A recap on the past year
General - Events, notes ·After the recent post I made on Schematise’s blog with the achievements from last year, I thought it best to log in my personal blog about last year. These are the things I worked on last year, beginning from April, 2025 and ending on March, 2026.
- I worked on some very cool projects at Awaaz Leadership Labs, an organisation that specialises in facilitation.
As Programme Coordinator of Varta Varan, I facilitated workshops (my favourite ones were the multispecies justice themed "Unlaw the Law" workshops, where I organised the first two iterations alongside a wonderful bunch of teammates I learned so much from).
During this time, I was inspired to write a song which I call the "Multispecies Song", although a significant part of it
I also worked with other organisations during my tenure here, including with an awesome bunch of young organisers in Delhi-NCR at COHAS ("Community of Hope and Support") where I played a multi-tasking role in helping organise the sound, conducting a workshop, placing the Climate Corner, and some logistics for their Samvidhaan Mahotsav 2.0. - The glimpse I got into the world of climate justice, social justice, justicemaking in India was quite something and I only had to leave to put Schematise to a final test - and at the very least wrap up my research projects here as publications.
- At Schematise I was able to devote only some of my time, but I spent that in writing a report on the implications of AI on the economy, labour, and the place it could occupy in technology. Link to Report
What led to me spending lesser time with Schematise LDA was a period of heavy introspection on "Whether lawyers should use AI"? Naturally, the question itself is moot after seeing the recent case where rights of trans folk were put at risk due to a lawyer filing an LLM produced pleading. Also, there is the question of AI psychosis when chatting with a sycophantic, hallucination-prone chatbot. This has led me to weigh things in favour of traditional technologies such as the Semantic Web in my implementations. Of course, this will require heavy guardrails so as to ensure AI usage is minimal, if at all resorted to using Schematise LDA products, since currently, we use it only for data extraction. But that itself does not circumscribe the issue of environmental damage and labour disenfranchisement as much as I would like. - Some of the projects I worked on at Schematise are now reaching a stage where they can be published, and that is what I look forward to the most - having worked on finalising the approach I could take with these publications.
- In terms of personal life, all I can say here is that my relationship with music listening and production has changed drastically - I feel I was earlier too dependent on Western Music to shape my world views, but if anything I've learnt in recent times through struggles from countries such as Iran, Venezuela, and even those much closer home - is that it is up to us to not consume numbly what is being shoved down our throats 24/7. I daresay this extends to all forms of content, and is the reason I maintain a separate blog for my website - so that no one (or for the IT policy geeks out there - a significantly lesser group of intermediaries) can deplatform me.
- There is a lot I have gained through introspection, contrary to what others may say about this, being a Founder today is something you can do responsibly and with a principled approach. Whatever the future may hold, I think there's plenty to learn from technology startups chasing metrics while destroying industries. This requires something more than a desire for making profits, which some may say spirituality or religion offer, some might even place dialectic materialism here. But I digress, and will come back to this more with my thoughts on this.