Scoop a spade through the soil beneath your feet and you could reveal eye-popping, fantastical proofs of creatures that existed a hundred, thousand, million or even a billion years before you.

The book Indica -- A deep natural history of the Indian subcontinent with its vivid illustrations and lucid prose, slices through India’s mountains, rivers, rocks and fossils to reveal the intricate layers of India’s natural history.

In this interview, Pranay talks about the inspiration for Indica, his mentors, the crisis facing geological monuments in India and the recent push for conservation of these relics.