It was a cold autumn day in 2015, when I decided to get a one way ticket back to India. I had just gotten through to the final round of interviews with McKinsey in London, deciding between a career in investment banking or management consulting. I had already done 2 months in Barclays Capital, but deep down - I just couldn't see myself living that lifestyle. So I quit.

I literally just left everything in between, to seek one thing. To seek the answers that my soul yearned beyond my textbooks; to seek out the spiritual truths of myself.

It was in 2017 that I bought my first camera. I always wanted to share my travels, but that was when I decided to make it my life and work. The universe took me to Thailand and Bali, where I discovered the niche spiritual communities, shamanic plant medicines and healing modalities that opened up entirely new worlds. I made the tiny island of Koh Phangan my home for months, with an equal balance of partying and spiritual risk-taking.

Across the years, I have hitchhiked barefoot across Eastern Europe, climbed up the most dangerous stairway in Hawaii in the middle of the night, danced for 3 days without a pause in psytrance festivals, made a ton of mistakes, lost my soul in toxic relationships, discovered it again with nature's healing, swam naked in waterfalls and always, always tried to create a better world with my platform.

Everything changed in 2020, on that one day in Koh Phangan where the skies were grey, and people were scurrying back to their countries. I remember that last day on the beach, knowing it would be some time before I came back to my favourite place in the world (well, we have a lot of favourite places).

But during that year, like many of us, my awareness about what was happening in the world expanded. The ancient Vedic civilisation that I had taken for granted, was crumbling. And to face that truth, the truth of centuries of Hindus being erased, persecuted; the ancestral trauma and the utter oblivion of new age spirituality towards caring about our survival stirred me into something deeper.

In 2022, I started hosting my first trips. Kashi became my permanent home, where I have lived until now. This period of my life was one of the most spiritually intense. If previously my journey was about free flowing wild exploration (which was invaluable), this was about expanding my knowledge and deeper connection the deities. Kashi Vishwanath, as we say, chooses you.

By 2024, I was starting to get frustrated with a lot of the problems of Indian society and Kashi. One of the main deterrents to foreign travellers to these ancient sites is safety and proper space holding. Yes on the one hand, India is special because it throws up all the issues of unconscious capitalism in your face. Europe keeps it under an aesthetic veneer.

But there was no doubt that unconscious tourism, haphazard development and lack of basic awareness had quickly eroded our most important Mokṣa Purī. As the issues piled on, I just couldn't escape. I couldn't take a flight to Bali and eat in a nice healthy organic cafe, knowing that the indigenous people who were protecting these ancient traditions and holding on by a thread didn't have access to pure food. That the temples didn't have access to the most essential things that were destroyed through neo-colonisation and colonisation.

Hence birthed my Kashi Sevā initiative where I provide organic A2 Vedic ghee and offerings in Kashi's temples; and arrange Yagyas (vedic rituals) for the protection of dharma and ecology. If you want to understand more about that, you can read that separately. But let's get back to the story.

The story of a traveller, who was just wanting to explore - but ended up discovering an ancient world that never left. The seeker that was just searching for a home, and found it in the divine mother. The activist who wanted to change the world and found the answers in the deep wisdom of these sacred traditions.