Bringing folklore, creative technology and public learning together to make AI accessible beyond its usual audiences.
Hasan Shahrukh works across art, technology and education, creating encounters with emerging technologies that people can explore through stories, sound, movement and participation. His practice combines AI, generative visuals and interactive installations with an accessibility-first approach to language, location and medium. Bhaav Nagari brings Rajasthan’s storytelling traditions into a fictional village of responsive objects, inviting visitors to influence the experience themselves.
Pooja Is Calling used music, chatbots and popular culture to open conversations about digital scams. His teaching has included curriculum development and artist mentoring for BeFantastic’s International Artist Fellowship. During the pandemic, volunteering at a government school also developed into Kalpana Innovation Lab, a learning space for girls in Rajasthan with books, computers, robotics and creative experimentation.
Across these projects, technical understanding meets the question of who gets to participate, learn and shape what technology becomes.
What this perspective brings
Accessible entry points through art and hands-on exploration.
Experience beyond conventional technology and arts audiences.
A connection between creative possibility, digital safety and education.
Leiden University Previously Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
Anthropologist and writer
Examining how we live with AI, and the stories about it that future generations will inherit.
Michiel Baas is an anthropologist and writer whose research follows how people make sense of social and technological change. With a PhD in anthropology from the University of Amsterdam, he has held academic positions in the Netherlands, India and Singapore. His work spans migration, urban life and social mobility, including the book Muscular India, which examines masculinity and the changing middle class.
His 2024 author biography documented his role as Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. This is historical background, not a statement of his current appointment.
His AI research brings this attention to lived experience into conversations about creativity, human agency and machines. The project Craitivity: Towards an Anthropology of Artificial Intelligence and his published writing examine how cultural expectations shape what people imagine AI to be. His research has included engagement with artists and data scientists in India.
This perspective opens a longer view for Responsible Now: how are we learning to live and create alongside AI, whose experiences become part of that history, and what story will we pass on to future generations?
What this perspective brings
Everyday cultural context.
Scrutiny of assumptions and stories behind technological claims.
Attention to whose experiences are represented and remembered.
Bringing relationships, emotional wellbeing and everyday behaviour into the conversation about how we live with technology.
Akshara Damle is a Bengaluru-based psychologist, trainer and author, and the founder of Mano Samvaada. His work combines individual support with public conversations about mental wellbeing, relationships and everyday pressures. He has conducted workshops on stress, conflict and leadership for educators, police personnel, bankers and other professional groups.
In his TEDx talk Pillars of relationship, he explores time, trust, understanding, freedom and friendship in healthy relationships. His engagement with technology is explicit: a 2025 session at Lincoln University College in Malaysia addressed excessive gadget use, emotional regulation and AI in mental healthcare.
His perspective brings a human-scale question to Responsible Now: what happens to attention, relationships and wellbeing as digital systems become woven into daily life? It connects technological change with experiences people can recognise and discuss.
What this perspective brings
Psychological understanding of attention and relationships.
Making difficult subjects discussable.
Evaluating technology through everyday effects, not capabilities alone.
Connecting security engineering, digital rights and public awareness to ask who bears the risks of new technology.
Aditi Bhatnagar is a security researcher and the Founder and CEO of Offgrid Security. Her work spans AI security, Android privacy and web applications, combining technical investigation with the question of how people can use technology safely.
Before founding Offgrid Security, she worked on cloud security at Atlassian and endpoint protection and AI-related systems at Microsoft. Her company develops Kira, a security platform focused on investigating vulnerabilities and testing whether they can actually be exploited. She has presented technical research at conferences including RSA Conference and NorthSec.
Alongside engineering, her Infinite Hacks initiative has built cyber awareness and convened discussions about digital rights and security. This combination gives Responsible Now a practical approach to responsibility: examine how a system works, identify who could be harmed, and make risks understandable enough for people to act on them.
What this perspective brings
Technical scrutiny of privacy, security and AI risks.
Bringing music, storytelling and social conscience into a shared public conversation.
Shashi Bhushan ‘Samad’ is a singer, composer, actor, lyricist and writer whose practice brings together music, poetry and socially conscious storytelling. He studied history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he also advocated for students’ rights. He founded Kala Chashma, a music project connecting ghazal traditions with contemporary storytelling, and works across Hindi, Urdu and Bhojpuri. His credits include music for TVF’s Yeh Meri Family, independent releases through 4PM Music and performances at mushairas and cultural events. In his Outlook essay A Diary From JNU, he reflects on music, student life and the relationship between artistic expression and collective action.
His lived experience as a visually impaired artist shapes a distinctive way of engaging with the world, expressed through music, language and storytelling.
For Responsible Now, his perspective connects technology to how people listen, express themselves and participate in shared culture. He brings an artist’s attention to language, dignity and experiences that can disappear when public conversations become too abstract.
What this perspective brings
Language, music and storytelling as ways to participate.
Attention to dignity, expression and shared culture.
Lived experience that keeps public conversations connected to people.
Bringing feminist care, community-led design and digital rights into how we imagine, build and use technology.
Dr Padmini Ray Murray is a feminist researcher, maker and founder of Design Beku, a collective working towards digital and design practices shaped by local contexts and communities. Her practice brings together research, creative experimentation and an ethics of care, asking whose knowledge, needs and choices are recognised when technologies are designed.
She holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh and established the digital humanities programme at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, where she was course director from 2016 to 2018. Her research includes digital self-determination for people with disabilities and survivor-centred approaches to designing AI interventions around technology-mediated gender-based violence.
Through Design Beku, she has worked with organisations including Enable India, Point of View, Sangama, Maya Health and Janastu. Her creative projects explore cybersecurity, archives, surveillance capitalism and alternative digital futures. Her Digital Good Network fellowship research examines how non-Western languages, cultural concepts and ways of understanding the world might reshape AI. Across these areas, her work foregrounds designing with communities and taking their existing knowledge seriously.
What this perspective brings
Community-led design grounded in local knowledge and lived experience.
Feminist care, accessibility and digital self-determination.
Critical perspectives on AI, power and whose voices shape technology.
Exploring sustainable product design, discarded materials and resource-efficient ways of making everyday objects.
Dr. Amaltas Khan is Associate Senior Faculty in Industrial Design at the National Institute of Design, Andhra Pradesh, where he has taught since 2017. His work connects sustainable product design, materials research and design education, with a focus on making better use of resources and reducing waste.
With a background in mechanical engineering and product design, he earned his doctorate in Design from IIITDM Jabalpur. His doctoral research explored design interventions to reduce food-packaging discards, with part of the work undertaken with Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. His academic experience also includes a student exchange project at TU Darmstadt in Germany.
Before joining NID Andhra Pradesh, he consulted with design organisations and co-founded Woll of Design Studio. At NID, his responsibilities include coordinating Research & Publications and heading Design Consultancy Services, alongside his teaching and research.
What this perspective brings
Sustainable materials and resource efficiency as practical design questions.
Methods for developing useful products from discarded materials.
Design education that connects research with hands-on experimentation.
A sound artist, composer and educator connecting experimental performance, collective listening and the cultural conditions that shape how people encounter technology and one another.
Anirban Ghosh, known as Baan G, is a New Delhi-based sound artist, composer and educator, and Founder and Artistic Director of W.I.P Labs. His practice connects experimental music, performance and moving image, treating sound as a way to shape stories, relationships and shared attention.
He founded the multi-arts project Dastaan LIVE, helped establish the Dilli Improvisers Orchestra and serves as Managing Trustee of Aagaaz Theatre Trust. These roles bring together artistic practice and the work of creating spaces for collaboration, experimentation and learning.
His sound-design projects include Mandeep Raikhy’s Hallucinations of an Artifact and Harkat’s Laal Aasmaan Hara Gulaab Neeli Dharti. His work has travelled to the Edinburgh Fringe, Venice Architecture Biennale and Kampnagel. He teaches Critical Sound Design and Creative Music Exploration at Ashoka University and CEPT University, with guest-faculty engagements at IIM Ahmedabad, FTII and IIAD.
Anirban’s wider practice includes documentaries about historians and writers, and an ongoing annotated translation of Hindustani vocal repertoire with composer Elliot Cole. Across these different settings, he brings sustained attention to how we listen, whose experiences become audible and how collective artistic processes can open unfamiliar ways of thinking.
What this perspective brings
Listening and sensory experience as ways to question abstract ideas.
Experience building collaborative spaces for artistic experimentation.
Cultural context and creative pedagogy alongside technological possibility.
A lawyer and arts producer connecting experimental cultural work with fair agreements, practical systems and sustainable collaboration.
Kirti Sharma is a lawyer and arts producer whose work connects creative ambition with the practical structures needed to sustain it. She is Founding Partner and Executive Director of W.I.P Labs, the New Delhi artist-run platform for experimental and interdisciplinary art. She previously worked at Amarchand Mangaldas before moving into the arts.
Her work at W.I.P Labs spans festival production, live performance and film-screening programmes, including W.I.P altFEST. Beyond producing, she has developed curricula for university partners, designed arts-immersion programmes for corporate teams and written intellectual-property policy for educational institutions. She also advises artists on contracts, intellectual property and working terms, bringing legal understanding into the everyday conditions of cultural work.
That combination offers a grounded perspective on responsible collaboration. Creative freedom depends not only on ideas, but also on clear agreements, workable processes and fair treatment of the people doing the work. Kirti’s experience brings those often-invisible conditions into view, alongside the public-facing programme or finished artistic outcome.
What this perspective brings
Fair working terms within creative collaboration.
Practical attention to rights, agreements and accountability.
Experience turning experimental programmes into workable production.
Nidhi brings a civil-society perspective on AI governance, information literacy and inclusive technology, grounded in nearly two decades of media experience.
Nidhi Sudhan is co-founder of Citizen Digital Foundation (CDF), where she works on responsible technology, information literacy and AI governance. Her approach connects the decisions made by technology companies and institutions with their consequences for people, communities and public life.
She brings nearly two decades of experience across content, editorial work, media strategy and analytics. Her education includes an MBA in Digital Media from Nottingham Business School and a Graduate Certificate in Public Policy, specialising in technology policy, from the Takshashila Institution. She trains and advises public and private stakeholders on media and information literacy, data and AI governance, AI ethics and inclusive technology.
Her work addresses issues including misinformation, behavioural manipulation, privacy, discrimination and online child safety. She advocates broader participation in AI ethics, including people whose experience comes from education, journalism, social work and other non-technical fields.
Named among the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics for 2024, Nidhi brings a civil-society perspective to responsible AI: helping people question how technology shapes their choices, and helping institutions consider accountability, inclusion and human wellbeing in its development and use.
What this perspective brings
Information literacy: understanding how AI and digital media shape attention, trust and public understanding.
Everyday accountability: connecting AI governance with privacy, safety, fairness and the real experiences of technology users.
Inclusive participation: making room for non-technical expertise and communities affected by technology decisions.
Social entrepreneur and dialogue practitioner connecting gender justice, community leadership and the practical work of building understanding across difference.
Trina Talukdar is a social entrepreneur and dialogue practitioner whose work connects gender justice, leadership and public life. She co-founded Kranti, which supports girls from Mumbai’s red-light communities to become leaders of social change. Her approach starts with the knowledge and strength people develop through lived experience, and with creating the opportunities that allow that leadership to grow.
Her work has also taken her across institutions and countries. At Ashoka, she led venture and fellowship work in South Asia and worked in Southern Africa; at American Express Philanthropy, she helped develop leadership programmes for nonprofit professionals. Through Bolti Bandh, she has worked to build dialogue between people divided by politics. Her experience at Fields of View brought games, simulations and experiential learning into conversations about civic issues and public policy.
Trina serves on the board of the Global Dialogue Collective. At Responsible Now, her perspective brings practical attention to whose voice is heard, how trust is built across difference, and how people who are often excluded from decisions can help shape them. Her contribution connects institutional questions with the everyday work of participation, dignity and shared responsibility.
What this perspective brings
Community leadership grounded in lived experience, dignity and gender justice.
Dialogue across political differences, with attention to listening and trust.
Experiential learning that makes civic questions accessible and participatory.
Gaurav brings theatre, creative technology and audience participation together to explore how people encounter digital systems.
Gaurav Singh Nijjer is a theatre-maker, creative technologist, multidisciplinary designer and researcher from New Delhi. He is General Manager of Kaivalya Plays and a PhD scholar at the Centre for Performance, Technology and Equity at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. His research explores distance, hybrid formats and new possibilities for live performance.
His practice combines storytelling with tools such as creative coding, live video, artificial intelligence and interactive media. Rather than keeping audiences at a distance, his projects invite them into the work. On Mining Hate, he served as technical director and designer, collaborating with a team that included Hasan to turn questions of online misinformation and hate into an audience-driven performance.
Gaurav also co-directed and designed Lifeline 99 99, a one-to-one telephone performance created during the pandemic. Alongside making work, he teaches artists and arts workers practical ways to use digital tools, including AI, with an emphasis on accessible, hands-on learning.
This combination of artistic experimentation, technical fluency and participatory design offers Responsible Now a way to make complicated technological questions tangible, discussable and open to different audiences.
What this perspective brings
Participatory experiences that help people explore technology through doing, not just listening.
Creative-technology expertise for making abstract digital issues visible and accessible.
An audience-first approach to learning across live, online and hybrid settings.
Varoon uses applied improvisation and participatory theatre to open conversations about safety, wellbeing and the social impact of technology.
Varoon P. Anand is the founder and Artistic Director of Kaivalya Plays, and a theatre-maker and facilitator specialising in applied improvisation. His practice spans performance, teaching and research, drawing on training in improvisation, clowning, physical theatre, classical theatre and Forum Theatre. He began his theatre career in Panama and later developed an improvisation practice in New Delhi.
Varoon’s work uses participation to approach subjects that can be difficult to discuss directly. He directed Unravel, an improvised production exploring experiences of mental health and wellbeing, and has led research into safety, consent and working practices in the performing arts. These projects connect what happens in a rehearsal room with broader questions of care, power and responsibility.
He is director and performer on Mining Hate, an interactive production about online misinformation and hate, developed with a creative team that includes Gaurav and Hasan. The work brings audience contributions into a conversation about the human consequences of digital harm.
For Responsible Now, his perspective connects critical questions about technology with the practical work of listening, responding to others and creating spaces where people can participate.
What this perspective brings
Applied improvisation that makes dialogue active, collaborative and responsive.
Experience examining consent, care and safety in shared creative spaces.
Participatory storytelling that connects digital harm with lived human experience.
Asking who technology serves, whose rights it protects and who it leaves out.
Rohit Sharma works across legal education, public policy and access to justice. An alumnus of the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, he founded All For Law and Awaaz Leadership Labs. His experience includes work with Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, SAMA and human-rights organisations, alongside research assistance at Harvard’s South Asia Institute.
Through All For Law, he emphasises experiential learning, mentorship and more inclusive routes into the legal profession. His published writing examines the distance between rights in principle and access in practice. In related articles for LSE South Asia and the Oxford Human Rights Hub, he analysed how digital-only vaccination registration could exclude people through connectivity, language, disability and unequal access to devices.
His perspective grounds Responsible Now’s technology conversations in institutions and everyday consequences: who can use a system, who is excluded by its design and what meaningful access requires.
What this perspective brings
Rights and access beyond convenience.
Legal and public education.
Attention to how policy, infrastructure and interface design interact.
A Goa-based artist and educator working with neurodiverse learners at The Owl House, connecting visual storytelling, sensory learning and local ecology.
Pakhi Sen is a visual artist, educator and illustrator based in Goa. Working across painting, comics and participatory storytelling, she explores ecology, memory and community through journaling and visual research. At The Owl House in Aldona, she develops arts pedagogy with neurodiverse learners, bringing creative practice into a community setting.
Her 2026 School of Commons project, Roots and Nerves, works with learners at The Owl House to explore Goa’s khazan wetlands through sensory experience. Drawing, play, observation and guided excursions become ways to encounter the landscape, with attention to texture, sound, rhythm and movement. The project asks how ecological engagement can become more accessible without losing its complexity.
Her collaborative work includes Fantasy Forest, part of Serendipity Arts Festival’s 2024 programme. The festival credits Sen and Sufyan Panna with leading artists from The Owl House in creating an installation and workshops around an imagined jungle.
Her illustration practice includes contributions to Comixense: The Irritability of Plants, The Discovery of J. Baret and cover art. Across these contexts, her work connects visual storytelling with collaborative learning and close attention to lived environments.
What this perspective brings
Creative learning shaped around different ways of sensing, communicating and participating.
An ecological perspective grounded in Goa’s wetlands and everyday encounters with place.
Visual storytelling that makes room for collaborative imagination and public participation.
Karn Malhotra founded Exit Design, the B2B branding firm whose clients included 3M, Decathlon, Accenture and Tata Motors. Across 17 years at Exit Design, he built experience in brand strategy and communication. He later served as Head of Marketing at Talent500 and Neol, and now leads Humanly Brands.
Through Humanly Brands, he works with senior leaders and deep-tech, purpose-driven founders on positioning, founder-led marketing and thought leadership. He also founded Outlined, an AI-driven design-automation platform. His work focuses on making complex ideas understandable and helping people communicate with clarity and build trust. Alongside brand and communications strategy, his interests include digital wellbeing and the relationship between human connection and emerging technologies.
What this perspective brings
Making complex ideas understandable through brand strategy and storytelling.
Attention to clarity, trust and human connection in communication.
A design and communications perspective on how emerging technology is framed.
Raghav Agrawal is a researcher and product designer concerned with the relationship between complex systems and the people who use them. His public writing explores interaction design as a sequence of decisions, uncertainties and changes in understanding over time. He considers how interfaces can help people compare options and make sense of difficult choices, alongside tools that let people explore ideas, manipulate representations and develop new mental models.
His writing on learning connects these concerns to everyday practice: learning within real workflows, sharing understanding and coordinating under practical constraints.
This perspective brings a concrete test to Responsible Now’s technological ideas: what does a person actually have to understand and do? It keeps attention on cognitive effort, learnability and the fit between a system’s capabilities and ordinary life.
