It was March of 2021—the last day of our workation. I woke up in my dorm bed to the sound of people packing their bags to check out. I bid them farewell while yawning, lay back down, and suddenly remembered: I neither had a return ticket, nor a plan to go back home.

Cut to 2020—the world was in a state of peak uncertainty. India probably had the largest and strictest lockdowns in the world, impacting 1.3 billion people due to Covid-19. I was one of them, stuck at home with my parents in Mumbai.

The first few days swept by, but slowly, work, college, and the internship kept piling up. I wanted to work on everything. I ended up working 15 hours a day, sleeping at 7 a.m. and waking up at 12 p.m. I barely got 5 hours of sleep each day. I couldn’t step out at all. The Mumbai summer didn’t make it any better—and the air conditioning slowly gave up. I was starting to feel burnt out (literally).

One day, while attending a college lecture on my phone, I tried booting up my laptop to submit some Google Summer of Code (GSoC) work. It wouldn’t start. I was anxious about missing a milestone—it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. None of the Apple Care stores were open. I had to wait for restrictions to ease and had no choice but to take a step back.

Over the next few weeks, I began rethinking what kind of life I wanted to live. Did I want to be someone constantly under work pressure? Someone who never had time for themselves? Someone stuck in one place forever?

Writing this now, while in a similar grind cycle. Life changed then. Will it change now?

Back to Rishikesh in 2021, lying on that dorm bed, something in me cracked open. Maybe it was the burnout, maybe the stillness of lockdown, or maybe just the realization that no one was coming to pull me out of this mess—I had to do it myself. So I didn’t book a return ticket. I just… stayed. You can just do things, you know?

Some of my coworkers and I were having lunch at a restaurant overlooking the Ganga. They slowly started to find cabs for their flight back. In the end, there were just three of us left: me, Nishanth, and our CTO, Vikram. I didn’t feel like going home—I had a feeling COVID would peak again in the summer, and I couldn’t be stuck. So, with no plan, Nishanth and I drove with Vikram to Chandigarh.

That was the start of it all. We listened to techno on the way, syncing with the street lights. I discovered classic rock. We had the best paratha of our lives at a random dhaba on the way—something I haven’t been able to find around the world since.

We didn’t plan anything, obviously. We just heard there was a bus going to Kasol and figured—why not? It sounded chill, the air was cooler, and honestly, anywhere with mountains and pine trees was good enough for me at that point.

At the time, I had no idea what I was doing. I was just going with the flow. I didn’t have a plan, didn’t want to make this a lifestyle. Nothing was thought out. I just wanted to escape the Mumbai summer heat.

Eventually, this became something else entirely—a new kind of living. One where I was no longer planning for the next milestone, but instead asking: “Where do I want to wake up tomorrow?”

That was the beginning. Not of a big dramatic lifestyle shift, but of tiny decisions that slowly peeled me away from the life I thought I was supposed to live.

I still remember getting off that rickety bus, slightly dazed from the winding roads and sleep-deprived after an overnight ride. But the second I smelled the pine trees and saw the Parvati River flowing beside the trail, something in me slowed down.

I didn’t call myself a “nomad” or a “backpacker” then. I didn’t even know I was becoming one. I was just someone following curiosity, weather, Wi-Fi, and gut feeling. But over time, something shifted. I realized I could work from anywhere. That I didn’t need a fixed base to feel grounded. That I didn’t like routine. That movement could be medicine.

There’s no perfect checklist.
Just one small decision at a time.