When we think of Delhi, we think of infrastructure, money, and images of the metro snaking through the city. Hives of humans densely populate this ant of a capital with their comings and goings. Yet there is an undeniable expanse of flora and fauna that breathes alongside its people. Against this backdrop, the city is wild for many reasons. Delhi is many things at once.
In the late 2000s, biologist Neha Sinha had just graduated and was working as a journalist in Delhi. Five years in, she realised it wasn’t for her, she wanted to work in conservation. “I was focusing too much on negativity,” she said. “I was only reporting what was wrong in the world but I wanted to be part of the solution.”
Almost two decades later, she works with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in New Delhi. Her new book, Wild Capital: Discovering Nature in Delhi, takes on the remarkable task of translating Delhi’s biodiversity to its readers. She writes that she wants to “revel in their non-verbal sense-scape. I must translate what they try to tell me.” What stands out is her awareness that nature has its own agency; she never imposes a rigid meaning upon it, and so her own childhood memories become a tool to resist universality and grant that agency to the natural world.
She also democratises the act of birdwatching, making it accessible even to city dwellers who don’t quite know what they’re looking at. Wild Capital begins with a kind of unknowing, a bildungsroman of a little girl deeply tethered to the landscape she grew up in, especially her garden. She takes us on a journey of her escapades in the wild city.
Scroll spoke with Sinha while birdwatching in Sanjay Van when the semal trees were in full bloom. Excerpts from the conversation:
You write about Delhi as both hostile and nurturing. What does a place like Sanjay Van mean to you?
These spaces are layered. There’s an ecological history of species, interactions, and processes that have been unfolding for decades or centuries.
At the same time, these places are complicated. When I first started going to Sanjay Van, it didn’t feel safe. Especially as a woman, you’re constantly negotiating your presence. Even now, if you stand by the roadside looking at a tree, people stare. They’re not used to seeing that.
So the experience is always bittersweet. You’re aware of the fear, the staring, the interruptions, but you’re also aware of the trees, the birds, the life. And that contradiction is Delhi.
And that’s why community matters. Going with friends, building a network of people who share that space with you, that’s how you navigate it.
You return often to certain trees like the semal, the palash, as if they anchor your life. What draws you to them?
I have rituals around them. Every spring, I go back to check on the semal trees. I count them, I visit them and see how they’re doing. It’s like a pilgrimage. For most people, the calendar is marked by festivals. For me, it’s marked by flowering cycles.
There’s something deeply comforting about that. These trees give you continuity. They exist outside your personal upheavals. Even in difficult times like COVID, the palash flowering felt like a kind of reassurance. We need those anchors, something that keeps us going, something that makes sense of the world when everything else doesn’t.
The book reads like a memoir. Your life is unfolding through trees and animals. Were you consciously writing yourself into the landscape?
I think it happened organically. When you write about nature, you’re also writing about yourself, your memories, your encounters, and your way of seeing.
Take something like the papri tree growing out of rock. It’s a chasmophyte and survives in extreme conditions, in cracks where you wouldn’t expect life to persist. When life feels difficult, I think about that tree. Nature gives you these narratives of survival that are not abstract. They’re right there.
So yes, I suppose it becomes a kind of natural history of myself, but also of the city. Because you can’t separate the two. The places shape you, and you shape how you remember those places.
Your book starts from a point of “unknowing” and that’s probably why it feels so readable. Why is that important?
Because certainty is often an illusion.
Science itself operates on that principle: this is what we know, this is what we don’t know. And that’s okay.
You don’t need to fully understand something to appreciate it. In fact, trying to control everything is harmful. It creates stress, and it disrupts natural systems. People who claim to know everything are far removed from nature, but they are running the world. This is why today we are struggling to explain why the Aravallis are important. We are struggling to explain why ChatGPT, which drinks so much water, should be used sparingly. It is probably only nature that has to prove its “value” over and over again.
You return often to childhood, almost as a baseline to measure ecological change. Why is memory so central in your book?
Memory is one of the few ways we can understand loss.
When I was writing, I kept asking: did I really see these things as a child – fireflies, certain insects or did I imagine them? And if I did see them, are they still here? Sometimes I wasn't sure if it was my mother’s memory or mine. That became a quest. To investigate it and see what remains.
And what you realise is that a lot has disappeared. There’s an insect decline globally. Children today may not have seen things that were common in our childhoods like earthworms, slugs, fireflies. That absence shapes us too. Loss is formative.
Our childhoods were closer to mud. Mitti (soil) was not dirty. It was just mitti. You played in it, you touched it. Now everything is sanitised. Our sensory experience is mediated through screens.
So going back to childhood is not just a way of romanticising. I am also trying to understand what we’ve lost, and what we can reclaim. Even in small ways.
You resist the idea that knowledge must be technical. The book alternates between technicality and non-expert language. That’s when you make use of personal connections. Is that a useful tool?
Naming is useful; it opens up worlds of knowledge. But it’s not the starting point. The starting point is feeling. Connection. I’m not interested in gatekeeping nature through expertise. You don’t need to know the Latin name of a bird to care about it. If you notice it, if it moves you, that’s enough to begin with.
I don’t tell people what to do. I put everything on the table. Then the reader decides.
Maybe they stand up for a tree in their colony. Maybe they listen to birds in the morning. Maybe they plant a native tree.
These are small things, but they matter. If every RWA does it, you already have a green corridor. And some people will go further, fight for forests, for the Aravallis.
You raise an interesting point about control, about how we shape parks, clean up leaf litter, and manage landscapes. Isn’t that a form of domination?
It can be. What ecologists argue for is allowing natural processes to continue.
Take leaf litter. People think it looks messy, so they remove it. But leaf litter is essential – it enriches soil, provides habitat for insects, and supports entire food chains.
Or fallen trees, people want to clear them out. But a fallen tree is alive in another way. It becomes a habitat for birds, reptiles, and insects. It’s part of the system.
The problem is excessive intervention. We want things to look neat, controlled. But nature doesn’t function that way.
What is it like to observe nature as a woman in the wild city? Paying attention to nature, then, is a form of resistance?
It is. Because the experience is fundamentally different.
A man standing by the road looking at a tree is invisible. A woman doing the same thing becomes a spectacle. She’s stared at, questioned, and sometimes harassed.
So being in these spaces requires negotiation. It requires resilience and it often requires companionship, of friends who will walk with you, share space with you. Sometimes, it tests your friendships.
There’s also a political dimension. Just being there, taking up space, is an act of resistance.
Because everything around us is designed to distract us, to pull us into cycles of consumption. Choosing to step outside, to notice a bird, to sit under a tree, that’s opting out of that system, even if only briefly.
It’s also about refusing cynicism. The world can feel overwhelming with climate change and ecological collapse, but observing something alive, something continuing, can counter that.
It’s a small act, but it matters.
Can you talk about patience as a life skill learned through nature? The book ends up feeling surprisingly hopeful. Is that intentional?
Absolutely. Birdwatching teaches you patience in a very direct way. If you’re impatient, you won’t see anything. You have to wait, without disturbing the animal. That waiting changes you and slows you down. It teaches you that not everything happens on your timeline. And I think that’s one of the most important things we lack today, the ability to wait.
You have to snatch that time and that meaning for yourself. I have also learned to say no. That’s also another adult skill. One is patience, the second is saying no.
And about hope, I wouldn’t call it hope in a simplistic sense. It’s more about choosing joy despite everything. There’s a line by Drew Lanham that I love: “Joy is the justice I give myself”. The idea that joy can be self-claimed, not granted, is powerful. I think resistance is finding your own path.
For me, being in nature is a way of claiming that joy. It’s not always comfortable. It’s hot, there are insects, there are risks. But it’s real.
You say we’re losing our sense of awe. Why does it matter?
Awe shifts you. It destabilises your sense of certainty. It reminds you that you don’t know everything. And we need that. The world we’ve built, especially in cities, is very controlled, very commercialised. Even leisure is monetised. So in that sense, nature is different as it directs our focus from consumption to experience. And that’s rare now.
Do you see individual attention translating into larger change?
Not directly, not immediately. But it builds something.
If people start caring about the tree outside their house, they might resist its removal. If a housing society allows native plants to grow instead of manicuring everything, that creates habitat.
These are small changes, but they accumulate.
At the same time, some people will take it further – advocacy, policy, activism. The point is not to prescribe action, but to create awareness from which action can emerge.
Your book acknowledges ecological loss, but it doesn’t feel paralysing. How do you balance that?
By focusing on what remains. Yes, there is loss. Yes, species are disappearing. But there is also persistence – trees growing through concrete, birds nesting in unlikely places.
That resilience is instructive. It doesn’t mean everything will be fine, but it shows that life continues in ways we might not expect.
