Detangle by Kinjal
Detangle is a podcast created by health psychologist and writer, Dr Kinjal Goyal. Each episode is a conversation with an expert in their field, as they dive deep into their journerys and experiences. The conversations are full of insight and a great way to hear, first hand, how the mind plays a pivotal role in almost everything that we do. The guests range from doctors, to writers, to those in entertainment and of course, those from mental health fields.
Detangle by Kinjal
Detangle with Seema Lokhandwala
What if the forest is speaking and we’ve simply been listening at the wrong frequency? We sit down with engineer-turned-conservationist Seema Lokhandwala, whose team built an AI system that detects infrasonic elephant rumbles to prevent deadly human–elephant encounters. The story winds from a childhood spark to field-tested tech, revealing how empathy, culture, and careful design can turn code into a life-saving early warning.
Seema pulls back the curtain on how elephants communicate: low-frequency rumbles beneath human hearing, rich with meaning when paired with body language and context. We talk about the hard parts, data scarcity, false positives in a world where trucks, planes, and wind live in the same frequency band, and the relentless need to earn community trust. She explains herd dynamics, “let’s go” rumbles, and why individual vocal signatures matter for understanding identity and intent. Along the way, we explore the ethics of anthropomorphism, acknowledging the compassion we see without forcing human motives onto wild minds.
The conversation tackles the realities on the ground: 600 humans and 100 elephants lost annually in India, families reshaping evenings around the risk of crop raids, and communities that still hold deep reverence for elephants as sacred. Seema argues that technology should be a support system, not a replacement for culture or local wisdom. We examine adaptation on all sides, elephants learning deterrents, humans changing tactics, and models retrained to stay one step ahead. Climate stress enters the frame through physiology and seasonality, with a candid look at why multi-decade datasets are essential and so rare.
Seema’s utopian vision is disarmingly simple: people sleep peacefully because an alert arrived early and a gentle deterrent quietly redirected a herd. No heroics, just fewer tragedies. She shares how she channels anxiety into persistence and why passion is built by doing the work, not waiting for a calling to appear. If you care about conservation technology, animal behavior, AI ethics, or how communities and wildlife can share a changing landscape, this is a grounded, hopeful listen.
If this conversation resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who loves animals and tech, and leave a review so more curious minds can find it. Your thoughts shape future episodes; what should we listen to next?
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Welcome to Detangle, where we untangle the complexities of life one conversation at a time. I'm your host, Dr. Kinjal Gow, a psychologist and a writer. Today on Detangle, I'm joined by a woman who quite literally listens to the forest. Seema Lokanwala began her journey in the world of code and algorithms. But somewhere along the way, her circuit started to tune into elephant calls. She has built an AI system that helps prevent deadly human elephant encounters by listening, truly listening to what the elephants are trying to say. This is a story where compassion meets computation and where technology becomes an act of empathy. Welcome to Detangle Sima. I'm so glad to have you with me today.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Kintel, for inviting me for this conversation. I'm looking forward to it.
SPEAKER_00:Same here. I hope we can actually finish in the time that we have decided for ourselves because the kind of work you are doing, I can go on and on. But let me at least get started with my first question. Sure. So, Seema, you began as an engineer, deeply rooted in the world of machines, algorithms, technology. What first drew you towards technology? And did you ever imagine it would one day lead you really into the wild?
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so I grew up in a small town. When I was growing up, it was a small town. Now it's a really big city, which is Surat. Okay. And I was very fascinated with wildlife at a young age. I would like go out in the wild in the open. I was doing trekking a little bit. I was talking to people who are in the in the wildlife space, but not actually in the wildlife space, like doing a lot of these eco-club kind of things. So I used to volunteer for these clubs and stuff like that. But nothing on a serious note. Then I happened to go on a trip to Nepal and visited the Royal Chitman National Park. It was a lovely national park back then. And I got to see the first time in my life elephants. Coming from Gujarat, I've never seen elephants in my life. So I got to see elephants, but I really didn't know that I loved them. They're really fascinating. They were huge. They had this huge impact on my upbringing after that. Because after that, in my house, there were elephant stuff toys as kids growing up. We had like a lot of elephant stuff toys, a lot of discussions over elephants, but we never thought that I would become a courier on elephants because that's something that never anybody would have thought about. Like you can be with elephants, study elephants. So what a normal traditional household does is you can either become a doctor, you can either become an engineer. Absolutely. And then I was like, yeah, it was just very natural coming to me. So my father and my mother were like, Do you want to do computer science? I said, Okay, fine, whatever works for me. I got into a college in Chennai, I took it up, but I still was there was a fascination within me, which you that's the reason people don't know what impact does a childhood have on a daughter or a son's or any other gender's mind. We really don't know what kind of childhood upbringing has. So, in maybe in the back of my mind, I was always fascinated about elephants. And then while I was doing my engineering in my second or third year, I was like, this is not for me. Like this, I can do this for my living. I can do, I'll be okay with it. But this is not exactly for my living. I don't want to make a living out of it. So I started reading a lot about elephants. I came across this documentary called Echo and the Elephants of Ambuselli, and for the first time, I could see a woman doing the thing that I had only dreamt of. That maybe something like this is what I want my life to look like. And that's when I started reading a lot more. And I met people who work in India on Asian elephants in IASC, Bangalore, and I started working with them because I wrote to people and I said, This is what I want to do. So it kind of worked out for me. Then I started working with elephants, and when you start working with elephants, you just get fascinated by the animal. But slowly and gradually you realize the reality on grounds, which is the human-elephant conflict, which is a sad reality because about 600 humans and 100 elephants die each year because of this conflict in India alone. And people say, Oh, it's just numbers, it's just this fancy numbers. These are lives. These are lives, and most of these lives, these are also that the trauma that people face while living alongside the animal. Because their their whole livelihood, their whole way of being has been shifted. They have to be at home by six o'clock, they have to do what like they have their whole routine of life is around an animal that's in their backyard. Right. So we what and I wouldn't want to sleep, or maybe most of us, because we live in urban landscapes, we don't understand the gravity of the situation. Do you want to live in a household where you're not sure that this house will be broken tonight by an elephant, and maybe an elephant will come for crop raiding, or maybe this could happen, and my life is in danger. Do you want and it's everyday living for them? It's that level of terror that they live with. And then also they show such level of compassion. That's when I decided that I would want to work in this space and I want to try and develop some level of technology, my engineering skills, that if I can be useful to the community and the people who I want to work with and who I want to like. So it became more of a community thing than an elephant thing. Earlier it was it was a fascination for the animal, which will always stay. But it is now about how you can be with the community, protect the community, and support the community in the best way possible for me. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So from computer systems to elephant corridors, Seema, there's been so much that you have done and so much that you have learnt and then integrated into your work. You've designed an AI that listens not to humans but to elephants. But I'm very curious, take me into the process of teaching a machine to understand an animal. I mean, any surprises along the way? What did you learn and how did you do this?
SPEAKER_01:So, first and foremost, we have like these really fancy now AI machines based on at least when it comes to humans. We have these face application apps where you can unlock your iPhones to everything. But we don't have anything really even remotely close to what we have for humans for animals. So any step towards it is a new way that you can work with. One of the major challenges that we face when we build these machine learning algorithms is data. How many of us have even heard about elephant communication? So elephants produce these low frequency calls, which is not audible to humans because they are these large mammals. Our human audible range is from uh 20 hertz to 20,000 Hz, but theirs is below 10 Hz. So they hear they hear in the infrasonic sound. So what you will hear is just second or third harmonics of it, and you'll not hear the vocalization. So if you think that you're beating an elephant and they're not vocalizing, you are most likely wrong because they're vocalizing in a language that you can't hear. So the and we haven't reached, we do have recorders to record these uh vocalizations. We do record them in a different way and then make based algorithms for it. But the data isn't sufficient enough. We need much more people, more people working in the field of animal communication, especially mammal acoustics, because in India there's quite a bit of work that has happened on bird acoustics, but for mammal acoustic, there isn't a lot of work. And also the challenges for these infasonic sounds, and when you build these systems, there are a lot more sounds that produce low frequency calls. Like, have you thought about a vehicle that's just starting and will produce low frequency calls? Aeroplanes flying overhead will produce low frequency calls. Literally everything produces low frequency calls, large-bodied or not. And to say that out of all these low frequency segments, this is the elephants that are, these are the elephant calls, and the rest are not elephant calls, like even wind produce low frequency. So that's the major challenge, and that's what we struggle to do. We try and build algorithms. We're also we have reached somewhere decent, which is 80% accuracy with 20% detection and stuff like that. But we would even uh we would try and reach much higher. We would like to prefer to it at at least 95 above, so that the accuracy and the detection rate also goes really, really high. So when I say 20% misdetection, we want to at least want, at least we don't misdetect any individual. That's one thing that we are looking at. But yeah, the major challenge right now for this is data, and the surprises is that everything else produces low frequency calls.
SPEAKER_00:How fascinating. I mean, these are problems we don't even think about. Problems that you're encountering in real life is something we haven't even reached the point of understanding. But tell me, Seema, when you learn about the language of elephants, like you mentioned, their frequencies, their patterns, do they really say something that we can understand? What are these animals saying to each other? When you really start to listen, what are you listening to?
SPEAKER_01:So when you speak about or when you talk about, sorry, when you talk about elephant communication, we're not just talking about the vocalizations because there's so much of there's so much that happens with the body language, there's so much that happens with behavior. So it's very similar to humans. Like, do you think that somebody is speaking something? But you see the whole body language of the person, irrespective of the person saying the sweetest thing, but if the person's gonna hit you with that sweetest thing, that's what it's something like that. But their body language does not it's not so complex as humans because I think their body language is I mean this, this is what I want to do, this is let's do. So they have this really cool rumble calls, which are the low frequency calls, we call them the rumbles, and they have this thing called let's go rumble where they point in the direction where they want to go, and then this is the direction I want to go. Can everybody else walk in my direction? So they live in a matriarchal society where the most eldest and the oldest, as well as the one leads the whole herd, and the young males about 10-12 years old are pushed away from the herd. So the herd structure is mostly aunties who live together and cousins-related cousins that would live together, so mostly females is what we see, and young ones. So when they do this, they have to live in a landscape where they have to continuously communicate with one another because they're these small herds, which are herds about from three to ten or more even larger, and they have to continuously vocalize to one another so that they do not deplete the resources in one landscape. So think in space that this is what they're doing, they're in a landscape. Let's just say a landscape that you're familiar with. Let's say if people are like familiar with the landscape like Mumbai or anything, they are communicating from one land from one place to the other, like Borivali to Andheri, and so that oh, I was feeding at Borivali, don't come and feed over here, go and feed at Andheri because that's where the resources are not depleted yet. So it's kind of like a continuous communication that's happening. We know that it's happening, but how to prove it is something that's very difficult because we don't know how they are doing it in real time. There are a lot of things that they say, the calls have individual identification. So, as humans, how do we all know that this is my voice and this is your partner's voice, or this is X-person's voice, or Y person's voice? You recognize it. And how do we recognize it? Because each one of us has this fundamental frequency, which is the vibrations of our vocal chords, which are particularly unique. So does elephants, so they also have individual identification, each of their calls are quite unique. So that's the kind of thing they do depict the emotional state of what they are trying to do at that moment, and you can see it because there's some papers which we talk about that they do have something called fear within the vocalizations.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's wow. I mean, this is this is so much information. I can almost feel myself in the forest right now, and I just want to hear one of these elephants say something to the other. You know, everybody knows this by now that animals are communicating, animals are doing things the right way because they are moving around in you know, like herds or social setups. But to get to the nitty-gritty of it and to understand exactly why, what, when, that is something very few people attempt. So, this is even more fascinating. And especially as a psychologist, you know, we talk about empathy, memory, social intelligence. It's very often said that an elephant's memory is very strong. But from what you've seen, how close is the elephant mind to us in its emotional cognitive world?
SPEAKER_01:So I work in the field of academia and wildlife conservation, and in this is a constant debate that we have within ourselves that how much of the emotions that we humans experience can we put into the elephants or the other large, like brilliant mammals that we interact with. And there's a term for it, it's like a tongue twister for me. It's something called as anthromorphism, which is how much humans' emotions and how much can you so that's the reason people do not want to name individual elephants as well. Or that was the study that Jane would all where he she individually named the chimps rather than giving them numbers because then they have identities and then they have characters. And I we know that they have they have their own characters, they are they have a personality for themselves, they have empathy, they show a lot of compassion. But these are emotions that in humans eat even to even pro even like show it and produce and like it's complex. You know, how how do you it's very difficult to say this one showed so much level of empathy to this person and this happened and that happened, kind of thing. For wildlife, it's much more different because we don't know, we kind of don't know the motives, the ultimate motives behind these actions, and we can't ask them that why did they do this, why did they do that? But said no more. If you see an individual's, if you live with wildlife, if you live with most of the wildlife, especially large mammals, you are going to say that they have empathy. You are going to say that they have compassion for one another. Are they caring towards their loved ones? Are they caring, do they have patience towards them? Yes. Do they teach you a lot about empathy? Yes, they do. So it's kind of like a two-way street, but it's very it's a complex question in a way, because as scientists we are taught not to think that way. But as humans, you can't hold back. It's very difficult in a way, that way.
SPEAKER_00:Super. So this is a very non-tangible but real experience where you can see it, feel it, but you still can't put a number to it. Like you said, you can't measure it. And emotions which can't be described, measured, or even cross-checked can't be labelled yet. So maybe in the near future, if not yet.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, maybe in the near future. Or maybe when there is this whole term where it's coming, we're talking about interspecies communication where a lot of people are talking about it. It's a new research that's coming up, there's a different projects that are working towards it. It's about can technology become a medium so that we can really talk to the animals. So there are studies that are trying to build a medium of technology, like an AI-based system where a human can translate what they're saying and how it the elephants or the other wildlife, at least the whales, will translate. Kind of really like a futuristic thing. It's a very long way. How it will change, we don't know. But yeah, maybe someday in future.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, but this is one of those things where you wonder just because it can be done, should it be done?
SPEAKER_01:Uh yes, that's also a thing that we wonder with that. Just yeah, it's definitely one of those things.
SPEAKER_00:Well, so tell me, Seema, we usually accuse AI of distancing us from nature, getting us too much into technology. Yet your work has made it an instrument of intimacy and of listening better. But do you ever experience or do you ever fear that technology will overpower the organic rhythm of the forest?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, always. I I would think of technology as just as an enabler or just as a medium. It's like something because what the communities, their relationship with the forest is much more integrate. It's it's integral to their life-being. So I don't think that a technology can ever replace it, or ever even should try to replace it, or ever say that it will replace it. I have met a couple of people who say, oh, technology can solve every problem in this world. It cannot. It's just that it cannot solve any problem, it can help in some ways to make life easier for the people who are living in the landscape. That's what it will do. It will make it give them like a support system. That's the topmost that it will do, but it can never ever. So, how will your technology change the cultural values? The cultural values what they feel for large mammals or elephants or tigers, because in certain places in India, elephants not in certain almost all the places in India, elephants are almost considered like gods, culturally reward, like Ganesh Baba, especially in places like even Maharashtra in Mumbai. You have the Ganpati festival, which is celebrated like a lot higher. So it's the same thing, it's it's huge. You you when you look at elephants, I have met people who have had their whole livelihood destroyed but never referred to an elephant in a negative way. They will always say that the elephants came and they blessed my land, and their footprints have blessed my land. Their whole livelihood has been destroyed by crops, but they still have this cultural reverence, they have respect for the animal. How can technology replace that? And why should technology try and replace and disrupt this scenario? It should never ever get into that place.
SPEAKER_00:True. And very well put because, like you said earlier, the human-elephant conflict is a data problem, it's an emotional problem, but it's also a culturally relevant problem. But in your work, you must be having to balance the logic of AI with the empathy of the people. Have you ever had this issue when people don't want your AI to be used in places where they think elephants, you know, are uh predominantly existing? Do you ever have this kind of conflict?
SPEAKER_01:We do, and uh, a lot of this is about trust building with the communities. Because the communities for a long period of time have not been supported with uh with any positive approach, and they they also feel that okay, this will be a new thing that will come for a while and then something else will come. Okay, because elephants is also you're looking at elephants, they are also very large mammal who learn really quickly. People have been you give one level of solar fence, which was an earlier technology, one branch of solar fence, then the elephants learn the these famous videos of elephants breaking all these fences. Okay, these this happens so every time when you are dealing with even technology, even I have to keep in mind that the elephants might adopt to it, and then they might stop vocalizing, and then there will be challenges to it that even the elephant deterrent system might not work, and I have to adapt because the elephant is a large mammal who is very intelligent, they really learn, and they have a very good behavior trajectory. In something like leopards in Bombay, they have adapted quite well to live within the city, correct? No, nowhere else, and their behavior has been changed, which is the same way that elephants are, they are mammals that learn, and so even your technology should learn, and that's the reason the communities are a little aware of this because they think that people are not thinking clearly that are not adapting towards the changing scenario of the wildlife. Like if the elephants have learned this, now you have to try and be one step forward and change and adapt your technology to make it work. It's kind of complex, it's like it's like a race, like the same thing, like how AI race is going on right now, a space race is going on. You have to learn the behavior of the animal, and hopefully, that they won't learn how to work around the technology or any device that you're giving. And if you are doing that, then you have to make something better than that so that the elephants don't adapt. And when if they adapt, then again you have to do something better. It's like that. It's kind of funny, but this is how it is.
SPEAKER_00:And here we thought we're just, you know, kind of battling between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. You've brought in animal intelligence also. Now we have a three-third single one.
SPEAKER_01:Super Yeah, I was just gonna say when you're looking at human-elephant conflict, you should look at three things, okay? There is human behavior, which is non-predictable, there is elephant behavior, which is completely non-predictable, and then there is these human-human interactions that happen and the changing scenario with the whole climate coming in and the landscape changing, the environmental factors changing it. So you're dealing with three issues when you're dealing with human-elephant conflict, and we all know that how humans are behave. Today they might say something, tomorrow that might not be predictable. Same with elephants. Elephants have their own brains of themselves. They are like, today I want to break this thing because I find it curious. I am curious about it, I want to break this, I want to try this up. Tomorrow they'll be like, Oh, this thing spooked me off. I am scared, I don't want to come in the landscape. You don't know what is going to happen when you deal with this, all these issues together.
SPEAKER_00:Well, now that you've mentioned climate change crisis, I'm very curious. Have you noticed or is there any way to measure anxiety in elephants? Do you think anxiety is increasing among these mammals because of climate change?
SPEAKER_01:So there have been studies, not personally done by me but by others, about not climate change, because see, when we talk about climate change, we have to look at data which is 30 years plus data. Right. And and the anxiety again is a human term, but we can look at physiological responses, which is basically some stress markers within a cortisol level stress markers within individuals. So we can look at something like does stress affect some part of behavior? That does, that happens that yeah, elephants are more stressed in different situations. That's kind of study has been happening. But due to dry seasons, seasonality studies could have has been done, but there isn't a study which can be done over climate change because climate change is a thing that if you have to prove that this is because of changing climate, you need like large years and years of data. Correct. One of the things that are still developing, the data points are still developing. Also, uh, I would say that you will need long-term studies to prove one of the major challenges in India, which is to have something which is goes long-term. Because some of the times everybody is doing something small, small, small. We have to be because the major challenge is funding. You can't you don't have funding. You see in abroad, there are studies which have been like going on for 40 years, 50 years on elephants. Because when you do studies like that, you get like a huge amount of data which can tell you depth about the individuals. We can't do that in India because of one of the major funding challenges. Because they will give us funding for two years, project-wise, do this project, get it done. That way, if you if there is a funding stability for 40-50 years to study such individuals, and then we might get the climate data, the it the details that we are looking for, hopefully in future, but yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So let me ask you a very utopian question. Hypothetically, if this project could grow without any limits, no funding limits, no policy red tape, you can scale it up to whatever level you want. What would your dream version of this technology look like?
SPEAKER_01:So, first of all, the dream version for me it would be like humans sleeping at at night peacefully. That's as simple, like something the technology is able to help people sleep at night peacefully in landscape where there are wildlife across. That's one thing. How does the technology play a role? It helps in detecting when the wildlife is going to come so that they get a message that it's an early warning system, that elephants are in the landscape, they can detect it. And second, especially they will be they if they're coming within a particular area, then the deterrent system will be activated, which gets activated, and the elephants move away from the area peacefully because this is where we don't want the elephants to come. This is what the system and the utopian look like that this can work full-time in a larger level and where the community themselves adopt to it rather than it's a very top-down approach where people go out and say, Oh, this is what you should use. If the communities feel the need for using it, they will definitely use it, which is what's happening now. But yeah, this is what my future would like in that system would look like.
SPEAKER_00:I'm very intrigued with this shift in paradigm that I've noticed when you're talking. So, whenever I'm talking to an animal rights activist or somebody working closely with animals, it's usually human bashing. It's usually, oh, animals need to be protected, humans are the villains here. But in our conversation so far, what I've realized is that you're taking equally equal importance to both. You are trying to manage both. You are not saying one is the villain or the other is the victim. You're not saying the elephants are the villains either. It's a coexistence where both are suffering because of each other, which is quite refreshing. I don't know if you've noticed this, but most animal activists will say humans are the bad guys here. They are the ones who've encroached, they are the ones who you know don't deserve any better. But I love this freshness of thought, and I think that's what's going to take it at least to the next level because you're taking care of everything in the ecosystem, not just the animals.
SPEAKER_01:So personally, as other like how every activist or any animal lover, I started this field and got into this field because I love the animal. Simple. I love elephants. But then you see the reality on the ground, work really on the ground. Look at the conflict firsthand. Look at I have seen a human death by an elephant. I have seen crops being damaged because of it. I have seen all of that on the ground, and that has humbled me. That that has made me feel that they are not the culprit. They are not, they are equally suffering just the way elephants are suffering. So it is not that they are the culprit or they are the bad guys or they are the good guys, kind of thing. Both of them are equally suffering, and they are trying to manage this space in a way that is conflict as much less conflict as possible. So they are trying to do this, both of them are trying to do somehow or the other, even the elephants, even the even the humans. So none of them, and that's when I have built this level of compassion towards the communities because I see the suffering firsthand. They have had sleepless nights. They how for three months of the year you're protecting your crops and you are sleeping on top of a tongi, which is barely anything, and you're sleeping in that fear that this can break anytime, an elephant can break anytime, and my whole livelihood will be destroyed, my whole year's livelihood will be destroyed by one crop raiding incident. And I don't know how I will survive, how I will uh support my family for the whole year, what I will do. This is the level of uncertainty they live with. And most of the Indians who live around wildlife and large mammals live with this uncertainty while it is crop raiding, while it is livestock that is depreded by others. So when When are we like I am not going to say that conflict is not real, conflict is very much real, but we have to find a way to live through conflict, and they are the ones who can show us that how they are living with it, and we can all we can do is support it.
SPEAKER_00:Amazing. Tell me, Seema, what are the major areas of stress and anxiety for you in this field of work?
SPEAKER_01:So we see a lot of electrocution that happens from the elephant side, also, where the elephants are being killed because they have been electrocuted. Which is also on the other side, we see a lot of humans that have deaths that happen. So every day there are these WhatsApp groups that I'm part of, and you wake up in the morning and this has happened. You wake up with this news something or the other, either one day there's an elephant that's killed, or there's a human that's killed. And how do you still navigate your day with that? Because you have compassion for both of them, you love both of them, you are caring for both of them, but you don't know how to deal with it. So for me, first of all, earlier I when I was part of all these groups, WhatsApp groups, I used to feel a lot. But then I realized that you can in a way try and use that energy of your feelings. I am a feelings person. I tell everybody I feel a lot. I don't, I don't, I am not a scientist who's not going to feel. I am going to feel it, and I'm gonna try and use that feeling as an energy to drive my work. That's what I think about. So yeah, I do feel anxiety. I do feel that how why is something not working? Why is this not happening? I struggle with anxiety, but I try and push that anxiety and make channel that energy towards actually getting the work done. Hopefully. Hopefully, and I just keep trying. I just say that keep trying, keep trying, keep trying.
SPEAKER_00:That's quite amazing because it takes a lot of energy to just keep trying. And this is the kind of resource that most people don't know they have. But every single day when you get up and continue your work, you know it's one day well spent. But talking of anxiety, let me ask you a very personal question. It's a question I ask all my guests, and I love the answers that come out of this. So imagine uh, you know what's a physical first aid box, right? Something we keep our band-aids, our painkillers in for one of those days when you have minor cuts or bruises and you don't really need a doctor. What if you were to keep an emotional first aid box, like a mental first aid kit at home? A box which you could just open on days where you've had an emotionally low time and you want a little pick-me-up. So, what would make you happy immediately? How would you make this box for yourself?
SPEAKER_01:So, for me personally, I go back looking at all the elephant pictures, and then I start to re- I start to relive the day that the day happens. Like, so it's like an elephant pictures, a day opens, and you of course don't remember this day, this happened. But then when you look at these pictures, then a story comes into your head. Oh, this happened this day, oh, this happened in this day, this way, and you start laughing at it. And you start feeling that, oh, this happened, and this is very much real, and you had a lot of fun this day at field work, and the stories come into your head, and you start whenever I'm low, I look at elephant pictures, and I look at the pictures that I have clicked, and I have felt that this is something that I want to see. I have like some 20,000 elephant photos or even more than that, so I can just keep looking at it and making stories over. And then imagine, like I think with humans as well, like you go on a vacation and you when you look at those photos, then you kind of relive that day again. Yeah, and then that's the same thing for me. I relive the day with the elephants, and then I'm like, oh, this is what happens, this is what happened, and I kind this is a way I it's a coping mechanism for me. If I'm do if I'm low mentally or emotionally, because there are days that I'm not a few, but quite a few days. But yeah. At first, I yes, and I do have a really nice support system. My friends, my family, there are a lot of people who have like really supported me, mentors who have supported all throughout my journey till here, and I'm really glad about it.
SPEAKER_00:How nice. I would love to see your first aid box someday myself. All those elephant pictures will be so nice to look at.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, some of them are quite goofy because they're these young ones, they do like really cute stuff, and oh my goodness, they make you laugh even after looking at this photo. After 10 years, also, they're gonna still make me laugh.
SPEAKER_00:How lovely is that? Well, see my this conversation I think can go on for another two hours, but I do have a time restraint. But before I close, I want to throw the floor open to you. Is there a question you want to ask me as a psychologist?
SPEAKER_01:You have done quite a few podcasts, you have done quite a few different kinds of podcasts. What is the common thread that connects all of these together? And what do you think as a psychologist that you think all of us have in common?
SPEAKER_00:Wow. So I think one of the things that has attracted me to every guest whom I have invited on my podcast is their passion for their work. Like you said, there are people from so many varied fields, and there is this inherent, rigorous curiosity that I have as a person, and there are questions that I want to ask. So luckily, I've been able to meet a lot of people through the course of my work, and I've asked my questions, and then I realized that these answers are what everyone should know. For example, I have a Nobel laureate on my uh season three, I think she's on, and Dr. Ruth is a close friend, and there was a question I always want to ask her: what happens after you win the Nobel Prize? Do you keep it on your table? Do you wear it as a mill? Do you hide it in a cupboard? But you can't ask these questions and you don't get these answers unless you have a medium. And similarly, I've had people like yourself, you know, working in different fields like this. I have had uh I've had people who are working in pure academia, in medicine. But there is this certain passion that everybody carries for their work, and this is not a passion that they found, it is a passion which was developed through hard work. One of the things I'm trying to teach the next generation is that don't go looking for your calling. Create it. Once you start working in a certain field, you get better at it and you start enjoying it more. One of the mistakes most Gen Zs are making right now is waiting till they find what makes them happy and what's going to be their ultimate passion and calling for the rest of their lives. They don't want to step in, start working, and then develop it along the way. So I think that's a common threat for most of my guests that they started at some point. They worked hard until you know their work became their passion and calling. And nothing came overnight. There was no dawn of some Eureka moment or you know, something which said, Oh, this is where you're going to be forever. So I think that's a good thing.
SPEAKER_01:Nobody's gonna come and tell you that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, there is not going to be any, you know, divine intervention which says, Oh, today now you've woken up, this is going to be forever. Like you loved animals, you loved uh elephants, but that's not where you ended up or not. You haven't even reached the end of your road. You don't know which way you're headed. Like you said, community involvement. I'm sure you didn't even dream about it earlier. And now it's such an integral part of your work.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I feel this is really like this is really beautifully said because you don't know your path. You keep walking, you keep walking, and then the path comes open, and you just have to keep walking and paddling. You can't be like, oh, I will only paddle after I've figured out what I want to do. How is that gonna work?
SPEAKER_00:Correct. And so I keep telling people, I listen to these people, they're real people doing real work. And I'm I'm just so happy and I'm so honored to have had you on my show today because I haven't met anyone who is in this field of work. It's so exciting because I love animals, I love technology, I'm very curious about AI, and this gives fresh hope to everyone who says AI is here to destroy the world, but you are actually saving the world through AI and through your love for animals. So thank you so much for your time, Seema. Thank you for taking the effort for the environment, for animals, for the community, and thank you for sharing all this with me and with all my audiences.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you, thank you, Dr. Kensil, for inviting me. Thank you. It was a lovely conversation.
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