A Journey Seeking Clarity and Building Foundations

I did not begin my legal education with a clear picture of where I wanted to be. In many ways, I was and still am a student of science. Unlike many students drawn to law, who are motivated by curiosity about legal systems, fairness, institutions, and how decisions are made when interests collide, law was a difficult choice for me. It required me to decode the logic in legislation and understand the science in it. Law was not a language I spoke fluently at first; it was something I had to learn to listen to.

My years at CUSAT reflected this uncertainty. Rather than following a fixed trajectory, I found myself exploring different spaces, academic research, student initiatives, competitions and legal aid work without a clear sense of how they would eventually connect. The Maritime Club became one such space. Discussions there moved beyond textbooks into questions of shipping, fisheries, port operations, environmental responsibility, and regulatory gaps. The Legal Aid Clinic offered something different: exposure to law at its most immediate and human, where clarity mattered for access and fairness. These experiences did not provide direction overnight, but they helped me understand that law operates within systems far larger than itself.

What shaped my path was not speed or ambition, but a slow, often uncomfortable and draining process of seeking clarity. 

Without reservation, it was my mentors, particularly Dr. Binu Mole K, who played a decisive role during this period. They did not push me to specialise early or chase visibility. Instead, they encouraged patience: to learn deeply, observe carefully, engage consistently, understand what truly mattered to me, and resist the pressure to appear certain before I was ready.

Family and friends, often removed from legal or maritime circles, offered a different kind of clarity: perspective. Their questions were simple and sometimes disarming: “What does this work actually change and will it support your living?” And they helped me remain honest about my motivations.

Although sustainability as a science and practice had been deeply embedded in me since my high school, it was only gradually, through exposure rather than intention, that the intersection between maritime law and sustainability entered my field of vision. 

In emerging fields such as maritime law, sustainability and ESG, clarity often feels like a luxury. The regulatory landscape is evolving rapidly, institutions are under pressure to “move fast,” and young professionals are encouraged to position themselves early. Yet my experience has been that moving without clarity of purpose, values, and limits can lead to compliance that is technically correct but substantively hollow.

Sustainability and ESG have become powerful professional magnets. They promise relevance, global engagement, and moral urgency. In maritime law, this pull is particularly strong. Decarbonisation targets, technological advancements, regulatory reforms, and shifting commercial expectations mean that sustainability is no longer peripheral. Early on, I felt the pressure to align myself quickly: to earn credentials, attend forums, and speak the language fluently.

What I did not yet have was clarity about the role I wanted to play within this space. Was I interested in policy design, compliance advisory, dispute resolution, or corporate governance? Was sustainability, for me, a technical specialisation, a practice principle or an ethical lens through which I approached legal work more broadly? Without answers to these questions, it was easy to confuse activity with direction.

The risk here is subtle. We learn frameworks without questioning their intent, cite standards without understanding their limits, and treat sustainability as an add-on rather than a governing principle. Speed creates the appearance of engagement, but not necessarily impact.

This understanding deepened during my time at Swansea. Exposure to core maritime law, comparative legal systems, rigorous academic debate, and peers from diverse jurisdictions revealed how partial any single perspective can be. Maritime law, as a niche, places you in a challenging position: what career paths are available, where do you begin, and how do you navigate them? I do not have a definitive answer. But it helps to seek clarity. With an appetite for risk, I chose to explore beyond my core modules and delved into Oil and Gas Law to research green shipping, and sustainability in maritime law appeared less as a settled concept and more as a negotiated one, reshaping maritime trade, insurance and technology but shaped by geography, economics, and institutional capacity. 

Swansea helped me see that clarity is not about confidence alone, but about being able to locate one’s work within a wider system of competing priorities. 

The same lesson emerged through participation in international forums, including engagement with the IMO. Being present in those spaces was humbling. Policy discussions revealed how slow and negotiated progress often is, and how easily ambitious language can outpace implementation. It also became clear that law operates alongside political compromise, technical constraints, and commercial realities. From that vantage point, sustainability in the maritime industry, viewed through the core principles of maritime law, stopped feeling like an abstract ideal and began to look like a series of difficult, imperfect choices.

Parallel involvement in Maritime Law Society and organising academic and professional events further taught me that leadership in legal spaces is often quiet, relational, and grounded in credibility, innovation and flexibility rather than certainty. It heightened my curiosity to explore the scale and precision involved in maritime crafts and shipping, and to experience that complexity firsthand.

Taken together, these experiences and achievements reshaped how I think about learning and practice, but another dimension of clarity became unavoidable: the need to attend to one’s personal life and inner stability. Exposure to high-performing peers and fast-moving fields brought with it a sense of imposter syndrome, the feeling of being present in rooms where one is still learning how to belong. 

Attending to one’s personal life, I realised, is as important as intellectual preparation, without which even meaningful work risks becoming unsustainable.

I have come to see academic and professional life not as parallel tracks, but as spaces that increasingly inform one another. While they differ in responsibility, scope, and the demands they place on time, the expectation that academic inquiry engage meaningfully with industry has made this overlap both necessary and generative. 

My own academic journey was not meticulously planned; it unfolded through exposure rather than deliberate design. In retrospect, I feel no regret in that uncertainty, only a quiet appreciation for how it allowed me to move between academia and practice, and to see collaboration between the two as a meaningful way of creating impact beyond what either can achieve alone. As I continue to find my footing, with little certainty but growing clarity, I would like to see more centres of learning develop around such collaboration, where inquiry and practice inform one another in sustained and practical ways, and I would be glad to be part of such spaces, contributing to work that is thoughtful, grounded, and capable of driving change where it matters.

Going forward, professional practice brought these reflections into sharper focus. Previously as an independent legal and sustainability consultant and now working at Global Feeder Shipping, where trade, operations, and law converge, sustainability and ESG ceased to be conceptual discussions and became embedded in contracts, claims, liability frameworks, compliance obligations, and operational decision-making. 

It became clear that clarity before compliance is not an abstract preference, but a practical necessity. Legal advice does not exist in isolation. Decisions about sustainability affect timelines, costs, and relationships. Being clear about what the law can realistically achieve and where it must work in partnership with technical and commercial expertise has been one of the most important adjustments in my thinking. 

As a maritime lawyer, I have had to reconcile the fact that sustainability is not always the centre of the mandate, even though it remains a central concern for me. Much of the work requires being a pedantic lawyer protecting commercial interests, facilitating business, and managing disputes. Alongside this, I have learned that sustainability cannot be confined to professional labels alone; it must also be reflected in how one works, lives, and engages with others. Over time, I have come to call myself an Ocean Steward and I see that the work is not only about specialising in sustainability, but about quietly embedding it into broader legal and commercial practice, and influencing decisions and behaviours in small, consistent ways so that it becomes a way of working rather than a separate role.

Looking across my academic journey, leadership roles, mentorship, international exposure, and professional practice, the connecting thread has been alignment rather than acceleration. Each stage required pausing to reassess not how fast I could move, but whether I understood why I was moving at all. For me, meaningful work has always mattered more than momentum, and impact has depended on taking that pause seriously.

For young professionals navigating law, sustainability, or global careers, clarity is often framed as something to achieve early. My experience suggests the opposite. Clarity develops through accumulation of experiences, mistakes, conversations, and quiet reassessments. It requires resisting the urge to present oneself as fully formed, especially in fields that are themselves still evolving.

Foundations, by their nature, are rarely visible. They are built in reading beyond what is required, in admitting uncertainty, in listening to people outside one’s discipline, and in choosing coherence over convenience. In maritime law, sustainability and ESG, where urgency is real and narratives are compelling, clarity is not a delay to progress. It is what allows progress to be honest, grounded, and lasting. In this sense, lawyers do not merely follow innovation; we help shape it by creating the regulatory impetus for responsible change.

I remain at an early stage of this journey, and many questions remain unresolved. But if there is one principle that has endured across institutions and roles, it is this: before compliance, before credentials, and before speed, clarity matters. The urge to seek it matters most. It shapes not only what we do, but who we become in the process.

Key Takeaways

• Clarity is built slowly, not declared early: Direction often comes from accumulated experiences, reflection, and reassessment—not instant certainty.

• Mentorship shapes depth over visibility: The right mentors encourage patience, learning, and internal alignment instead of rushing into specialisation.

• Sustainability requires intent, not just language: ESG can become performative when frameworks are adopted without understanding limits, trade-offs, or purpose.

• Exposure reveals complexity behind “fast narratives”: International policy spaces highlight how negotiated and imperfect real progress is.

• Personal stability is part of professional sustainability: Imposter syndrome and pressure are real; inner stability protects long-term meaning and endurance.

• Impact comes from alignment, not acceleration: Foundations are built through coherence, discipline, and consistency—often quietly and invisibly.

Curator's Note

Some journeys begin with certainty. Others begin with curiosity, discomfort, and the willingness to stay with questions longer than feels comfortable. In this reflective piece, Rekhil traces how clarity is built slowly—through mentors, systems, lived exposure, and honest reassessment. A reminder that foundations are not always visible, but they shape everything that follows.

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