyderabad for three days. A personal visit, but one that left a mark.

In the background, Mysore Grahakara Parishat has revamped their website. Worth a look and find ways to engage, if the work speaks to you.

June was heavier on invisible groundwork than milestones. The hydroponics reset is coming. The microgreens are in their trays.

In his “Grammar of Anarchy” speech, B.R. Ambedkar warned that people often settle for “government for the people” and neglect “government by the people”. Our digital governance sometimes reflects that temptation: portals are built supposedly for us, but with very little visibility or voice from the end‑user about what happens when an application stalls. Officials still retain a vice‑like grip on the process; the interface may be digital, but much of the machinery remains analogue.

In the corporate world, “digital first” and “digital transformation” have come to mean redesigning processes around the user. In much of the state, these phrases often feel like totems rather than reality. There are welcome exceptions — ministers who are more accessible on social media, or grievance portals that genuinely respond — but for many citizens, escalation still depends more on access and influence than on clear rules.

Bureaucrats understandably need paper trails; petitions collected at a janata durbar are one way of creating that record. Today’s civil servants and senior officials are increasingly adept with technology. At a minimum, they have email addresses listed on departmental portals, though responses to citizen emails often produce mixed results. A generation of digital natives will enter the services soon. The problem, then, is less about individual capacity and more about the approval matrices they are entangled in.

How friction shows up

Another pattern is visible at the front desk of many “digital” processes. The people operating the computers are often contractors or entry‑level staff. They may not fully appreciate that they are dealing with citizens who, by necessity, have learned the system through repeated interactions. Yet these operators are shielded by the power that comes from being the only ones who can decide when to click the button that generates a challan or a registration document.

Karnataka’s trade licence system is one small example of how this plays out. On paper, there is an online way to apply. The web form looks harmless: a few basic fields and a submit button. The real journey begins after you click it. Different wards fall under different authorities — the development authority, village or town panchayats — and the system appears to be built more around which administration collects the tax than around a clear path for the applicant.

The form never explains expected timelines or whom to contact if nothing moves. There is a landline number, but it often goes unanswered, and when it does, the advice is usually: “Come to the office.” For one establishment within city limits, an officer informally discouraged using the online process altogether. Even with a “friendly” official, the process stretched over months, with the business owner and the officer spending weeks just coordinating when and where to finally hand over the licence.

Renewal under a town panchayat was no better. The portal’s best status message was “Pending with Operator”. It never explained who this operator was, what they were supposed to do, or how an applicant could seek redress if nothing changed. After a few days, the status flipped to “Closed by operator”. That was it. There was no way to re‑apply, because the same portal insisted that “this application has already applied for renewal”, even months after it had been closed. Systems like this quietly recreate the long shadow of the licence‑permit raj. The interface might be new, but it does little to reduce opacity.

What this system does, by design or neglect, is remove accountability from the citizen’s line of sight. There are no visible service timelines, so one cannot tell whether a delay is routine or exceptional. And the identity of the decision‑maker is hidden behind generic labels like “operator”. A citizen‑facing system built this way makes it rational for people to seek informal help, pay under the table, or avoid formalisation altogether — the exact opposite of what India’s digital governance story claims to achieve.

One basic statistic would reveal how deep this problem runs: how many establishments are operating without current trade licences despite having attempted to comply? I am not referring to fly‑by‑night outlets, but to legitimate small businesses run by sincere owners. If each licence or renewal demands weeks of follow‑up, how many one‑person establishments simply give up or are nudged into informal payments because it is cheaper than losing more time?

What the state should count

Trade licences usually make news only when an establishment comes into contact with the law. Headlines then declare that “the shop was operating without a trade licence”. The questions that rarely get asked are: Did the proprietor try to apply or renew? How many hours did they lose chasing it? How many times have the rules, forms or authorities changed without clear communication?

From a corporate perch, it is easy to bandy terms like “interactive interface” or “product model”. In citizen–state interactions such as trade licences, the issue is far more basic than return on investment. A government that takes an oath not to leave any citizen behind ends up doing exactly that when scores of people face repeated errors or multiple visits just to find a friendly officer to get a routine job done.

Ambedkar’s warning about preferring “government for the people” over “government by the people” still applies in the age of portals. India’s digital public infrastructure should be judged not only by how many services go online, but by three simpler tests: does the citizen know the rule, the timeline, and the person or office responsible? Is there a clear way to escalate when the system fails? And do we publicly count how many people fall through the gaps? Until the answer to those questions is yes, the licence‑permit raj has not disappeared; it has merely found a new screen to hide behind.

Hydroponics and the aeroponics tower went on pause for new sowing.

The trays already on the roof were busy just surviving, and it felt pointless to push a fresh batch into that heat for the sake of “continuity”.

Indoors, microgreens shifted from solo project to gentle campaign. I’ve been nudging our meals towards using what’s grown at home first. The experiment is whether this can become a family activity rather than one more thing only I care about.

A work video on “influencing skills” made me realise I’ve been running my own version of that at the dining table.

Mushrooms made a small entry. An hour of training in Mysuru made it real, but not enough to pretend expertise. Since then I’ve mostly been walking around the house, repurposing corners in my head to see where a modest grow could live without taking over.

On the “scale” front, one potential partnership kept moving, mostly on paper. May was about drafts of an agreement, a legal advisor, and sitting with the language long enough to see what we are actually signing up for.

The bees did the steady work this month. Under the same sun that paused hydroponics, the colonies kept their rhythm. My role was topping up sugar syrup so they had a buffer against the heat and patchy forage.

Outside FarmSay but still connected, the final GCPP grades landed at the end of May, and I’m relieved to have made the cut.

It closes one chapter of structured learning and opens another, where policy and practice might start showing up here too.

For a month that felt thin on visible progress, May still did its work: forcing a pause, testing small shifts at home, and keeping the question of “what to scale” on a slow simmer.

That gap, between the reader I intended to become and the one I actually am, is something I have been sitting with lately.

I was a reluctant convert. Dad was well-read. My sister took to books naturally. Mom moved between Tamil novels and English magazines with ease. Watching them — or being nudged by dad to read some article or chapter — mostly kept me at arm’s length. We had two TV channels. I had just enough outdoors time to collect a few minor injuries and stay out of serious trouble.

What helped was having a library subscription during our Madras years. I started with Famous Five, a couple of Nancy Drews. I can’t honestly say I enjoyed either. It felt like floating — somewhere between following the pace of the book and mindless page turning. Even then, and this has stayed with me, I rarely retained plot points after finishing. My sister found this endlessly amusing.

The daily newspaper was another reluctant habit. The Hindu was simply the paper at home — no discussion, no alternatives. I was expected to at least skim the headlines. There were long stretches about GATT that meant nothing to me. But something shifted slowly. Once I found my footing with a few topics, writers like P. Sainath became ones I actively looked forward to.

Around 1997, back in Chennai with the luxury of time, I went deeper. I worked through authors back to back — Ayn Rand, Agatha Christie, Michael Crichton. When I found a writer I liked, I cleared their shelf before moving on. It was also around this time that dad introduced me to J. Krishnamurti, and to Dominic Lapierre, whose writing about historical events remains among my favourites. I think I understood the weight of what Gandhi carried more clearly after reading Freedom at Midnight than from anything I had studied in school. City of Joy brought me to Mother Teresa in a way no biography had managed, and that appreciation has stayed.

Around 2000, The Lord of the Rings was voted book of the century. I got hold of the paperback — 1,200 pages, small font. I was running a pace of roughly one 300-400 page book a week at that point. LOTR took two months. By then I was also spending serious time with The Hindu every day, religious about the editorial and Op-Ed pages even when the policy arguments went over my head.

Reading kept pace into my corporate years. A friend’s home library helped. So did nudges from a couple of colleagues. Night shifts meant reading was mostly pre-sleep and weekends. Kindle hadn’t arrived in India yet. A book a week was harder to hold. But the habit was alive. A few quiet compliments about how I wrote and communicated were filed away, more instinctively than deliberately.

Then the slide happened. I won’t blame it entirely on smartphones — it was more of a slow pile-on. Increased travel during start-up years. A home library that couldn’t grow past a certain point. A to-read list that exploded the moment social media started surfacing recommendations. A growing conviction that I should read fewer things more deeply rather than chase bestseller lists. Career anxieties. The twins. Streaming platforms making a not-so-subtle entry.

The habit didn’t disappear, it narrowed. And I kept negotiating with myself — next month, next year, when things settle.

In 2026, the to-read list is larger than it has ever been. The main feeds now are The Seen and the Unseen podcast and the Life Lessons cohort. I am trying to filter the recommendations down to areas I want to engage with seriously — not just finish a book, but perhaps write to the author, or respond to an argument in writing.

There is a map of the Song of Ice and Fire world I want on one of the walls at home — as large as I can find. I watched the series before I read the books, which some would consider the wrong order. I still want the special edition volumes. That ambition sits comfortably alongside the J. Krishnamurti I haven’t returned to and the Gurucharan Das I keep meaning to re-read. A reading life, I suppose, is as much about what you carry forward as what you finish.

Dad gave me the habit even when I resisted it. I am still working out how to honour that properly.

The years that followed were, honestly, good ones. A manager who fought for compensation when the system resisted. A team without the weaponised insecurities of the first stint. Work that had real organisational stakes — driving a metric that the whole company eventually decided it needed, just not at the level it had been sitting at.

Then the usual forces. Org changes. Leadership musical chairs. Four managers in twelve months — not a reflection of performance, just how large organisations shed skin when uncertain about their own direction.

2024 and 2025 brought their own texture. Return-to-office mandates, AI anxiety, the quiet competition between those who returned to the office and those who didn’t. Someone even found a way to badge in, get a coffee, and be back in traffic before the metrics reset. Coffee badging, as it came to be known.

Customer Sentiment got centralised, rebranded, redistributed. Progress, apparently.

The span shrank. The role shifted. Each change arrived with a rationale that made sense at the level it was communicated, and meant something different at the level it was lived.

At 48, the calculus is different. The org chart is less a scoreboard and more a weather forecast — worth checking, not worth arguing with. The scheduled 1x1 moved for the dozenth time. For the first time, I didn’t care.

The parallel investments had something to do with that. Quiet Saturdays tracking microgreen failure rates. Learning the patient, unhurried logic of a beehive. Things that grow on their own schedule and don’t have a quarterly review. These have stopped feeling like side interests. They feel like the point.

The company will do what companies do. The question worth sitting with isn’t what they’ll decide next. It’s what I’m building on the ground that doesn’t depend on that answer.

The soft landing is already in motion. Which, on reflection, is the only real advantage of playing a long game.

This is the third and final piece in Pages from Corporate Life. Part One — The Newbie in the Room — covers 2002–2008. Part Two — Exits, Experiments, and a Phone Call in June — covers 2009–2015.

It came from the previous Friday. An end-of-year review that went sideways. Not in a way where the door was shown, but in a way that told me the direction ahead had been set.

What I didn’t know then, and only found out years later: my manager at the time had plans for me. That information arrived in 2018. The resignation was in 2013.

As a family, 2011 was a tough year. Father’s health declining slowly, then quickly. Diagnosed late April. Gone by mid-June. A hospital room where a work call happened anyway. He overheard. Asked, for the first time, what exactly it was I did all day. I tried to explain. He seemed satisfied.

The years outside were instructive. A startup with a persuasive founder. Another one incubated at a prestigious institution, where the product was still theoretical and the salary was more so. I was employee number six. Traveled extensively on my own dime. I believed in the upside. The share certificate still exists, in 2026.

Meanwhile, the company I had left announced a voluntary separation program. The broader context was a company navigating its own transition — out of public markets, into a private ownership. With a stated belief that the share price had never reflected the real worth. The timing of all of it had its own comment.

The lesson from those years isn’t the obvious one about startups or stability. It’s simpler: knowing what you’re good at doesn’t protect you from situations designed to waste it. The exits weren’t failures of skill. They were failures of fit, and sometimes, of luck.

The call came on an ordinary June 2015 evening, during a family prayer that happens around the same time every year since 2011. Someone had put in a word. The door was open again.

I walked back in. One level higher than when I left.

The grade they had once withheld had quietly corrected itself.

This is the second piece in Pages from Corporate Life. The first — The Newbie in the Room — covers 2002–2008.

The first couple of years were the phone. Thousands of calls, a headset that felt permanent, and the slow realization that the operations floor had its own ecosystem — unwritten hierarchies, invisible alliances, and a particular kind of person who could only grow by making sure others didn’t.

A move off the phones arrived. This was sold as growth. It turned out to be true — just not in the way they meant it. The role sharpened many things. Communication, yes, but also the ability to read a room.

Then came the grade problem. Three people doing work that mattered. Paid less than a peer imported to oversee us. The math was never explained. It rarely is.

A move into a new team felt like arrival — until the fifth day, when I was pulled into a room full of people who resented me before I had done anything. The charge: I had walked in at a grade they’d been waiting for. The irony is that I hadn’t snatched it away from them either.

What that room taught me: the onboarding was surface-level by design. In certain organisations, what you’re handed on arrival is never the full picture — just enough to locate you. The rest you figure out by watching who speaks first, who stays quiet, and who is trying to make sure you don’t last.

I felt it. Plainly out of place. A rabbit who’d walked into a room that had already decided what it thought of outsiders. I stayed anyway.

Lessons came. Did I learn them, or merely survive them? As I reflect even today, I’m still not sure I can tell the difference.

Most of April was centred on my GCPP final project. The submission was due on April 20, which gave me just enough room to prepare for the viva in early May. The project, “Building Energy Resilience in India”, has been a rewarding mix of treating AI as a thinking partner and digging deeper into India’s energy resilience questions. Once things settle, I’ll share it here and see what questions it sparks.

Hydroponics on the terrace

On Ayozari, did a round of summer cleaning after five spinach harvests and sowed a fresh round of seeds. Germination has been noticeably sluggish, which I’m blaming on the heat until proven otherwise. The Dutch bucket tomatoes, meanwhile, have decided to overcompensate: the plants are dense enough now to need serious support, and a few baby tomatoes have started to appear.

The second aeroponics tower from Homeponics did not share that enthusiasm. Amaranthus germinated well and made it into the net pots, but a gusty, rain-lashed evening knocked several pots out of their grooves and even caused minor damage to Dutch Bucket irrigation line. The tower is now offline while I wait for the worst of summer to pass and have deeper conversations with Homeponics and Pindfresh about aeroponics management from seedlings through mature plants.

That said, it is hard to learn anything if everything always works.

Bees, trays and other small experiments

Outside of the bigger systems, April’s theme was to do less and watch more. The bees mostly got on without me, apart from one sting as a pointed reminder of their presence; I limited myself to topping up sugar syrup and keeping their setup shaded and stable in the heat. This has been less about “doing things” and more about learning when to simply watch. Microgreens continued as low-stakes practice: a few batches went through, with chia leading the pack, followed by onion and pea, and the rest gently underlining how many repetitions it takes to turn reading into reliable results.

Sheep, goats and mushrooms

On the small ruminants front, conversations to participate in an existing business moved into “advanced but not yet final” territory. There is still a fair bit of due diligence and paperwork ahead, so for now this sits firmly in the background rather than as an announcement. If things go to plan, I should have a more concrete story to tell over the next few months.

After a long wait, there was finally some traction from the Horticulture Department on mushroom cultivation. It is early days, but it feels like the first nudge after a long pause. May’s lookback will have more to share than ‘emails were exchanged’.

Wrapping up

Seeman’s NTK may have drawn a blank this time, but I hope their ideas especially on sustainable agriculture get far more traction. Because the potential for genuine change feels too important to be confined to one election, one leader, or even one state.

When Dan ran away from his new home in Ooty and was never found, neither my sister nor I pushed for another pet. We liked dogs when they were around. But Dad’s transfers, our studies, and Mom’s mixed feelings made it easy to let the idea sit — for decades, as it turned out.

The gap between Dan and our next pet was nearly thirty years.

How much of finally deciding to get one should be credited to social media algorithms? Probably more than I’d like to admit. The choice of a Golden Retriever was almost certainly algorithm-assisted. Once we had Leo, #ForeverGoldenRetriever stopped being a hashtag and became a motto.

Mid 2021 is when we made up our minds to move to a Tier II city. Getting a pet was a joint family decision — and an energising one. We visited a couple of pet stores in Hyderabad. I reached out to long-lost contacts for breeder referrals — that’s how I first heard of Farmers Choice.

After a few referrals and some internet digging, we found a Hyderabad-based breeder.

For novice eyes, the pups looked excellent. We didn’t know what to look for yet. The father was a show-quality stud. The mother was in post-partum care. This was early January. We were slated to bring the pup home in February 2022.

The breeder delivered him in a cardboard box on a sunny February afternoon. We were ready — bed, first toys, pee pads, the works.

What a joy. Except for the cleaning up.

We named him Leo, for the mane that Golden Retrievers grow into. Leo wasn’t a difficult pup — good with sleep, not destructive. Except for a pair of slippers, our furniture was spared. Leo in tow, we moved to our own house early April 2022.

Leo handled the 14-hour drive from Hyderabad rather well. He didn’t eat a proper meal through it, but we kept treats and liquids handy. A pet-friendly serviced apartment bridged the gap between our arrival and the housewarming.

Through a referral, we found a trainer from the Police K9 unit. Leo picked up his tricks. Leash control — as with every dog in this house — remains a work in progress. I’ve stopped holding that against any of them; it needs more repetition from our end than we’ve managed.

Leo was a darling throughout his short span. My heart grows heavy writing this.

He had his share of health scares. None of us saw how swift the end would be. One root cause, we later understood, was unethical inbreeding. The questions I keep returning to, even in 2026:

Was it the environment? Open spaces carry their share of pests.

Was it the variation in food at home?

Was it the competency of vets here?

Is this country genuinely pet-friendly?

I don’t have clean answers to any of them.

May 8th, 2024 was Leo’s last day.

Leo’s loss — at a young age, to causes that may have been preventable — shifted something. A pet is not a decoration or a status symbol. They depend entirely on what we decide for them: the breeder, the vet, the food, the time. That weight hasn’t left me. If anything, it has pushed me toward thinking about what dogs genuinely need — beyond companionship, beyond affection.

The house felt desolate after. Part of what I felt was grief. Part was something closer to anger — at ourselves, at the situation, at the unanswered questions.

Farmers Choice had been consistent with WhatsApp status updates through all of this. That nudged me toward trying again — this time with a breeder who claimed ethical practices and top-quality lineage. We discussed it as a family. The decision: not one pup. Two.

The two pups were born on May 17th, 2024 — nine days after Leo’s last day. They arrived home on July 4th, 2024.

They needed names.

I was insistent on four-letter names — Dan and Leo had set that pattern without my realising it, and three letters felt too short now.

Otis — from a web series. Ollie — shortened from Oliver.

If Leo was gentle and contained, Otis and Ollie arrived like a joint announcement of chaos. With two, the cleaning wasn’t double — it was quadruple. Chair legs became chew toys. Wallpaper was not spared. Slippers, predictably, suffered. Feeding time brought a level of ruckus that, on one of Mom’s rare visits, drove her out of the kitchen entirely.

We found a trainer — Pramod who had worked on the Kannada film 777 Charlie. The training ran for nearly fifty days. The time they were away was, honestly, a breather. The house stayed clean. As eager pet parents we made a mid-term visit to check on their progress; saw the explosive energy they were carrying.

A word on each of them, as they are in 2026:

Otis — clingy, seeks human touch through the day, eager to please. Has learnt words: wipe, car, tata. The kind of dog who follows you from room to room and considers your lap a rightful territory.

Ollie — needs his space, has a mind of his own. Less interested in approval, more interested in his own agenda. Will come to you on his terms, which somehow makes it more satisfying when he does.

Both are anxious in cars. We’re working on it.

In 2026, I still think there’s room for one or two more. A Belgian Malinois perhaps, or a German Shepherd — a nod back to Dan. Life will decide the timing.

For now, Otis and Ollie own the stairs, the garden, and a significant portion of the furniture. The house hasn’t been quiet since July 2024.

That feels exactly right.

Part 2 of 2. Part 1 — Dan, the Pet Who Found Us — is here.

When I write this in 2026, my love for pets—especially dogs, and within that Golden Retrievers—is undiminished.

People sometimes ask where this came from. I usually joke that no dog ever barks at me. The honest answer begins in Manjankarani — a small village outside Madras — and Ooty, long before smartphones, when pets were rarely photographed. Cameras and film were not fixtures in every home then.

Dad was a vet by education, a specialist in bovine gynecology and artificial insemination. Pets weren’t a problem from his side. Mom grew up surrounded by animals too. She doesn’t exactly like them, but she never shunned them either. Apparently my grandfather even kept deer at home; I remember seeing a pair of stag horns in Manjankarani.

I can’t call the village strays our first pets, but there were a bunch of indies my cousin and I played with and fed. We were a pampered lot there. Once, he even captured a parrot and left it with my grandmother to care for. Monday to Friday, we were back at school in Madras. By the time we returned, the parrot hadn’t survived the cage. That was one of my earliest lessons in how badly good intentions can go with animals.

My uncle did not want dogs around until much later, when they’d be useful as guard dogs. My cousin and I had to hide our dog-time from him. We used to beg, or just quietly take, milk from grandma to feed them — the farm’s cows and buffaloes made that easy.

Our first unplanned pet arrived in Ooty.

His name was Dan, chosen from the horse-racing section of the newspaper. There was a horse called Double Dan, and somehow “Dan” stuck. He was a German Shepherd, a crossbreed from what I heard, though I never knew with what. Maybe because of the Ooty weather, he was much furrier than the shepherds you usually see—almost like a Pomeranian in a GSD’s body. He was meant for one of Dad’s colleagues, but the colleague never took him.

I still remember the day my sister and I came home from school and saw a small pup tentatively sneak out from under the sofa and softly bite my shoe and socks. Both of us were overjoyed. Mom kept reminding us he would go to his “real” home soon.

He never left.

Dan was a high-drive dog. Because of the Ooty weather and our school routines, he never had a formal walk schedule. His first neck belt was one of my outgrown belts, the kind with some elastic in it. Dan quickly figured out how to slip out of it when excited. He never bit or hurt anyone, but the speed at which he sprinted and chased people scared them senseless.

We were lucky to be living on a large farm, so space wasn’t an issue. He had room to drain his energy. The way he would recognize our car long before it reached the gate was pure cliché: the dog as man’s best friend. In my case, as a boy’s best friend. We truly grew up together. I had no idea then about daily walks, deworming schedules, vaccinations—he was just my dog.

Bath days were a spectacle. With his fur and energy, it was something to watch from a safe distance. I don’t remember him having ticks; maybe the disinfectant shampoos did their job.

Dan stayed with us until Dad was transferred to Tanjavur. The vet in Dad worried that a dog who’d spent his whole life in Ooty might not survive the plains heat. Dan found a home within the farm. At that age, all I knew was that we were the ones going away.

We parted not by choice but by circumstance. I was in the middle of my 10th grade when Dad’s transfer came through. There was no time for a proper goodbye. We were children, and these were not our decisions to make.

I visited Ooty a few years later with my friends. By then Dan had run away from his new home and was never found.

Neither my sister nor I pestered our parents for a new pet after that. We liked dogs when they were around, but Dad’s transfers, our studies, and Mom’s mixed feelings meant it never felt like the right time. I had to wait all the way till 2022 to bring another dog home.

Maybe that long gap is why Leo, and now Otis and Ollie, occupy so much space in my heart. They’re not just pets—they’re a continuation of something that began with indies in Manjankarani and a furry German Shepherd who snuck out from under a sofa in Ooty and claimed us as his own.

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Note: Dan belonged to a pre-smartphone time. I don’t have a single photo of him—all I have is memory. If a picture ever surfaces from family albums, I’ll add it here.

Part 1 of 2. Part 2 — Leo, Otis & Ollie — coming next week.

March was high on learning, laying a foundation for the months ahead.

Navaramba by GKVK (3rd–13th)

March started with a startup pre-incubation programme — GKVK’s Navaramba — running from 3rd to 13th. The kind of event that doesn’t give you one clean takeaway but leaves you with a lot to sit with. The talk that stayed with me stemmed from one session in particular: how Indian agriculture is today, and how small cohorts of agripreneurs will meaningfully address that, if at all. A decade down, are we quietly moving towards corporate farming? There is enough economics literature advocating for farmers to exit marginal farming and move towards higher-value economic activity. I don’t have a counter to that. What I keep asking myself is: will that transition happen at the pace and scale economists envision? And at what cost to the consumer, or to state capacity that still leans on subsidies and freebies?

The other thread that stayed with me: there is funding flowing towards agri start-ups, but procedural hurdles are many. For a farmer navigating nature’s vagaries, fluctuating prices, and sometimes zero earnings, being asked to pivot to high-value crops and tech — with all the compliance and insurance complexity — is a tall ask.

What Navaramba clarified for FarmSay: Do I go mile wide and inch deep, or the other way around? That question is still open, but at least it is now more sharply framed. The point I am trying to find is where spreadsheets and PPTs meet farmer realities and farm systems. Educated folks, maybe those displaced by AI, may move into agri with the same “can do” attitude they were incentivized to have in the corporate world. FarmSay’s innings, I think, is locked somewhere at that point of confluence.

Takshashila GCPP Weekend (27th–29th)

The weekend workshop with the Takshashila Institution’s GCPP programme landed in an already hectic month. Day job was demanding, family time was squeezed (new academic year for the twins, which helped a little), and fitting in policy homework made it feel like a lot. But something clicked during the GMO research.

While working on policy alternatives, our team found that soil-less or CEA (Controlled Environment Agriculture) was the second strongest area of alignment. Four other teams were focused on GM mustard and other crops still navigating India’s regulatory and legal landscape. Livestock feed via CEA felt different: a lower-resistance path, a broader conversation, and closer to what I think FarmSay’s eventual thesis is. Not the glamorous export-ready fruits and vegetables, but serving the complementary, closer demographic of livestock farmers.

If I had to frame a realistic win from this line of thinking: a pilot growing soil-less feed for a stall-fed operation or a farm closer to home. That’s the direction April points.

Home Systems: NFT, Dutch Bucket, Aeroponics, Microgreens

March was a debugging month on the terrace.

The Ayozari NFT has been the most stable: a steady stream of spinach, short learning curve, proving its reliability. Dutch Bucket seedlings are showing robust early growth, but I’m still observing.

Aeroponics is where things got interesting. Seeds germinated well, early growth looked promising — then yellowing leaves showed up in the last week. Likely a nutrient imbalance; the fix is to pump out the tank and refill. Still working through it. The hardware itself feels fairly polished, but the interlocking pieces don’t snap into place like a Swiss lock, which may be causing uneven irrigation. I’m also figuring out root exposure when transferring cocopeat pellets to net cups.

A new aeroponics tower from Homeponics arrived this month and is still in the box. Longevity and spare availability are questions I’ll watch as both systems settle in.

One honest admission: I haven’t been measuring EC and pH as regularly as I should. NFT has been forgiving; aeroponics and Dutch bucket less so. The bigger learning I am still working towards is finding the delta between seed vigor and the environmental factors that are actually in my control. No pests though, which is something.

In one line: NFT is in proving-stability mode; aeroponics and Dutch bucket are in debugging mode; microgreens are about building muscle.

Microgreens deserve a separate mention. This is where the journey started — and I getting trained back in December ‘25. Many failed batches since. Started 4 trays each on March 30th and 31st. The goal for April isn’t yield, it’s consistency.

Bees

Two bee boxes came home on the 12th. This has been on my wishlist since December 2025, and the honest reason for starting now is to validate my own consistency. Can I manage them reasonably well over 12 months? What are the pitfalls I encounter as an individual?

March was largely about letting them settle. I have not obsessively opened the hives or kept close tabs. I don’t even have a photograph of the hive yet. My relationship with them in March, if I had to use one word: calm.

The practical change to my routine has been minor: checking that our pets don’t disturb them, and making sure their water bowl is filled. That’s about it for now.

I have also been learning about equipment and suppliers, mostly to understand what a more serious setup could look like down the line. Two worth bookmarking: Futuristic Beehive and Farmmily. More on these as I explore.

If measured by visible outcomes, March looks modest. But the foundation being laid, across policy thinking, home systems, and the bees, feels like the kind of work that compounds quietly. Momentum, I am realizing, is less about dramatic progress and more about not stopping.

April has a clear agenda: microgreens consistency, a deeper dive into CEA for livestock feed, and letting the aeroponics debugging play out.

If there is something from this month you want me to dig into, drop a comment or hit reply.

Catch up on previous lookbacks:

FarmSay this Feb: Making It Real

FarmSay this Jan: First Roots

FarmSay this Dec: Field Notes

As always: ideas, experiments, and opinions are mine. AI helped with the edit.

What surprised me was how closely his framing of an “agriculture-centred economy” mapped to what I’m attempting through FarmSay. He argues that if we want a stable economy and meaningful work for most people, we have to move towards a வேளாண்மை சார்ந்த சமூகம்—a society where land, water, food, and livestock sit at the center of economic life, not at the margins. Food self-reliance (தற்சார்பு) becomes a basic condition of national health, not an afterthought once GDP targets are met.

He talks about villages as clusters of small farms and local processing units—milk, oil, eggs, honey, fruits, vegetables—so that people can live and work without being forced into city migration. Taken together, it’s a vision where agriculture is not nostalgia, but infrastructure.

FarmSay lives at a different scale—balcony microgreens, a 60-pot hydroponic system, new beehives on a terrace—but the underlying question feels similar. What does an agriculture-centred life look like when you’re in a city apartment or a small plot, not a 20-acre farm? Can neighborhoods become clusters of micro-farms in the same way he imagines villages as clusters of small farms?

There’s also his critique of “freebie politics” (இலவசம்): support that creates dependency instead of capability. FarmSay’s instinct is almost the opposite model of support—less about giving things away, more about open documentation, shared learning, and skill-building so people can grow a meaningful fraction of their own food, and maybe create small surplus streams.

I’m not writing this as a voter or a supporter—I’m too far away, literally and politically. I’m writing it because it’s interesting to hear a politician in a neighboring state give national-scale language to a question that most people treat as personal or local.

I can’t read or write Tamil, so I used an LLM to interpret the Tamil portions of the interview — the connections to FarmSay are entirely my own.

If you’re curious about how he articulates this vision in full, the interview is worth a listen; FarmSay is just one small attempt to test parts of that agriculture-centered idea in everyday life.

Over the last few months, my schedule has looked more like a student’s than a mid‑career professional’s. There was a UAS incubation program in early March, a 10‑day Navarambha pre‑incubation course at the Agri Innovation Centre in GKVK, and my public policy classes at Takshashila moving toward term‑end. Navarambha is probably the best a government‑backed program can offer right now: structured sessions on markets, business models, value chains and pitching, delivered by people who care about agri‑startups.

But walking out of those classrooms and back into real fields—literal and metaphorical—I’m left with two worries. First, that the incentive to continue farming is eroding in a country that has broadly achieved food security and grown comfortable importing what we want beyond necessity. A fellow participant put it bluntly over coffee: the sale value of agricultural land often exceeds any realistic income from cultivating it over many years. That sentence has stayed with me.

The second worry is about how we talk solutions. In most startup and incubation spaces, the air is full of “market linkages”, “tech enablement” and “scale”. Some of this is clearly useful. But the underlying logic often drifts toward “big is good”: big FPOs, large polyhouses, large platforms. If hydroponics or protected cultivation only seem to “make sense” at a certain industrial scale, what story are we telling smaller, mixed farms that don’t fit that frame.

Half a world away, economist E.F. Schumacher argued that modern economies over‑value what is big, centralized and capital‑heavy, and under‑value what is small, local and people‑centered. In Small Is Beautiful, he wrote in favour of village‑scale, ecologically grounded production systems—arguments that sound close to India’s own debates on rural livelihoods and local food systems. Much earlier, Gandhi’s idea of Gram Swaraj imagined each village as a “complete republic”: largely self‑sufficient for basic needs and relating to the outside world from a place of dignity rather than dependence.

The complication is that we are trying to revive some of these instincts in a fully networked world. The village square is now also the WhatsApp group. Market discovery happens as much on apps as at the mandi. That raises new questions I don’t yet have answers to: if community linkages run on digital rails, who owns and sees the data about what a village grows, consumes and demands.

I come to agriculture with privileges most farmers do not have. So I’m careful not to treat my terrace or my coursework as a grand “experiment with truth”, just as a small attempt to see whether the languages of startups, public policy and self‑reliant communities can do more good than harm when they meet real farmers’ lives.

If you are working on or living inside an example where “small and local” and “tech and markets” are pulling in the same direction for farmers. I’d love to hear about it in the comments - or tell me I’m wrong.

February felt different from the months before. November was about laying groundwork. December was field notes — events, trainings, and one very expensive six-minute slot that vanished at IIHR. January brought first roots: the hydroponic system working, microgreens still refusing to cooperate. Ideas were either going to become real decisions this month, or stay stuck in the 'thinking about it' column.

Hydroponics

The month began with a conversation I had been looking forward to since December — HortiRoad2India. I had been trying to understand their Dutch knowledge-sharing framework for a few months now. Talking with them in February finally gave me a clearer picture of what subject-matter support actually looks like in practice, and how their go-to-market playbooks are adapted rather than just handed over.

That conversation made the homework feel more concrete:

• What does it actually cost to lease agricultural land at a scale that makes sense?

• How close to Bengaluru does it need to be to make logistics and margins work? (Right now my thinking is closer to Bengaluru, given the market size, unless ongoing conversations point to a better balance.)

• Can purchase or volume commitments from hotels or cafés be secured early enough to de-risk the early stage?

The CapEx I am looking at is in the 10–12 crore INR range, which is not a number that allows vague thinking. First instinct is B2B — hotels and cafés, where quality matters more than packaging. Once there's predictability of produce, direct-to-customer or farm-gate becomes the next question. But that needs data, not just direction.

A separate thread: a detailed conversation with Dr. Sudhir Sharan, Head of Department at GKVK, on the viability of strawberries specifically. He made a strong case for value-added products over fresh fruit — the shelf life problem is real. We went through OpEx and CapEx together. We are going to keep meeting through March. That feels like a good use of time.

Towards end of the month — positive movement on the VVCE Mysuru / IIT Ropar MoU, and an encouraging response from VVCE to my outreach. More structured conversations are planned for March. I want to see if FarmSay can plug into that kind of ecosystem in some useful way.

On the hands-on side, I ordered a Dutch bucket setup and a 60-planter aeroponics tower from Pindfresh. Seeds are already in. As I write this, they are germinating quietly.

To pull all these threads into a more coherent frame, I signed up for Navarambha, the agri startup incubation program at the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bengaluru. Webinars run March 3–12, with an in-person session on March 13. This feels like the right moment to figure out if any of this actually hangs together as a real venture, not just a list of experiments.

Microgreens

Still very much a “work in progress” month. I ran limited batches of onion, methi, and red radish. The onion batch did the best, which I didn’t expect.

The goal here is not scale. A good week simply means microgreens are on the table — in a salad, a smoothie, or alongside whatever we are cooking. To get more consistent at that, I ordered a new tray and broadcast seeds on March 1. The focus now is rhythm, not output.

Beekeeping

This is the thread that feels most tangible right now. Our first two hives should arrive in the first week of March, and they will start on the home terrace. The plan is to learn at home first. Get the basics right. Then look at expanding — through farmers I know, or through Samrudhi Agri Farms if that conversation develops.

In February, and I attended an in-person workshop with Apoorva B V (Beeman_India). The clearest takeaway: you cannot understand a hive without managing one — steadily, sincerely, over time.

Over the longer term, honey is only part of what interests me. Value-added products — beeswax, royal jelly — are on the horizon, but only once hive management is genuinely under control. When the hydroponic systems are running, having bees nearby for pollination is a natural next step.

Bee9 Training Institute is right here in Mysuru — proper training facility, post-harvest equipment, a lab. All under one roof. Should have found this earlier. Met the founder, MACK Prasad. He cleared up a few things I had been getting wrong. They are working toward international standards in Indian beekeeping — didn't expect to find that in Mysuru.

On the community side, I opened a conversation with our Residents Welfare Association about making the neighborhood more pollinator-friendly. Small step, but worth following through on.

And then the algorithm delivered: a product called “Futuristic Beehive” appeared on my feed. Good design, premium price, free worldwide shipping at the time. Homework now: understand the customs angle — and whether someone in India could build something along similar lines.

Sheep, Goats, and the Mushroom Pause

Samrudhi Agri Farms ran two sheep-and-goat workshops in February, with the next one planned for late March after exam season. A conversation with the founder stretched beyond livestock into hydroponics too — which is exactly the kind of cross-linking I want to see more of.

Mushrooms stayed in the “no movement” column. No cultivation progress, and the IIHR refund is still unresolved. I haven't written mushrooms off. First question: is a home terrace setup even feasible here in Mysuru? If yes, then — does it fit the rest of the FarmSay stack, or not? I'd rather know it doesn't work because I tried it, not because I got stuck on a refund.

Wrapping Up February

The month’s scorecard reads mixed. But as a learning journal entry, it feels more like a portfolio taking shape. Two hives on order. Hydroponic systems germinating on the terrace. Microgreens inching toward a weekly rhythm. Navarambha on the calendar.

Progress is still rarely linear here — which, if December taught me anything, is exactly how it goes.

If there is something specific from this month you want me to dig into — the economics, the gear, the people, or the decisions — drop a comment or hit reply. If something here is close to what you're thinking about too, hit reply.

Subscribe to get FarmSay Field Notes in your inbox: short, honest breakdowns of real farm experiments, mistakes, and small wins from our corner of Mysuru.

Catch up on previous lookbacks:

January was high on experiments: good results from the Ayozari hydroponics system, and mixed, often frustrating, microgreen batches.

Hydroponics

On January 7, we transplanted seedlings from grow trays to net cups and officially started a batch of lettuce and spinach. It needed delicate hands because the seedling roots were just developing, and the ‘shock’ of the new NFT environment can easily slow their growth.

Thanks to the steady hands of and one of our 17‑year‑old volunteers, we’re at about 96% success: 21 days after transplanting, the first batch is ready for harvest.

On the second row of the Ayozari system, we also tried sowing seeds directly in the net cups.

Microgreens

It has been a ‘testing’ month, to say the least.

At best, we had mixed results from two batches of alfalfa—and none of them reached our fork.

• Uneven germination and tender stems that couldn’t support further growth.

• Otherwise healthy cotyledons wilted, even though we misted the trays a couple of times during the day.

Chef Sanjeev Kapoor’s microgreens kit is yet to show signs of germination. It’s been 10 days since sowing. This leads me to two possibilities:

1) The seeds were in the pack too long. So, priming prior to sowing might have helped.

2) Too much moisture from bottom tray. So will be patient for few more days.

On a side note, maybe the kits were closer to their “best by” date, hence the deep discount on quick commerce site.

Beekeeping

Our efforts to learn more, network, and get an actual bee box got a shot in the arm from a recent article in The Hindu.

Stay tuned for more on this in February.

Sheep and goat rearing

Our involvement here is still indirect for now. Stallfed/Samruddhi Agri has restarted their in-person one day training from January 2026. The first February batch is scheduled for the 8th.

Mushrooms

We’re still awaiting a refund from IIHR for the training fee paid for an unsuccessful registration. I’m not very hopeful of a positive response, but I’ll keep you posted on how it plays out.

On the community front, there was talk of an agripreneur meetup in Bengaluru on January 26—details are still emerging, but I’m keen to see if it turns into a regular circle. A discussion with HortiRoad2India is also lined up for early February. A health setback for one of our sons meant fewer microgreen experiments and new connections than planned in January, so both are high on the list for February.

Subscribe to get FarmSay Field Notes in your inbox: short, honest breakdowns of real farm experiments, mistakes, and small wins from our corner of Mysuru.

Publishing this a couple of days into January, while the December details are still fresh. This is a quick look back at what the month actually looked like on the ground.

• Krishi Mela – The month really started there, walking through stalls, listening to farmers, and collecting ideas that shaped many of December’s next steps.

• Microgreens training – A focused session that sharpened the way FarmSay thinks about household‑level nutrition and small, controllable growing systems.

• IIHR mushroom training attempt – The mushroom farming slots vanished in about six minutes, and the fee now sits in refund limbo—a small reminder of how high the demand for structured agri‑learning has become.

• Keystone beekeeping at Masinagudi – A day with hives and trainers that made bee behavior and landscape feel very real, and anchored how the beekeeping journey should begin around Mysuru.

• The Nilgiris Earth Festival – A different kind of learning space: conversations, community, and sensing how people respond to slow, grounded ecological narratives.

• Seedling setback and Batch 2 revival (Dec 23–24) – The first batch of seedlings did not make it, and that failure forced a reset in method and timing. Batch 2, started around December 23–24, carries those corrections and a quieter kind of confidence.

• NYE outreach – Closing the month (and year) by reaching out to ApiNZ, HortiRoad2India, and the Mysuru Horticulture Department to see how FarmSay’s small beekeeping and horticulture efforts might sit inside larger NZ–India and Indo–Dutch productivity plans.

Indo American and All That Grows seed orders were also placed at the end of the month, setting up the next round of experiments.

One thing December underlined is that progress is rarely linear: public events, formal trainings, failed seedlings, revived batches, and international emails all sit in the same month and still point in one direction.

In January, the focus shifts to how the new seeds behave, and how to turn all of this into a more concrete plan for FarmSay’s 2026.

A day in Kotagiri for The Habba, part of The Nilgiris Earth Festival, felt like stepping into a living classroom on food, culture and ecology.

The day began under clear blue skies and tea-covered slopes, a reminder of how much history and livelihood are packed into these hills.

Inside, The Habba brought growers, cooks, organizers and visitors into one room. Conversations moved easily from seeds and millets to recipes and memories.

The screening of the stunning Wild Tamil Nadu by Kalyan Varma left us re-looking at the familiar with fresh eyes – landscapes, animals and even the roads we had just driven on.

Beesalu added a quiet reminder of how much the forest and indigenous communities still have to teach. The idea that young bees – and young people – learn by being carefully guided into the world felt very close to what FarmSay is trying to do with food systems.

Days like this make the Nilgiris feel less like a getaway and more like a set of teachers we are only just beginning to listen to.

Thanks, Nilgiris. Back to FarmSay—clearer eyes ahead.

Vazhaithottam, a small village on the edge of the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve, set the stage for our beekeeping training. We found ourselves in awe of two things at once: the self-organizing genius of the bees, and the mountain landscape that holds them.

Bees fit into FarmSay’s arc as quiet infrastructure for the food system we care about. Beekeeping forces a wider view: how flowers, trees, seasons, and tiny pollinators all combine to decide whether a harvest succeeds. Learning to keep bees now is a way of committing to that systems view early, while the venture itself is still taking shape.

Obvious fact out of the way: bees are of utmost importance to this planet.

We were fortunate to have exclusive access to trainer Justinraj T. from Keystone Foundation. With over 32 years of experience in this field, we could not have asked for more. To top it, he was very patient with absolute beginners; he neither overwhelmed us with jargon nor left any query unanswered.

Midway through the training, we even witnessed a bee colony rescue and resettlement. This was not part of the curriculum, but the expert eyes of the co-trainer, even during his lunch break, spotted this colony and moved into action.

Without diving too much into the training content, the bee “dance language” alone is a solid topic to rabbit-hole into. It is equal parts choreography, navigation system, and information-sharing protocol.

A key moment of truth for us was realizing that we are in the right season for hive growth. That shifts beekeeping from an abstract “someday” into a very real “start now and manage well.”

A few management aspects that stood out:

• Beekeeping is not a major financial strain in terms of initial investment and equipment requirements.

• Daily effort is low; most of it is simple monitoring for issues such as ants, wasps, or other disturbances.

• Market demand is on a steady growth path, especially for more artisanal and traceable varieties of honey.

• There is government support through the National Bee Board and state-level efforts such as the Jhenkara brand in Karnataka.

• For coconut farmers, managing a few bee boxes can significantly enhance yields through better pollination.

A few watchouts we are carrying back with us:

• Placement matters. Sunlight is crucial, but hives must also be shielded from direct heat and rain; there is no need for artificial light.

• Bees are prone to a few pests, so a regular, calm eye on the hive goes a long way.

• Bees will quietly go about their work 24/7, but human mischief can still disrupt them; intentional disturbance can lead to the odd stray sting, so neighbor engagement and expectations need managing.

• In farms, neighboring fields’ pesticide use can harm colonies, especially because bees can forage up to 1–1.5 km from their hive.

• Queen bee presence is non-negotiable. A hive is at its best when she is healthy and active, and there is a clear protocol to follow in case of queen loss.

Call it convenient or good timing, but the book on the table right now is Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. It feels like the right companion as we get things off the ground in the coming weeks and months, translating training notes into checklists and routines around live colonies.

Ending with another book: Beesalu (Malayalam title), authored by indigenous communities of the Western Ghats, from Neelambur to be exact. It documents traditional honey collection practices and the communities around them, and one of the authors was present at The Habba on 21 December 2025 as part of The Nilgiris Earth Festival.

From here, the focus shifts to Mysuru: one hive to begin with, set up carefully and observed often. Those early days will shape how FarmSay works with bees, and the notes from that journey will continue to live here for anyone curious to follow along.

Witty University of Agricultural Sciences, Bengaluru (UAS, B) National Seeds Project Director Dr. Sharat Sharan urged over 40 diverse participants—though only 35 were planned—to own the process of bridging nutrition deficiencies. He and his team laid out key areas effectively during the one-day training program at UAS Bengaluru on December 13, 2025, underscoring the hunger for such expert-led sessions.
Firstly, I recommend this program to anyone dabbling in microgreens as a hobby or scaling bigger.

Microgreens:

I have to admit without my spouse educating me, I would have lived under the assumption that microgreens and sprouts are the same! Table below helps bring out the nuance.

Without summarizing or trying to review the training, jotting down points that resonates.

• Recommendation of up to 40 grams per day of microgreens for adults. About half of it to kids below 18 and elders above 60. Best to take your doctors advise to adjust portion size.

• Not all fruits, veggies are suitable as microgreens. E.g. eggplant, potato is NOT suitable.

• Microgreens are for all ages to address nutrient deficiency. It’s not a supplement to proteins or carbs.

• Microgreens are not necessarily medicinal i.e. it might not cure an ailment that we already carry.

• Budget to set-up is not high. If intention is to scale, then go-to-market and building a subscription model is important.

• Tending to microgreens is not a steep hill with regards to skills. Nuances of handling seeds and growing medium can be the secret sauce.

Growing Medium:

Handout from the UAS Bengaluru microgreens workshop outlining different growing media options—from cocopeat and tissue paper to jute mats, hydroponic pads, and vermicompost mixes—and their suitability for various crop durations and setups.

Seeds:

To state the obvious, seed selection is of utmost importance. Two factors that Dr Sowmya emphasized are: seed vigor and vitality.

Learnt about the importance of reading the seeds packaging label to grok aspects like germination rates, chemical treatment, if any.

Seed Priming is another important factor that Dr Sowmya spent time to clarify to the participants.

Morning’s session was capped by Dr Manjunath speaking on Fungi and their impact on seeds and growing medium. This session and seeds priming session are best to be absorbed as in-person session. Rather than me trying to extract a summary. Just would like to add, that both their sessions were not too geeky or nerdy.

Post lunch sessions were shared between Dr Bhuvana Sharma, Dr Sharat Sharan and Rajender Satyanarayana, Founder of Agrowvitz. Ahead of the hands-on session by Dr Vishwanath, the UAS team managed to handover certificates to all participants.

Hands-on Training in Microgreens Production certificate from the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, marking completion of the GKVK program on 13 December 2025.

Training wrapped with a walk around of the massive hydroponics facility and some networking.

Overall, we felt it was a day well spent. The content and experts who delivered them came across very approachable. Even being open to consultation over WhatsApp as we progress in our endeavors. Not to forget, each participant carried home their own grow tray with the cocopeat and seed broadcasting done under the watchful eyes of Dr Vishwanath. Only wish, that there was a microgreens/hydroponics reads seeds that we could purchase!

Keen to start? Comment for program details—UAS experts are WhatsApp-ready.