Shivanshu Sharma

  • He never said no!

    Dear Mahi, In my last letter I talked about your mundan and your first visit to Himachal. In this letter, I want to talk about your Dadaji. You never met him as he left us in 2019. I want you to know how funny, kind, and a great human being he was. He was a…

  • Mundan, Mountains and Mahi

    Dear Mahi, We came back from your first mountain trip yesterday. You will not remember this trip as you are too young- less than eight months old. You will not remember the mountains or the fun food or the stories your dadi was sharing from her previous trips, including the one where she and papa…

  • Nani ka ghar

    Last weekend, we took our daughter to Ameen for the first time. Ameen is my mother’s ancestral village in Kurukshetra district, Haryana. The government renamed it Abhimanyupur. Abhimanyu, the young warrior and son of Arjun is said to have died in this village during Mahabharat. We all still call it Ameen. It was a couple…

  • Saanp Ka chatta

    Last weekend my partner and I went to Cafe Athyeka 2.0 in Noida. It was our first dinner date after the birth of our daughter. It was fun. Anyone reading this should try their Chettinad mushroom curry with parotta. Though I love anything with parotta so perhaps do not take my word for it. My…

  • Shared struggles, different contexts: The case for rethinking South-South collaboration

    In recent years, I have noticed that donor interest in South-South collaboration has grown significantly. Foundations, bilateral agencies, and multilateral institutions are funding programs that aim to transfer solutions, and enterprises from one country to another. The intent is to leverage shared development experience and build peer-to-peer learning across the Global South. The design, however,…

  • People like me!

    People like me do not see communities as numbers on a screen. We see living human beings because we were once among them. One of my ex-bosses once told me that the social impact sector needs people with family money. People for whom the salary doesn’t matter, people whose only thought would be how to…