I studied law at NLIU Bhopal (B.A.,LL.B.), NLSIU Bangalore (LL.M), NALSAR (PhD), taught briefly at UPES Dehradun, and have been teaching at NALSAR since 2017. Some of my earliest professional habits were shaped in teaching assistantships: under Prof. M. P. Singh, where I learned to treat preparation as a form of respect and respect as a form of preparation for the classroom, and under Prof. M. K. Ramesh, where I began to see teaching not as the delivery of information but as the design of a way into difficult ideas. Those years left me with a fairly old-fashioned work ethic: read properly, prepare thoroughly, and never assume that students owe theory their obedience before theory has earned their attention.
At NALSAR, much of my work has gone into helping build animal law as a field that can hold its own in the classroom, the clinic, the policy room, and the judiciary. This has included helping shape India’s first MA in Animal Protection Law, running a year-long clinic, co-hosting the Comparative Animal Law Symposium as a space for early-career scholars to test ideas, build intellectual networks across jurisdictions, and working with judges and public prosecutors in ways that treat legal change as patient, repeated translation rather than theatre. The ALC’s work got The President of India’s recognition in 2024, which remains one of those sentences that still feels slightly unreal when written down.
I have also been interested in how an academic institution might enter a public dispute without becoming merely another combatant. That instinct shaped NALSAR’s intervention in the Supreme Court stray-dogs matter, where our effort was to offer a non-adversarial, evidence-based, academic account of coexistence. The application drew, among other things, on NALSAR’s own campus experience, including clinic work in which students helped draft a campus dog policy, to show that lawful and compassionate management need not be imaginary. I remain mildly committed to making “academic” not a dirty word in a court of law.
My research circles one stubborn question: how does law teach us not to see? That question runs through my doctoral work on indifference towards animals, the research work undertaken at ALC like The True Cost of Eggs series, the Animal Markets and Infectious Diseases project in collaboration with Harvard Law School, fish welfare work with Fish Welfare Initiative and Ethical Seafood Research, a clinic project with the Nonhuman Rights Project on the legal personhood of an elephant, and a forthcoming book on privacy and religious freedom with Penguin. Across these projects, I have been interested in who law recognizes, who it renders peripheral, and what suffering it treats as background noise.
That worldview travels into my classroom. I am less interested in “covering” a text than in watching students learn how to sit with one, argue with it, and eventually use it. I try to make assignments feel less like punishment and more like invitations by using collaborative annotation dossiers, reflective field journals, infographic and data-visualisation briefs, Wikipedia-building exercises, short explainer videos, and sometimes even songs, performance pieces, paintings, or zines. In my leisure, I like to garden, daydream about acting in plays, play percussion instruments, but I only find time to do all of that when I am not dealing with the more immediate constitutional crisis in my life: using my PhD to negotiate bedtime with a very vocal cat at home.