When the role was first described to our partnerships team intern stepping into her first job, it sounded neat: 

Coordinate with schools.  

Stay in touch with volunteers.  

Keep track of schedules

She approached the role with seriousness: listening more than speaking, trying to understand how decisions travelled and who they affected. She was attentive to details, double-checked dates and sometimes even followed up on the tiniest things – she wanted to get everything right.

Even in the early days she sensed that much of the onus of this work was in conversations and judgement calls rather than clear instructions.

To keep our school programs – Khoj, Debate and Growth Mindset – running meant holding a role at the centre of many connected parts. And at the heart of those parts were our volunteers — people who gave their time expecting to do meaningful work. What we did not yet fully grasp was how much of this role relied on unspoken, practical know-how, and we wouldn’t until something slipped.

Uncertainty rears its head 

A school for the Khoj programme had been finalised months in advance – dates locked, confirmation emails exchanged, and later, volunteers briefed. On the morning of the visit, the team of volunteers were given their final confirmation yet again after some back and forth with the school, just to be sure. 

And yet, when the volunteers reached the gate, they were not allowed inside.

The principal who had approved the programme had left months earlier. The new management had no record of the collaboration. What the volunteers experienced in that moment was confusion, disappointment, and the awkwardness of being turned away despite being ready to contribute. Through the day, she moved between calls – speaking to the new principal, the school director, her colleagues, and the volunteers waiting outside. The school finally admitted to the miscommunication and offered to reschedule. 

The human measure of running a programme

As the situation unfolded, what she kept returning to was: What does this moment feel like for the people who showed up? She wondered what it would mean to ask them to go back to the same place and still hold the same energy. Instead of pushing ahead, she chose to pause. The program was moved to another school where teachers were prepared and students were waiting. The session ran well - but the earlier moment stayed with us because it showed how quickly a system gap can affect the experience of our volunteers.

When she reflected on the incident, she spoke about the support that helped her navigate it - a teammate guiding conversations, the team backing her decision, and the space to think beyond immediate fixes. But what stood out most was how she learned to hold multiple perspectives at once: the school’s internal issues, organisational timelines, and most importantly, the time and emotional investment of volunteers.

That balance became her reference point: decisions were not only about whether a programme could happen, but whether it could happen in a way that respected the people showing up to make it possible.

What we learned 

For us, the incident became a reminder of what sits at the centre of our work. 

On the surface, it looked like a scheduling problem. A visit didn’t happen. Plans had to change. But what stayed with us was something else: a group of volunteers had arrived ready to give their time, and we hadn’t created the conditions for that effort to land the way it should have. That part was ours to own. We had trusted earlier confirmations and moved ahead, without building enough checks to be sure the space would be ready.

It made us realise how easily uncertainty can stay hidden. Everything can look fine until suddenly it isn’t, and by then the weight has already shifted onto the people on the ground. In this case, that meant volunteers waiting outside a school gate, unsure what had happened.

We also saw more clearly that good intentions are not enough to create a good experience. Programmes run well when communications are clear, confirmations are on paper, and follow ups happen routinely. Without these, even committed teams and volunteers end up facing unpredictability rather than the work they set out to do.

This experience continues to shape how we think about responsibility: as something that needs to be built into the way we work, every day.

What stayed with us 

At its heart, this is not only a story about an intern learning through a difficult moment.

It is about an organisation recognising that the quality of a programme is measured not only by whether it runs, but by how it feels for the people who make it possible. Our employee’s experience helped us see more clearly that our responsibility is not just to design meaningful engagements, but to safeguard the conditions in which volunteers can offer their time with confidence.

And in looking back, the incident becomes less a disruption and more a turning point - one that reminded us of where the true intention of our work lies.

The exciting and exhausting journey of launching Third Space had recently ended with us settling into order. The next day, a parents’ meet was planned. A panel discussion would follow, where a few colleagues would speak about their journeys – what had been difficult, what had held, what had slowly come together – and their families would witness their workspace.

Hitesh, one of our colleagues tirelessly working to make launch day a success, was a panellist. Public speaking had never been easy for him.

His hands shook. The stage was unfamiliar territory. He often felt his heartbeat rise louder than his own voice.

He jotted some points down, anyway, folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket.

The missing pages

On the day of the event, the paper stayed behind — left in another pocket, in another set of clothes. He realised it only after reaching the venue.

He checked his bag once. Then again.

Nothing.

The questions he had gone over a few days ago suddenly felt distant. He could remember fragments, not full answers. He stood near the side of the room, asking colleagues what they thought might be asked. He repeated possible responses under his breath.

It wasn’t panic. It was a steady, uncomfortable awareness: I don’t have the backup anymore.

What made it harder was the audience. His parents were sitting in the front row. They hadn’t attended many of his school events growing up. Now they were here, looking toward the stage, waiting. That thought kept returning as he waited for the panel to begin.

On stage

As the discussion started, Hitesh listened carefully to each speaker before him. He tried to track the flow of questions, guessing which one might reach him.

When the questions finally turned towards him, he stood and took the microphone.

For a few seconds, nothing came out.

He folded his hands and said, khammaghani. His voice felt thinner than usual. He cleared his throat. Then he looked toward his parents. That part felt natural. Easier than answering anything about work. Then he began.

The first few lines didn’t come out the way he had rehearsed them. He paused midway through a sentence, adjusted the wording, started again. He moved between Hindi and English without planning to. Sometimes he lost the exact point he wanted to make and had to circle back to it.

His hands trembled slightly around the microphone. He shifted his weight to steady himself. He wasn’t smooth. He wasn’t dramatic either.

He spoke about the work — the pressure before launch, the confusion, the learning curve, the fear of standing here at all. Some answers were shorter than he had imagined. Some felt clearer because he wasn’t trying to remember exact lines.

He didn’t stop feeling nervous. But he didn’t stop speaking.

What stayed with us after

This story is not really about a missing script; It is about being seen in the moment you feel least prepared.

Hitesh did not speak perfectly that day. He paused. He reshaped sentences. He searched for words. But his parents saw him stand there and try. They saw the trembling hands. They heard the hesitation in his voice. And they watched him continue anyway.

That possibly changed something.

We, at Dharohar, do not always know exactly what these moments will produce. Sometimes they are awkward. Sometimes emotional. Sometimes uncertain. But when we allow families to step into the spaces where work usually stays contained, something honest surfaces.

Perhaps when families enter a workspace, the work shifts slightly. Perhaps it is no longer only about targets or roles – instead it tends to become visible as effort, risk and growth.

For Hitesh, the moment mattered because his parents witnessed not just what he does, but who he is becoming while doing it.

Maybe that is what stayed. The fact that work and family briefly shared the same room, and nothing was hidden.

This was our idea of brooms too, until the day Nandita ma’am sent a set of broom designs from Alaska.

Printed images were passed from hand to hand. Our team huddled to take a closer look. The designs looked nothing like the brooms we were used to making. Thin and thick lines moved together in careful balance. They also curved at places instead of running straight. The tying at the top was unfamiliar – tight, deliberate, precise.

These were not decorative changes. They required a different way of working — one that began by slowing down. The designs held the room for longer than expected. People kept coming back to the same lines, tracing where they thickened, where they curved, where control would be difficult. It took time to see what they could make of the design, for craft is often not about beauty or inspiration. It demands meticulous effort, attention to detail and discipline.

The process felt a bit like the moment before weaving begins at a loom. The frame is ready, the thread is there, but the pattern must be read first. Where will the tension in the strings arise? How much should the yarn be twisted? Such questions must be answered before any work could start.

Everyone seemed to look at the designs in their own way. One person checked the balance of the lines, another followed how they curved, someone else kept returning to the knot at the top. The act was deeply meditative. Much like the weaving process, no one began until they studied how the pattern would hold, where it might loosen, and where it needed control. Understanding came slowly and unevenly.

The question, still, was not can we make this?

It was can we risk making it exactly like this?

To risk, or not to risk?

After discussion, a collective decision was made. The designs would be attempted just as Nandita ma’am had shared them – no shortcuts, no early adaptations.

It was not a comfortable choice.

The raw material lay stacked nearby, limited and precious. Every mistake would mean loss. Every failed broom would need to be broken apart. There was no guarantee the unfamiliar technique would ever settle into their hands.

Still, the decision stood.

The desire to try was strong enough.

The days that followed were slow and heavy.

Every morning, Jungle supervisors and our team sat together on the floor, the designs placed between them. Someone suggested bending a section inward. Someone else demonstrated how the knot at the top might be formed. Hands moved cautiously, testing pressure, loosening and tightening fibres.

Often, a broom would be completed and stood upright. Everyone would step back. Heads would tilt. Silence would stretch.

Then, quietly, the broom would be taken apart.

The sound of fibres being loosened filled the space more often than not. There was frustration in the room. Added to this was the constant worry of wasting material. Yet no one walked away.

Slowly, something began to take shape.

Muscle memory

Within a few days, the shift became visible.

The same members who earlier struggled to complete simple patterns now moved faster, more confidently. Their hands remembered where to bend, how tight to pull, when to pause. The curves grew smoother. The grip stronger. Time reduced.

Finished brooms were held up for others to see.

You could see it on their faces – the hesitation lifting, assurance visible. What once felt impossible now felt achievable.

Sometime later, Nandita ma’am sent more designs. New patterns. Different techniques.

This time, the reaction was immediate. People leaned forward eagerly. Conversations overlapped. Everyone wanted to try first. The same designs that would once have caused silence now sparked excitement.

The workspace looked different now. Multiple brooms lay side by side. Three, then four distinct styles began to emerge. The weaving was clean, the grip solid, and the finishing careful and consistent.

What had begun as an experiment gradually turned into skill.

Limelight ka litmus test

The real test came on Hariyali Amavasya, at the first large stall set up in Udaipur.

Brooms were arranged carefully on the stall. Sunlight caught the curved patterns. The fibres gleamed softly. For a moment, the stall stood undeterred in the sea of curious eyes and whispering mouths.

Then people began to stop.

Interested, they picked up the brooms, turning them over in their hands. Fingers traced the unfamiliar designs.

“These are handmade?”
“By forest and local folk?”
“Here?”

Surprise gave way to admiration.

People didn’t just pause – they stayed. They asked questions. They compared designs. And then, they bought.

For our team behind the stall that had invested in this project, this moment mattered. It was important that their work was not being seen as novelty, it was becoming a part of everyday households.

Later at our annual flagship event, MASST, the scene returned.

Questions came again:
“Is this really handmade?”
“Where did you learn this technique?”

Behind the stall, our team exchanged glances and small smiles. Pride and contentment clearly visible on their faces as their work travelled beyond Jungle and beyond expectations.

Around the same time, this thinking carried into another public space — the Garden at Pal, a flower show by Fateh Sagar Lake. Instead of focusing only on ornamental plants, our contribution to the flower show made room for the city’s local grasses — the kinds people usually overlook, step past, or cut away without a second thought. Seen together, they revealed a layered beauty rooted in the local landscape of Udaipur.

Here too, brooms became part of the conversation. They were displayed not just as finished objects, but as outcomes of a process — shaped by skill, patience, and practice. Visitors were invited to try their hands at broom making themselves. It didn’t take long for them to realise how difficult the work actually was. What looked simple, even ordinary, quickly revealed the labour behind it.

What this story leaves us with

This is a story about what happens when people are trusted with opportunity – even when there is risk involved. When they are allowed to try, fail, break, remake, and try again.

It is also important to say this clearly; we are not perfect.

We make mistakes. We sometimes underestimate how hard a process will be, or how much support it will need. We introduce opportunities that do not arrive with clear answers. This project also had its own imperfections. There were moments when the risk felt too high, when material was lost, and when better planning might have eased the journey.

But we chose not to step back.

We stayed with the work. What emerged was gradual transformation discovering that day- to-day efforts reflect risk taking, leap of faith and uncompromised experimentation.

It is equally important to recognise those at the centre of this work. Supervisors from Jungle who make these brooms carry skills that cannot be picked up casually. If we were to sit down and try to make these brooms, we would struggle. Its simplicity is held together by experience, practice, and familiarity with material and technique. Their labour deserves to be seen, respected, and credited.

At Dharohar, this is the work we believe in.
Not getting everything right – but staying responsible to the process.
Not avoiding risk – but standing alongside those who take it.

Sometimes, all it takes is an ordinary object, and the courage to imagine what else it could become.

Sometimes, learning doesn’t happen through well-designed systems. It happens when something doesn’t quite work — when instructions are unclear or when tools fail. It happens in those moments of confusion, frustration, and small victories that rarely make it into a manual.

In noticing this, we realise that we are still learning too.

This story comes from one such moment.

This is a story of Namya and her Hindi-language journey at Sangrah, but also about the human potential to navigate uncertainty, discover strength, and grow through challenges.

The First Days

Namya officially joined Dharohar as a cataloguer on November 15, 2024.
Before that, she spent 40 days as an intern in July.

Those internship days were both encouraging and challenging.

Only three interns were from South India where their first language was not Hindi. Everyone else spoke Hindi easily. For Namya, this was her first long stay outside her hometown in Kerala. Amid the unfamiliarity of a new city, she leaned on something deeply familiar: Bharatanatyam. Years of dance had taught her that learning begins with listening, watching closely, and repeating movements. That mistakes are part of the practice.

Being enrolled in a Sanskrit-based institution, Namya assumed that Sanskrit and English would be enough to learn and communicate.

As it turns out, they weren’t.

From the very first day, many of the classes were conducted in Hindi. Except for the three of them, everyone else followed easily. For Namya, the words tumbled together in a blur. She walked out of classes wondering how she would attend the next, how she would ask questions, or even survive the internship.

Back in Kerala, she had always been a front-bencher – active, engaged, confident. Here, she slowly began sitting in the last bench – silent and overwhelmed. Some evenings, disappointment turned into tears, after everyone had gone to bed.

As if this was not enough, handling and studying manuscripts was entirely new to her – delicate, centuries-old texts she had never studied required new skills she had yet to grasp. Trying to learn a whole discipline through a language she barely understood felt overwhelming.

And, at times, almost impossible.

‘Chhote’ Steps, ‘Badi’ Journeys

Despite everything, Namya chose to stay.

Hindi wasn’t entirely new. Since childhood, she had absorbed fragments of it — around 30–40%, by her estimate — from cartoons. Doraemon, she proudly says, was her first Hindi teacher.

That small familiarity became her entry point.

At first, words and sentences swirled around her without meaning. Slowly, though, familiar words began to stand out, like lighthouses in a stormy sea. By the second week, she could catch some words.

And then something shifted.

If she didn’t understand, she began asking questions in class. At first, her hand hovered uncertainly in the air. Gradually, she started raising it, asking the meanings of words she didn’t know. The facilitators saw her interest and started responding with patience. They slowed down, repeated words, used examples from stories, sometimes switching to Sanskrit or English.

Looking back, Namya laughs. By her own admission, she was probably the most annoyingly curious student in class! In many ways, she was learning Hindi the same way she had once learned to dance – step by step, misstep after misstep.

Finding the words

In a new predominantly Hindi-speaking city, Namya made deliberate efforts to immerse herself. She watched Hindi films, interacted with people, and pushed herself past the fear of sounding wrong.

Shopkeepers, auto drivers, locals – the world around her didn’t speak Sanskrit, and English rarely helped.

At first, this was intimidating. Will they understand me? Will I understand them?

Slowly, it became easier. Sentences slowly began to roll off her tongue.

The day she realised she had found her footing in the city, quite literally, was when she hailed a Rapido auto and gave directions clearly in Hindi.

Her confidence shifted.

The ‘suhana safar’ milestone

A year later, during the 2025 internship, Namya stood on the other side of the classroom.

She was asked to facilitate a lesson. The lesson was entirely in Hindi – because the students were all comfortable in Hindi, and all surrounding classes were conducted that way.

She was nervous. But she agreed.

During the session, she briefly forgot a word. Her guide gently helped her, and the class flowed smoothly.

When it ended, Namya felt proud.
She had gone from sitting silently in the back row to facilitating an entire session in the language that once terrified her.

What this story asks of us

Namya’s journey is inspiring.
But should it become an unspoken expectation?

What if it hadn’t been Namya?
What if it was someone who didn’t know how to ask for help, or didn’t feel strong, safe or positive enough to keep trying?

Would our spaces have made room for their struggle?

This story reminds us that learning cannot rest only on the individual.
It must be supported by the systems they are a part of.

Yes, it asks us to do better – to perhaps offer Hindi learning support wherever required, or to ensure stronger ways in which access and inclusivity is created within institutions as much as possible, but it also asks us to stay honest about where we are still learning.

This story exemplifies that a learner can only truly learn when the organisation creates a culture of patience, care, and room for growth.

This story is not only about Namya – It is about everyone around us who have shown the courage and tenacity to build opportunities through such challenges.

And finally, it is about how we, at Dharohar, learn alongside our learners – by listening closely, recognising invisible struggles, and shaping platforms for stories like hers, and many others,

showcasing that learning flows both ways.

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It’s a question we ask ourselves sometimes… if not a lot. And today, we’re looking back at one of our most ambitious projects, a mad journey that still makes us shake our heads.

This is the story of the launch of Third Space Cinema: the largest, most technologically advanced cinema in Udaipur.

And it’s the story of how we handed this massive, complex, high-tech project to a colleague who, in his own words, “didn’t even know what an IP address was”.

This isn’t just a story of grit and teamwork, though it has all of that. This is a story about the great Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”

And oh, did things go wrong.

The ‘Pagal’ bet

Our dream was simple, really. We have one for everything we do: to prioritise the “Visitor Experience and Quality of Excellence”. We wanted to create a world-class space for the community to watch learning-based films, documentaries, and even the occasional blockbuster.

So, we went all in.

We’re talking about a state-of-the-art Barco SP4K-25 laser projector, full Dolby ATMOS 7.1 sound system, and the works. Honestly, we probably hadn’t even heard of half this stuff. We just knew we wanted the best, most “user-friendly” experience.

Now, who do you hire to run a project this complex? A seasoned IT integrator? An expert projectionist flown in from Mumbai?

We did the opposite. And that was a deliberate choice.

Our ‘dharma’, as we saw it, wasn’t to hire one or two expert projectionists. It was, as Praveen later said, “to take the people we have... and based on their interest, turn them into expert projectionists”.

So, we handed the project to Praveen, a key member of our Visitor Experience team.

There was just one small panga. This was a tech project, and Praveen, by his own admission, was a “non-tech” guy. His first challenge? A vendor asked him for an IP address. He got so worried about being responsible for the info that he went out and “bought a Lucent Publication computer book,” where, he says, “I learned for the first time that the full form of IP address is Internet Protocol”.

Still, we believed in our people. We got it rolling. We had no idea what was in store.

Pange ke upar panga

We knew it wouldn’t be easy. It was new for all of us. But we didn’t just face one panga. We faced a bunch of them. It felt like the universe was conspiring against us.

First, there were the partners.

To run a modern cinema, you are completely dependent on big corporate vendors for ticketing and tech integration. And they were… difficult.

We faced “harsh language” from a partner’s manager. This led to a full-blown “tu-tu main-main” in the very first meeting between our IT head, and their manager over something as basic as a “Firewall Policies Template”. After that, Praveen had to act as a “third-person communicator” just to get them to talk.

At one point, the work was stuck in a ridiculous fight over “HTTP vs. HTTPS,” a security setting one partner refused to adopt.

Then, for two months, their corporate team refused to handle movie scheduling over official email. The only reason we got any movie schedules at all was because of Praveen’s personal dosti with his contact, who was bending the rules for him.

As if that wasn’t enough, the tech itself decided to self-destruct.

One late night, Praveen got the call. He had just reached home after a three-hour commute, and his mother was calling him for dinner. It was a software crisis: the core server installation had failed, triggering a virus alert.

Praveen, stuck three hours away, immediately got his seniors on a conference call. This kicked off a “high-stakes blame game” between our IT team and the vendor. Praveen’s biggest fear? That he’d be responsible for malware on the main server because he’d been “too trusting” of a “novice” vendor team.

How do you even manage this kind of “war-like” situation”? Where everything is just a… mess!?

Praveen recalls sitting with Ketan, a senior colleague, who asked him how he was managing all this chaos. “I write in a diary,” Praveen told him.

Ketan’s advice was simple and transformative: “You can’t show our partners and colleagues a diary. You need to make an Excel sheet. Write down everything that has happened, day by day. If someone asks how much is done and how much is left, you need to show them a sheet”.

That suggestion was a turning point. That Excel sheet became the map. It wasn’t a magic wand – Praveen also used a jugaad of “red and white threads on a physical plan” to track dependencies – but it turned the chaos into a to-do list.

It was a good thing he started, because the pangas weren’t over…

There was a big one still left – we discovered that three months of our ticketing data was corrupted.

A quarterly check revealed that because new team members were struggling with a complex data sheet – and a website design that “merged cells” – the data was a mismatched mess. It all had to be cleaned. Manually. One. By. One.

So here we were. Our partners were hostile. Our server was on fire. Our data was a mess.

And it was in the middle of all this... that our hard launch deadline – 11 May 2024 – flew right by.

There was no last minute miracle. No late nights that could speed it up. We just couldn’t make it. We failed.

The deadline wasn’t just missed; it was obliterated. This isn’t one of those last-minute-win stories. It’s a story about a public failure. We had to put up a “Coming Soon” sign on our biggest, most hyped-up feature.

And sometimes, you just have to accept that, take a breath, and figure out what to do next.

The 77-day gap

The “lage raho” phase… just continued. The 77-day gap between the missed deadline and the final launch was where the real grind happened.

The server crisis that started in April? It finally got resolved in June.

The corrupt data? The team just sat and manually fixed three months of entries, a process that led them to redesign the data sheet to be simpler for everyone.

The hostile partners? Praveen, now armed with his spreadsheet, kept getting on calls, kept pushing, and kept using his interpersonal skills – eventually making a personal appeal to their senior, who finally got the work moving again.

And it was the team, who “had never even connected an HDMI cable” before, spending time in the projection room, learning the machines, and teaching each other.

The launch (and the real ‘win’)

On 27 July 2024 – 77 days late – the cinema finally opened. The Olympics were happening in Paris, so we screened sports-based movies for school kids. We also got some French language films screened

So, what was the real “win” here? It wasn’t just an open cinema.

It was a messy, chaotic validation of that “mad” bet.

The team members who were new to computers are now running the whole show. They even try to solve IT-related problems themselves first, before calling the IT team.

Praveen, the “non-tech” guy, is now an expert. He’s one of the “less than 1%” of people in the world, as he proudly says, who can run this entire system.

As he puts it, “I now consider myself a ‘seekhne wala baccha’ who is not afraid of any challenge, but rather sees it as an opportunity to learn”.

What we’re still wondering

This is the Kahaani Junction, not a fairytale. We’re proud of the team, but we’re left with messy questions.

We lived up to our belief, but at what cost? Was the stress on the team worth it?

We learned that we should hire for “curiosity” and “problem-solving”, but how do we build better processes so we don’t have to rely on one person’s grit (and a personal dosti with a vendor) to save a project?

And,

We built a world-class cinema for “learning-based movies,” but what do we do when we see that audiences, reasonably, just want to be entertained?

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Every company, not-for-profit, or start-up has them. Even Dharohar does.

Words like ‘Integrity’, ‘Courage’, ‘Transparency’ – they look good in an employee handbook or framed on a wall. But are they just nice-to-have keywords? Are they there to make the organisation look and feel serious?

Or are they supposed to be actually followed? And guide us in what we do every day?

It’s a fair question.

At Dharohar, we try to make them real. Not in a self-righteous “we’ve figured it all out” way, but as a constant, daily attempt. This story is about one of those attempts. It’s not a dramatic, public-facing win. It’s a quiet, personal story that, in hindsight, showed us exactly what living our values looks like.

It’s the story of our colleague, Seema*, and a choice she made when she was stuck, stressed, and no one else was watching.

[Editor’s note: We’ve changed our colleague’s name for this story.]

The 2 AM Problem

The incident took place in July 2023. It was the frantic pre-launch period for Third Space, and the team was working day and night.

If you’ve been to Third Space in Udaipur, you’ll know it’s a vibrant public hub with a library, a makerspace, art studios, and community corners. It’s a massive, multi-faceted space. And at the time, we’d never done anything at this scale before. Seema was deep in the logistical trenches, managing travel and stay for nearly 70 visiting food workers – across multiple different hotels.

On one of those chaotic nights, around 2:00 AM, a panga struck.

The owner of one of the booked hotels called, furious. About 50 of our guests had just arrived, and a full-blown fight had broken out. The group was aggressively clashing with the hotel staff – maybe about unclean rooms, maybe just exhaustion and misunderstanding. The hotel owner was equally aggressive, shouting to Seema that he refused to host “such people.”

Seema found herself trying to mediate a shouting match in the middle of the night, pleading with the owner. Where else could 50 people go at this hour? She called her colleague for support. He managed to get the group’s head chef on the line, who in turn spoke to his team and calmed the group down.

A tense, temporary peace was brokered. The hotel owner reluctantly agreed to house them. For that moment, Seema thought the problem was now over.

Little did she know that the real panga, the one that quietly tested her resolve, would begin a few days later.

The Awkward Call

The launch was over. It was time to clear the invoices. The same hotel owner called Seema, but his tone was completely different. He was, as she put it, “exceptionally happy.” He had, after all, made a significant profit from the large, multi-day booking.

He told Seema he wanted to “return the favour.”

It was a favour nobody wanted. In fact, for Seema, she had given no favours; it was a business transaction. We had people who needed a place to stay; he had a hotel. We used the service; we paid the bill. Done. What favour was there to return?

But the owner had something else in mind. He offered Seema a “personal commission.”

He didn’t dance around it. It was a clear offer of a bribe, a rishwat, for giving him the business.

Seema was taken aback. She refused. “No,” she said. “That’s against my personal values. If you want to offer a discount because of the business, please apply it to the company’s invoice.”

He refused. He wasn’t interested in giving Dharohar a discount; he wanted to give her a cut. He kept pushing, telling her she could take “as much as you want.” He even offered to arrange a lavish “five-star dinner” for her and her husband.

Seema was stuck. The owner kept pestering her, call after call, for five or six straight days. The calls, she said, “ruined her mind.” She was terrified and felt the “very awkward feeling” around the whole situation.

She couldn’t just block his number. She couldn’t just tell him to get lost. The hotel’s final invoice, the very thing they were “discussing,” was still pending payment. She was professionally trapped, forced to remain polite to a person who was actively harassing her and putting her in an impossible ethical bind.

The Price of Integrity

Finally, the invoice was cleared. The payment was processed. The professional tie was cut.

Now she could act. She told the owner, in no uncertain terms, to never call her again. Then she blocked his number and internally, made a permanent decision: she blacklisted the hotel.

She didn’t blacklist the hotel because of the 2:00 AM fight. Bad service, unclean rooms, aggressive staff – those things are fixable. People have bad days. Operations can be improved.

This was different. This wasn’t an operational failure; it was a values failure.

It wasn’t just the personal harassment, though that was certainly part of it. It was a question of integrity. It was a fundamental misalignment in beliefs, in the right and wrong way to do business.

It means we now have one less hotel in our vendor pool, which might mean having to find a more expensive or less convenient option next time. It means we sometimes say no to sponsors or partners we’d love to work with, because we realise our values just don’t align.

Seema wasn’t consciously thinking about Dharohar’s “values PDF” in that moment. She wasn’t running through a checklist. She just did what she felt was the right thing to do. And in doing so, her personal integrity and the organisation’s integrity became the same thing.

But it leaves us with a real, messy question: how do you stick to your values when it makes your work harder? How do you do the things you want to do, at the scale you want to do them, without making compromises you’ll regret?

We don’t have a perfect answer. It’s something we’re still figuring out.

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It’s not just a garden with a few jhoolas, benches, and a walking track.

It’s a promise. A promise of a small piece of the world that belongs to everyone. And to no one in particular.

When you think of a public park or a garden, you imagine fresh air, children playing, families enjoying picnics, and couples, both young and elderly, catching a moment alone. It’s a place where a community can simply be.

At least, that was the vision we had for Udaan in Udaipur, Rajasthan.

When we began building it in late 2020, we pictured a vibrant, safe, and joyful new addition for the neighbourhood. A promise we were excited to keep.

But promises, we learned, are fragile. And sometimes, trouble arrives before the promise is even fully formed.

Trouble Before Day One

The conflict began not after the park was opened, but while it was still a work in progress.

The site was a mess of construction material, newly planted saplings, and tyres waiting to be repurposed into planters and swings. Security guards were present from the start, but their job was simple: to guard the construction material.

The challenges, however, weren’t just about protecting the materials.

Some locals saw the unfinished park as a convenient dumping ground, driving by to fling plastic bags of waste over the fence. And a group of young boys began to see the construction site as their turf. They would challenge our contractors, trying to intimidate them.

Shreeraj, one of our team, remembers how scared the labour team was. The threats were escalating. “Hum apne bhaiyya ko bula lenge,” they’d say, “fir woh aapse niptenge.” We all knew what that meant.

The tension was so thick that twice, the team stopped work entirely, afraid of a physical fight.

It all came to a head one afternoon.

Nandita, who leads our work on green spaces, went to the site to figure out what was happening. As she began talking to the contractors, the same group of boys approached, their body language confrontational. They were ready for a fight.

The contractor, Kamlesh, and the guards immediately grew protective. They warned Nandita not to engage. But she saw a wall of anger that could only be met by something unexpected.

She walked straight towards them.

She didn’t shout, she didn’t threaten. In the face of their aggression, she did something that defied all logic. She held out her phone and said calmly, “Agar koi aake hume maarna-peetna chahta hai to yeh lo, mera phone, aap bula lo apne bhaiyya ko.”

The boys were shocked. They were prepared for an argument, for a fight. But they didn’t know how to react to this quiet show of strength. They hesitated, realising they had no move left, but just walked away as Nandita stood her ground.

That single act diffused the immediate hostility towards our people. The harassment stopped. But the park’s own trials were just beginning.

A Different Kind of Attack

With the human tension eased, the construction continued. The swings were installed, and beautiful, colourful bird hangings were put up on the poles. The park was starting to look like the promise we had envisioned.

But that promise was about to be systematically dismantled.

It became a routine – Kamlesh’s team would fix a swing one week, only to find its ropes sliced clean with knives the next. They would replace the saplings, only to find them uprooted a few days later. Tyres we’d installed were ripped out and thrown into the nearby lake. Boys were climbing the tall poles just to tear down the colourful bird hangings.

Each repair felt temporary, almost futile.

It was frustrating and demoralising. The constant repairs were draining our time, budget, and our motivation. We were stuck in a loop of repair and destruction, and we were losing. We started to ask ourselves the hard questions. We questioned our judgement. We wondered if community parks were even possible.

The Question of the Guards

So what did we do?

The security guards were still on site, scheduled to stay until all the construction was done. A suggestion was made: why not just increase their numbers to police the park and stop the vandalism?

It was tempting. But it didn’t feel right. A public park shouldn’t be a policed space. It would be like trying to hold sand in a fist – the tighter we gripped, the more we’d lose the very essence of what we were trying to build.

An idea had been floating around the team, one that leaned into the Dharohar value of trust. What if, instead of adding more control, we removed it completely?

We had no idea if it would work. But we figured it couldn’t get much worse. Once the final canopy was installed and the construction was officially over, we had to make a choice.

And so we did it. We let the guards go.

The Hard Work of Trust

The park didn’t magically heal overnight. The vandalism didn’t stop in an instant. The real, patient, painstaking work started the moment the guards left.

Our team started visiting the park, not as managers with clipboards, but as neighbours.

They began talking to the parents in the nearby colony, to the elders sitting on the benches, to the kids who were causing the trouble. The message, repeated in all the small conversations, was simple and consistent: “This is your park. It belongs to you. If it thrives, it is your success. If it breaks, it is your loss. We can’t protect it for you, only you can.”

We started filling the park with life. We organised Art Jams, where people who might have never met before came together to paint and create. We held small music sessions and workshops.

We wanted to get rid of the negative energy that had engulfed the park – and replace it with a wave of community spirit, reminding everyone of the park’s true purpose. And the greatest source of support in making all this happen came from the community itself, who didn’t just participate in these events, but joined hands in making them happen.

The change was slow. It wasn’t one big event, but hundreds of small interactions. It was a quiet victory of trust. A campaign built with conversation and consistency, day after day.

The Park Breathes Again

And then, slowly, we started to see it.

One evening, Shreeraj walked through Udaan – a place that, until then, had only meant stress and conflict to him. But what he saw that evening stopped him in his tracks.

The park was full. Not with troublemakers, but with life. Families were strolling after dinner, laughing. Elders having gentle conversations on the benches. And in one corner, under a lamp, a group of young men who had been the source of so much trouble were peacefully playing a game of Ludo.

The change was real and visible. On her next visit with her grandchildren, Nandita saw the same boys who had once been the troublemakers now gently helping her grandkids on the swings. The unlikely approach was working.

It’s still not perfect though.

The vandalism hasn’t disappeared entirely – nothing ever does. There might still be a broken swing here, a trampled bush there. But it’s now the exception, not the norm. And it’s nothing the community can’t handle. In fact, we now hear from our ally Gourang that he sees his neighbours fixing small problems themselves.

The park has found its own rhythm.

On any given day, you’ll find a musician doing his riaz in one corner, a group of women praying in another, and youngsters practising kick-boxing.

The community has made the park their own.

The Line Between Policing and Trust

So what does it all mean?

Maybe it brings us back to the question we started with: what is a public park? We learned that it’s not our property to be managed. A community park belongs to the community. And they need to be free to use it how they want. Even if all of those ways don’t align with our original vision. And we have to be ok with this.

It does make you think. About the line between policing and trust. Between restriction and freedom. And about what can happen when you decide to bet on the best in people, even when it feels like the hardest thing to do.

ka·haa·ni /noun/ a story.

junc·tion /noun/ a point where two or more things are joined.

This publication is a meeting point. It’s where our work on the ground joins with the lessons we learn from it. And, more often than not, an interesting story comes out of it.

Sometimes it’s about a surprising win, sometimes it’s about a frustrating failure. Often, it’s just a small learning that changes how we see things.

Welcome to Kahaani Junction by Dharohar.

So, who are we?

These stories come from our journey at Dharohar, a not-for-profit in Udaipur, India. Our team works on the ground building community projects and learning experiences – from quiet reforestation efforts to vibrant public hubs like Third Space. We believe real growth happens when people connect, create, and contribute.

Through it all, we’ve learned that the path is never a straight line.

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Why are we sharing this?

Because the most useful learnings are often the ones you won’t find in an annual report. We believe our stumbles are just as important to document as our successes.

So we’re keeping a public log of our experiences – the panga (challenges) and the seekh (learnings). We aren’t here to share “wisdom,” but to contribute to the sector’s conversation in a practical, honest way.

That’s the simple idea behind Kahaani Junction.

Our first story is about a park, a group of angry boys, and a decision that went against all logic. It will be in your inbox soon.

Until then, if you know a colleague, friend, or fellow builder who might find this space useful, we’d appreciate it if you shared it with them.

Thanks for being here at the start.

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