You’ve decided you want to do a thing. Watch the movie. Try the restaurant. Take a trip. And you open your phone to see who’s free, who all are in, who could come and everyone is busy or not into it or vaguely enthusiastic in the way people are enthusiastic about plans they’re not going to come for.

And so you close the phone and the thing you wanted to do quietly dies.

I know that moment because I have lived that moment. Small things and big ones. Cafes I didn’t go to. Movies I didn’t watch. Cities I didn’t visit. Trips I put off for a someday that was actually just ‘whenever someone else is ready’

I’ve been thinking about why I do this.

The honest answer is: I wasn’t really waiting to do the thing. I was waiting to be seen doing the thing.

Waiting for someone to witness the movie with me so I could talk about it after. Waiting for someone to share the meal so it counted. Waiting for a companion, not because I needed one to enjoy the thing but because I wasn’t sure the thing happened if nobody else was there.

That’s the trap.

We treat our lives like they need a spectator to be real. Like a meal alone doesn’t nourish us the same. Like a trip alone doesn’t count. Like a Sunday spent quietly, doing something small, without a witness, is somehow wasted.

But you know what’s actually wasted? Every restaurant I didn’t try because nobody was free. Every activity I didn’t try because nobody was doing it with me. Every trip I put off waiting for the right group, the right partner, the right permission slip from someone else.

You do not need one.

Here is the boring, life-changing thing nobody says clearly enough

You can just go.

Alone.

You can take yourself to the restaurant you’ve been saving and wear that pretty dress you bought for no particular reason. You can watch the movie on a Tuesday afternoon. You can walk into the cafe, order the coffee, sit by the window and not scroll, just sit. You can take the trip you’ve been waiting to take with someone by taking it without them. You can meet strangers on the way and let them be a chapter of your book.

The first time going solo will feel weird. Everyone stares (they don’t). Everyone notices you’re alone (they aren’t). You feel like you’re doing it wrong (you aren’t) and then the second time is easier, by the fifth, you’ll wonder what you were waiting for all along.

Not every experience needs a witness. Some can be just you and the thing.

But — and this is where it gets harder — being physically alone is only half of it.

The other half is being actually alone. With yourself. Without the phone. Without music playing in your ears. Without a text conversation happening in your other tab. Without your brain narrating the entire experience back to itself in 10 different versions that might have been better.

That part is much harder. Because we have spent the last decade very carefully forgetting how to do it.

Our generation has never, ever, actually been bored, not in the real sense. Every quiet moment gets filled with a scroll, a reel, a notification, a new website, a quick video call. Our attention is so subdivided we don’t remember what a full unbroken thought feels like.

And now we have AI writing our thoughts too.

I say this as someone whose job is literally to build the AI. I love what it can do but I have started to notice that my brain, unmedicated by a screen, is a place I don’t fully recognise anymore. It goes quiet the second there’s nothing to react to and that quiet is uncomfortable, restless, it seems like I’m missing out on something that I could do with this time. Which is how I know it’s important to stop and be okay with it.

Because if you never sit with yourself, you cannot know yourself. And if you cannot know yourself, you will always need someone else to tell you who you are. Which is the actual reason we can’t do things alone. It’s not that solo dinners are boring. It’s that being alone with our own thoughts is unbearable, so we bring a phone or a person or a playlist anything to fill the gap.

Solitude is a muscle and we have let it weaken too much. It has to be trained back.

Here is the truth I keep returning to: the person I want to become — the one who lives fully, travels widely, learns everything, meets everyone, tries everything — that person is not built by doing more things. She is built by being able to be completely present while doing them.

The doing is easy. The being with yourself with full attention while you do it is the whole game.

I want to leave you with the simplest possible reminder.

Everyone is waiting for the right person to come with them. The right partner. The right friend. The right group chat that actually shows up. Meanwhile the years pass and the meal you wanted to try, the experience you wanted to have, the trip you wanted to take — they wait too.

Take yourself.

Not as a consolation prize, but as the plan.

Learn to enjoy your own company. Not because you can’t find better company. You can and you will but because the version of you who can be alone with herself is the version everyone else wants to be around too. That’s not a paradox. That’s the whole thing.

The person who doesn’t need a witness is the most magnetic person in the room.

And you can start this week. With a walk. With a coffee. With a movie ticket for one.

The room only has you in it. It always has, if you’re honest.

Learn to live in it.

If you needed a nudge, take this as it 🤍

Ab kaha, janu?

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It’s such a silly sentence when you first hear it.

Until you realize how often we do exactly that

Someone gets excited about a new hobby and we call it childish

Someone loves a band we’ve never heard of and we say, “People actually listen to them?”

Someone orders pineapple on pizza, watches rom-coms on repeat, collects fridge magnets, spends hours birdwatching, gets excited over stationery, wakes up at 5AM to watch a sunrise or travels just to sit in a tiny cafe with a book!

And somehow, instead of letting them enjoy it, we feel the need to rank it, question it or laugh at it

WHY?

Not everything has to make sense to us to be meaningful to someone else.

Joy is already hard enough to find. Why make someone feel embarrassed for the things that bring them a little more of it?

The world doesn’t need fewer people getting excited over the little things.

It needs fewer people making OTHERS feel weird for it

So if something isn’t hurting anyone, let people have their “yum”

You don’t have to like it! You just don’t have to yuck it!!

Ab kaha, janu?

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He’s in his late forties maybe. He left his hometown in his twenties. He’d tell you it wasn’t planned — that he came here for another reason and something in him decided this was where he’d stay. There’s a filter coffee machine sitting at 11,500 feet because of him. He doesn’t seem to think it’s a big deal.

I keep meeting people like him on trips.

I met a couple, both IT professionals, who built a treehouse B&B at the very edge of Himachal, the point after which there’s only wilderness. They still work remotely from there, letting guests take over their kitchen just for the fun.

Then there were two people I met in Jibhi who fell so deeply in love with a hill that they built a stay right on top of it

Every one of them, if you ask, will tell you the same thing.

“I came for a trip. I never left.”

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There’s one question I keep meaning to ask them. I never do.

WHY?

Why leave a good salary and a good apartment and a good coffee shop and a life that works, for a place with a bad washroom and no consistent electricity and a road that only a jeep can climb?

Because everyone I know in Bombay, in Bangalore, in Delhi — we’ve built these tiny sealed lives. Uber to the office. Zomato at 9pm. Instagram before sleep. The conveniences pile up until they become the whole ceiling of what we think life is allowed to be.

And then you meet someone who walked out of the ceiling and you have to sit with a question you didn’t want.

What if this isn’t the daydream? What if the daydream is real, and I’m the one still asleep?

I have started to believe something and I want to say it to you as clearly as I can:

Your 20s are the window.

Not a metaphor. A real, closing window.

This is the time when you can take the midnight flight with the middle seat because it was cheap and it doesn’t ruin your back for three days. This is when a bad hostel with a shared bathroom is a story, not a health event. This is when you can dive into an ocean you have never seen, jump off a cliff toward a river flowing hard below, count the Milky Way from a village you can’t pronounce and follow a stray dog up a trail that isn’t on any map — because someone told you it goes somewhere beautiful and you have the legs and the time and the stupidity to find out if they were right.

You will not always have all three.

You will not always have the legs. You will not always have the time. You will, eventually, stop being stupid enough to say yes to things without a full plan and a return flight.

That is not a threat. That’s just what happens. And the people who traveled hard in their 20s are the ones who look back at 40 with a life — not a trauma, not a regret, a life. Stories they have collected, edges they have stood on, moments where they were fully awake in a place that was not theirs.

The point of a trip in your 20s is not to see all of a country. It is not to check the famous places off a list. It is not to make the reel.

It is to live in a demography that is not yours, in a culture that is not yours, for long enough that some of it becomes yours.

To find out why people who live in that place love it enough to have never left and to find out what it does to you to be there.

I’ll tell you the truth, I am someone who loves a safety net, always have!

I have a full-time job as a software engineer. I like the salary. I like the stability. I am not planning to quit tomorrow and open a Mysore Cafe in Leh. I’m not romanticising that life for you either — it’s harder than it looks and most people are not built for it.

But I am saying this: even if you don’t leave everything — even if you keep your job, keep your apartment, keep your city — you can still travel like it means something. You can still choose the harder trip. You can still take the flight to the place you can’t pronounce. You can still skip the resort for the hostel. Still say yes to the trek. Still eat the food you can’t identify. Still stay a day longer than the itinerary said to.

You are the youngest you will ever be right now. Reading this. In whatever chair you’re sitting in.

The trips that feel hard now are the ones you’ll be proud of at 40. The trips you take because they’re easy — the resorts, the packaged tours, the flight-and-photo-and-back-in-time-for-Monday, those blur into each other. Nobody tells stories about the all-inclusive.

They tell stories about the night the bus broke down. The stray dog who walked them home. The stranger who ran a B&B on a hill while working remotely.

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Somewhere in Himachal, two IT professionals are running a tree-house they built themselves. In Leh, a Chennai guy is pulling filter coffee at 11,500 feet. In Jibhi, a couple is falling asleep on top of a hill they cleared themselves.

None of them planned it. All of them started with one hard trip they said yes to in their 20s.

I keep them in my head as a reminder of what is possible and of how the possible starts.

You do not have to build a tree-house in Himachal.

But you do have to start.

Go now. Go hard. Go while it’s still hard.

Ab kaha, Janu?

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There are places you visit and there are places that visit you back.

I did not expect Ladakh to be the second kind. I had a list. I had a plan. I had booked the flights and the stays and made peace with the altitude sickness.

What I hadn’t planned for was the silence. Or the eternal flame. Or the boulder shaped like a saint’s back. Or the hill behind the hill, where the sun went down and something in me ignited.

Let me tell you how my first 48 hours in Ladakh actually went and Why Every itinerary. Every reel. Every Travel agent was wrong.

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We landed in Leh early morning off a red-eye. Dropped bags at the hotel and instead of resting, which is what you’re supposed to do at 11,500 feet, we went hunting for breakfast. Found a tiny dhaba down the road. One bhaiya, running the whole thing — Cook, server, cashier, greeter (you’ll find such places a lot in Ladakh and believe me no where else will you get such graceful welcome and home cooked meals). He made us mixed parathas and ginger-lemon tea and that was one of the best meals I ate in nine days in Ladakh.

Then we slept. Curtains drawn, six hours straight. Which is boring to write about but essential to do — because Leh sits at 11,500 feet and if you don’t rest on Day 1, every day after collects the debt.

We woke up in the late afternoon to a soft, golden Leh and headed straight to the market.

Leh Market at that hour is the best introduction to Ladakh you can ask for. Cobbled streets, prayer flags, tiny shops full of things you didn’t know you wanted. I picked up an unstitched embroidered three-piece from a store I couldn’t find again the next day, probably the best pashmina suit I’ve ever laid eyes on. Had Walnut fudge from Moonlight — honey, kesar, no chocolate, the kind that makes you close your eyes for a second. And momos and stuffed garlic bread from Nathu’s. (I’ll die on this hill: it’s the best garlic bread I’ve had in India.)

And then, Shanti Stupa for sunset.

Every list will tell you Shanti Stupa. Listen to them. The whole city stretches out below, the last of the sun catches the snow-clad peaks and the city lights come on one by one as pink becomes purple becomes navy. Sit through all of it. Don’t leave when the sun goes down, stay until the stars come out. That’s a kind of peace I haven’t found anywhere else!

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Most itineraries will tell you to rush through Shanti Stupa and head to the light and sound show at Zorawar Fort right after. Skip it. Sit at Shanti a little longer instead — jaaha ho vaaha ka maaza lo!!!

And what if the light and sound show turns out to be dhasu? Well this sunset is dhasu too. And you can’t miss both.

(If you know, you know. If you don’t — that’s a YJHD dialogue reworked in my head. You’ll see me do this often.)

End the night at Lehvenda Cafe. I’m telling you now, in writing, in a public place: their paneer butter masala is the best I have ever eaten. I went back twice on this trip alone. Order it.

Day 2 is the day everyone underrates. On paper, it looks like a filler day — Magnetic Hill, Sangam, a couple of monasteries, back to base. Not the drama of a high Pakistan bunkers. Not the postcard of Pangong.

But Day 2 is the day Leh actually shows you what it is.

Start at Mysore Cafe, because South Indian filter coffee at 11,500 feet is a joke that turns out to be delicious. Then head to Hall of Fame, which everyone will describe as “just an Army museum” and everyone will be wrong.

Hall of Fame sits inside a live cantonment. Army jeeps patrolling, aircraft overhead, drill grounds active. Inside, you walk through Ladakh’s entire story — the dynasties that shaped it from the 1500s onward, the migrations that built its identity, the wars fought here against China and Pakistan and Outside this, an akhand diya — an eternal flame — burns in front of the Ladakh Battalion flag, for every soldier who fought and did not come home.

Goosebumps.

I stood in front of it for a while. That was the moment I first understood the ground I was standing on. The power it holds, the courage it carries and how that quietly makes the beauty of this place hit ten times harder.

Then, Gurudwara Pathar Sahib — The story goes that a demon once lived on the hill where the gurudwara now stands, terrorizing the villagers below. When Guru Nanak Dev Ji stopped there to meditate, the demon tried to kill him — rolled a huge boulder down the hillside, aimed at his back. But when the stone touched Guru Nanak Ji, it softened like wax, took the imprint of his body, and stopped.

The boulder is still there. No cap. You can see the imprint.

Buddhists in Ladakh revere Guru Nanak Ji too — they call him Nanak Lama — which is why the gurudwara is maintained jointly by Sikhs, Buddhists, and the Indian Army.

Wear the orange cloth they give you. Eat langar slowly if it’s your first time — because that will stay with you. Everyone is welcome. Everyone eats the same food.

Then it’s time to visit the Indian Grand Canyon nobody’s telling you about — Sangam. Where the Indus and Zanskar meet, grey water and turquoise water sitting side by side, refusing to blend. This is where I finally noticed that the mountains around me were not brown. They were dark pink, violet, blue, olive green.

Ladakh is a place where you need to sit everywhere. Just sit. Look around, try to take it all in because your camera is not going to do justice to any of it. Lock the view into your eyes instead.

Seven kilometers from Sangam sits Tsogsti — home to the world’s highest altitude bungee jump. And if that jump doesn’t turn into the clearest moment of your life, come back to me. I’ll take the heat.

I stood at the edge and looked down. The Zanskar river rushing hard below, mountains of every size and colour crowding in on every side and something in me quietly came to a realisation —

Travel does not just show you places. It shows you the version of yourself that shows up in them.

The one who says yes before her brain catches up. The one who stands at edges she never thought she’d stand at. The one who does the thing anyway, ready or not.

This is what the good trips do. They don’t just widen your map. They widen you.

There is also a specific kind of quiet that finds you when you are around views like this. When the sky is bigger than your problems and the river doesn’t know your name and the mountains have been here for longer than any thought you’ve ever had, think about it!

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The day is not over yet, there was one more thing. “The Thing” you might say after experiencing it.

Nobody talks about Namgyal Tsemo. It’s a short, steep climb behind Leh, up to a monastery so small and quiet that when we reached the top, we were the only people there. No tour groups. No selfie sticks. No one asking us to move.

(A quick note if you want to go: the full hike starts from Shey Palace and takes about an hour. If you’re short on time or breath, you can drive up to the viewpoint and climb the last 100-odd steps. Either way, you’ll earn the view.)

The monastery itself is a soft ochre and red, prayer flags stretched across the hillside like laundry lines to somewhere else. We took our shoes off. We sat down.

The sun went down over Leh in complete silence. Mountains turning bright orange. The wind slightly playful, greens waving us hello. Monastery bells ringing somewhere behind us. No music. No voiceover. Just the sun rays coming and going like flickering hope of human mind

I had come to Ladakh to see things. I hadn’t come to be seen by any of them.

Everyone tells you the first two days are just the warm-up. But they’re the whole trip.

The rest of Ladakh is what happens after Leh has already met you.

Namgyal Tsemo saw me.

That is how Leh gets you.

Through an eternal flame you didn’t plan to stop at. Through a saint’s imprint on a stone. Through a Tibetan food you would fly back for. Through a hill behind another hill, you almost didn’t hike.

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Two days is the minimum. Not the ideal — I added a third because I couldn’t get enough of Leh. But even in 48 hours, Leh will do this to you. If you let it.

(I’ve mapped every stop from these 48 hours plus the full nine-day Ladakh route in my guide — linked at the end.)

I have started saying this to people who ask why I travel: I take my big thoughts to big places, so they can feel small.

Leh is exactly the kind of big place that does that.

If you’re planning the full nine-day Ladakh trip — Leh, Nubra, Turtuk, Pangong, Hanle, and Tso Moriri — I’ve put together a deep-dive guide with every stay, every drive, every meal, and every hidden gem I found. Including a lake nobody talks about that I’m still thinking about six weeks later.

Get the full 9-day Ladakh guide → Ladakh Full deep-dive Guide

Ab kaha, Janu!

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I’ve never been someone who can sleep on a plane. For years I thought this was a flaw. Everyone around me knocked out cold, and me? wide awake at 2am, staring at the map on the screen like it owed me something.

Now I think it’s a boon.

Because a flight is one of the only places I know that forces me to sit still. Actually still. No producing, no ticking things off, no proving anything. Just — be. Take it all in for once.

For a restless person like me, that’s not easy to find at ground level.

And, Night flights are the best of it. You’re somewhere over a city that isn’t yours, watching darkness broken only by a scatter of lights — a road, a stadium, someone’s living room at 3am. It’s the closest thing I know to real quiet.

I took the red-eye from Mumbai to Delhi, then boarded a 5:30 AM flight to Leh, with the sky still dark and just a scatter of red and orange coming through

It started like any other flight. Monsoon fog. Cloudy. Gloomy. I remember thinking, “of course, the one time I take a sunrise flight to the Himalayas, we’re going to fly through clouds the entire way.”

Twenty minutes in, things turned!

First thing I saw was a rainbow. On the clouds. Which obviously was beautiful. But then I kept looking, and it kept going. It didn’t stop. It curved all the way back on itself. A full-circle rainbow. Sitting on top of a mountain range like a halo someone had left there.

Not once in my wildest imagination did I think that was a real thing.

And then, like the whole sky had been waiting for its cue, the clouds started moving. Fast. Peeling back like curtains. Like someone offstage had said okay, it’s time to reveal the main character. And there it was — the first snow-clad peak. Then another. Then the entire range.

Everyone who has ever said the Delhi–Leh flight is one of the most beautiful in the world was right. Because what do you mean, in one window, in one hour, you get the Himalayas, dry brown mountains straight out of the Grand Canyon, glacial lakes the color of a broken sapphire and a full-circle rainbow with a halo on top?

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Even the runway at Leh is beautiful. I never thought I’d say that about a runway.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to.

I’m a restless person.

I don’t stop easily.

I’m always making, asking, chasing the next thing.

And flights are the one place that make me stop without asking my permission.

They put me in a metal tube, take away my WiFi and say — just look. Just consume, for once. Just be.

If that’s the trade for never being able to sleep on a plane, I’ll take it every time.

Field notes: Delhi → Leh, sunrise flight, monsoon season (July). If you can, book a right-side window seat — that’s where the Himalayas open up. And do not sleep. Set alarms. Pinch yourself. Whatever it takes.

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