One of the most interesting days I spent in Delhi began in a forest that used to be a mine. Restored, it has let nature and wildlife return — caves scattered through the area, and animals still roaming. They mentioned a monitor lizard had been spotted just around the time we visited.

After the forest we toured a mud house — traditionally built, but checked by engineers to make sure it was sustainable and met the necessary guidelines. The indigenous solutions were the part that really stayed with me.

Instead of windows with nets, there were holes in the walls plugged with dry branches — letting air cool the house while keeping bugs and birds out.

It had a rainwater harvesting system and a nearby pond where water was collected, then filtered and boiled to purify it. Overall, the house barely relied on the outside world — and actually helped nature thrive around it.

Later, we made things out of clay in a ceramics workshop, each piece representing our own creativity and our relationship with climate change and adaptation. It was fascinating to see how differently everyone expressed the same idea — a whole table of imagined futures, shaped by hand.

On the 23rd we fought through Bengaluru’s famously terrible traffic to reach the Reap Benefit team — and arrived to find ourselves reintroduced. New roles: government officials and citizens of different countries, handed one very real problem to solve together — El Niño — with a $100 budget and a real-time tool to test whether each plan was actually feasible and effective.

Over a samosa-and-chai break we kept wrestling with it, and closed the activity with reflections. Somewhere in the role-play, two lessons had landed at once: El Niño as a phenomenon, and leadership — the kind that looks completely different depending on the role you’re wearing.

A day of new roles, responsibilities and challenges that slowly turned into lessons — and a lot of gratitude towards each other.

After a yummy, authentic lunch at the Reap Benefit office, we spent the second half of the session reflecting on our whole 360+ journey — and turning the morning’s energy into something real. We committed to actual initiatives: a youth-driven Sunday drive for cleanliness, and longer-term plans for the two weeks after we each get home.

We ended the day with heartfelt shout-outs to the people we wanted to appreciate — and a photograph where we each stood in the part of the room that matched our country, together forming a living map of the world. New roles, new potential we didn’t know we had, and a whole lot of gratitude.

The day began at Adani Group’s cybersecurity centre, where we saw the machinery of digital defence up close — isolated servers subjected to simulated attacks, a small-scale replica of a working power station, and the control room from which the tests are watched. A staff member walked us through a simulation of the 2015 cyberattack on Ukraine’s power grid.

Then we stepped into the real thing: Adani’s control centre for its power grid, a single room from which the company’s entire energy portfolio across India is monitored and managed. The lesson was hard to miss — the corporate world shapes daily life on an enormous scale. Adani controls roughly half of India’s energy needs, and reaches into ports, airports and much more.

The company’s contribution to sustainability is undeniable — and the corporate field is extremely grey.

Many of us held both of those thoughts at once. Almost half of Adani’s portfolio is solar and wind; the other half leans on large-scale coal mining in Australia. Students raised the unethical labour used to build some solar plants, the disregard for regional biodiversity, and — inside the cybersecurity centre itself — the heavy use of AI-generated content where a person could have explained things, and the certainty with which our guide denied that Adani had ever been attacked. All of it fed a genuine debate about the power corporations hold in the modern world.

The day closed at Dada Hari’s stepwell. It felt a little rushed, and more than a few of us wished less of it had gone to group photos — but the structure, and the story behind it, were impressive and beautiful all the same. Cool, quiet and centuries old: a very different kind of engineering to end a day that began in a control room.