A woman gets on the U-Bahn in Berlin with flowers in her arms, and she is crying, properly crying, and the whole carriage looks at her and nobody moves, and Nischhal Sharma does not move either and thinks of the trains in India, where a stranger would have come over and asked and stayed two hours with her life story.
Nischhal told me this in the second round of INFINITIVE Safari, where i sit down with the next generation of people who will move this planet somewhere good. We met in Norway, at the INFINITIVE retreat for students of ESCP, and i began where i always begin, with who are you, and the answers came in order, a student of sustainability entrepreneurship, a filmmaker, and under those a child, somebody for whom a horse can fly and love never runs out, a child since twelve, since the household that didn’t work and The Kite Runner and a mother who cultivated empathy and the nights without sleep over the state of the world, and “I think I’ve been tired since the age of twelve.”
Tired, then, and still a child, and when i asked about the future it all came at once, right-wing extremism in country after country and the budgets going to defence and AI on top and at home a harvest in doubt, farmers told to wait with their seed, and more of it coming, and at the far end of that list Nischhal said “I could be delusional” and went on hoping, because the hope has an address, it lives with the people who do the work and stays away from the people who watch, and in Hyderabad last year the state began clearing 400 acres of forest beside the university and the students went into the street and the police went at them with sticks and on 3 April 2025 the Supreme Court stopped the felling, because somebody moved.
Awake, Nischhal calls that, and awake means connected, to yourself and then to nature and then to whoever stands next to you, because when we’re connected we care, and India had that and traded it for the West’s flashy clothes and now has the clothes and a question to go with them: “What is the rush and where are we going?”
So Nischhal, who had been running from film because film was too small, is going back to film, because everything pulls us apart and a story is the one thing that could tie us, and the fossil fuel industry will survive this filmmaker, but enough people might flirt with the idea that things could be different, and the generations who made the mess get anger first, and then you had wisdom and let it die with you, and then, from nowhere, let the women be, because in India, Nischhal said, “we just never let them leave the house.”
The woman with the flowers got off somewhere in Berlin and nobody had asked, and it was two metres of carriage floor, and a new story starts when somebody stands up and crosses them and says are you okay. Flirt.
