Shayaan Patel is a high schooler from Ahmedabad who got interested in Gujarat's history through an unlikely route: fieldwork, not textbooks. Working on grassroots water conservation projects across the state taught him something most people miss, that these old structures were never just stone, they were built by people solving real problems, and forgetting them means forgetting how clever those solutions were. That single realization is the seed Echoes of Gujarat grew from.