About
In my own words
The Question That Changed My Direction
For years, my work lived inside the machinery of justice after harm had already been done. I sat with people who had lost family members to conflict. I trained lawyers and judges in restorative approaches. I helped design Nepal’s first restorative justice programs inside a judiciary that had never used them before. This was meaningful work, and I do not regret a single year of it.
But somewhere along the way, a question started following me around, and it would not leave. Where do these harms actually begin?
Not in the moment of violence. Not in the courtroom. Earlier. Long before a person becomes a perpetrator or a victim in the eyes of the law, they were a child sitting in a classroom, learning what fairness looks like, learning whether their voice counted, learning whether the adults around them saw them as capable or as a problem to be managed.
I started to see a pattern I could not unsee: the child who was labeled, excluded, or punished into silence in a Nepali classroom often became, years later, the very case that restorative justice was trying to repair. The justice system was doing careful, well-intentioned work on the back end of a problem that education systems were creating on the front end.
Where I Come From
I was trained as a lawyer in Nepal, studied conflict, peace, and development at Tribhuvan University, sociology and anthropology at Central European University in Hungary, and, most recently, inclusive and special needs education at Kathmandu University. Before any of that took the shape of formal study, my grounding was in peacebuilding and dialogue work, sitting with communities and institutions trying to rebuild trust after conflict. That grounding is still what shapes how I approach everything else. Justice, education, and inclusion are the three places I have applied it. Dialogue is where I learned how.
What I Do Now
A Guiding Belief
Courts and laws are where most people imagine justice lives. I have worked inside those rooms, and by the time a case reaches one, a great deal has already gone wrong, often years earlier, often in a school.
I believe classrooms are where a society’s real values get tested first. Get that right, and you are not just improving education. You are building the foundation for a more just society.
Let's Build Something
If this resonates with you, whether you are an educator, a policymaker, a researcher, or an institution working on related problems, I would be glad to connect.