This is a talk I gave on July 4, 2026 in Telč, Czech Republic. In 2015, a skatepark arrived in Janwaar — a small, remote village in Madhya Pradesh with no reliable electricity and a school most kids skipped. Nobody asked for it. But under two rules (“No school, no skateboarding” and “Girls first”), the […]
I broke my shoulder hours after I had returned to Janwaar. Not dramatically. The kind of accident that happens on these roads at night. And then you stand there for a moment working out what has just changed. By the time I understood what had happened, someone had already noticed. That is the thing about […]
I am leaving for India in a few days. Everyone I know there has sent some version of the same message: it’s extreme, be careful. Not the usual seasonal warning. Something more urgent. More tired. Yesterday a longtime friend wrote from Banda, Uttar Pradesh — a district I know, with people I love. A record […]
A Nomad’s Compass to Change That Holds I have been carrying this for a while. In talks, in workshops, in conversations after conference sessions when someone pulls me aside and asks: but how did you actually do it? This booklet is my answer. It started with a simple question I asked myself in 2014 when […]
These are the values that run underneath every decision, every process, every moment of change we lived through in Janwaar, a social experiment I ran for 10 years — and equally through everything we didn’t pursue, through our struggles and our failures. They were not designed in advance. They became visible over time — through […]
Skater Girl Asha, the book I’ve written one and a half years ago, is now available as an audiobook on various platforms – here is the link to Barnes & Nobles. But it is on many other platforms as well – just google „Skater Girl Asha Audiobook“ and you will find the right platform for […]
The release of the Netflix film ‘Skater Girl’ changed the distance between Asha and me.Not emotionally — but in how I began to see. I hadn’t stepped out of Asha’s life.I was away because of Covid. She was in Janwaar.I was in Portugal. The distance wasn’t chosen.It was inevitable. And it was just enough to […]
I’ve edited and published quite some books over the last 30 years and I’ve written articles for these books, but Skater Girl Asha is the first one for which I typed every single character on my own. It was quite a process – let me tell you this. Before I dig deeper into my writing […]
This is the second part of “What companies can learn from Janwaar”. The first part you’ll find here. While the first part was more about how to set-up the transformation process in order to succeed (=principles), here in the second part I summarise the main learning in form of a few rules. Combined these rules […]
This is the first part of “What companies can learn from Janwaar”. The second part you’ll find here. While the first part is about how to set-up the transformation process in order to succeed (= principles), in the second part you’ll find the main learning in form of nine rules. Combined these principles and rules […]