Anand Pandian - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflection

Anand Pandian
Johns Hopkins University

I first met Shivi when I visited Yale in 1996 as a prospective graduate student. He took me out to
lunch and shared some very thoughtful advice about how to make an important decision about
where next to take my studies. In the decades that followed, I turned time and again to him for
further counsel and guidance, which he never hesitated to share with characteristic generosity,
humor, calm, and wisdom. His writing and thinking shaped and inspired so much of what I seek
to do myself as a scholar and teacher, as it has countless others like me. I think of a story I still
remember him telling when he gave a talk at UC Berkeley many years ago now, drawing on the
research for Modern Forests, likely in the late 1990s. He talked about the casual way in which
one of his Indian interlocutors lopped a branch as they were walking together along a trail, an
utterly ordinary gesture of maintenance and care that reflected less an environmental ideology
than a coherent way of life. I'm grateful to Shivi for showing us that mentoring well can also be
like this: an ethos, a way of being in the world. Our academic environment is simply the better
for it.

Anand Pandian