A pair of mud-caked shoes at a Goa music festival turned into Clean Kicks, the cleaning and restoration business Devarsh and Akash built from a bathroom. They have quietly grown a sustainability venture by helping people hold on to the things they love a little longer.
This edition introduces the Linchpins who have taken uncharted paths to define the shape of their work, and reflects on what that choice costs along the way.
Volume 5 of Linchpin Magazine is here. This, our first edition of 2026, is about changemakers. The people willing to decide, quietly and repeatedly, not to be the ones who look away.
Jonah built Zeroposro on the belief that sustainability begins with refusing the single-use convenience that has become normal in Goa. His work as a zero-waste storekeeper and local food advocate reflects a stubborn commitment to keeping his childhood fields from being paved over, one grain at a time.
Neda turned her experience of pandemic motherhood into a calling, creating digital spaces where pregnant working women can be vulnerable without being invisible. Her research and interventions embody a quiet insistence that maternal mental health cannot be an individual responsibility when the systems around women demand the impossible.
Durgesh built Hybrid Internet Services on a simple truth: that connectivity is not a luxury but a basic right, even at the edge of the world. His work as an internet pioneer embodies a quiet determination to bridge the digital divide one wireless signal at a time, connecting remote communities to the possibilities of the modern world.
Yogesh Maitreya built Panthers Paw Publication on a simple premise: that caste-annihilating ideas must find their way into the world without seeking permission from institutions designed to keep them out. His work as publisher and writer embodies a refusal to be flattened, creating space for voices that dominant caste society would rather silence.
Hannah Lynn built find a protest not as a tech company but as an act of care, creating infrastructure that helps people find each other when the world tries to keep them apart. Her work reflects a quiet certainty that collective action begins when we lower the barriers between wanting to help and actually showing up.
For Sandeep Mehto, the journey from student to teacher has never been about creating an organisation. It has been about creating a conscience — and teaching others how to listen when it calls.
For him, movement is the language that taught him resilience and showed him he belonged. In teaching others to move, Reza “Baba” Massah has built something that stands still only long enough to inspire the next step forward.
