Manish is a phenomenal storyteller, who uses his lived experiences to talk about the people and ecology of the islands with extreme clarity. Our recording with Manish ran into hours, and so I'll be bringing his voice to you in two parts. In the first epsiode featuring Manish, The Thing About Discovering The Islands, he talks to us about how he stumbled into the Andamans nearly three decades ago, what it was about the place that got him involved in several projects there, how he came to know and live with the local communities intimately, introduces us to the who's who of early ecological and anthropological work in the islands, and provides us with a window into how he began working with restoration.