I grew up in India.
Then I learned to see it
from the outside.
Living in Oman, learning German and spending years guiding people from different cultures gave me a rather unusual way of looking at the place I call home.
This is me
It started with questions
Curiosity came first. Tourism came later.
I grew up in a family that travelled often, and I was fascinated not just by the places we visited but by the people we met along the way. Whenever I saw foreigners, I wanted to talk to them. Where were they from? What was life like there? What did they think of India?
That curiosity is probably why learning German felt so natural. It opened a door to a part of the world I’d been curious about for years. I joined a hospitality club, hosted people from different countries in my own home, and learned that some of the best conversations happen when two strangers sit down together and start asking each other questions.
A language is more than a way of speaking. It’s another way of seeing.
During a tour in 2018
Then came Oman
I became a guide in Oman.
For someone from India, Oman is both familiar and wonderfully different. In the beginning I noticed the differences everywhere — how people lived, ate, welcomed guests, understood the world. I was looking at Oman as an outsider, much the way visitors sometimes look at India.
Then, slowly, Oman stopped feeling foreign.
After several years there, it became a second home. I began understanding not just the places I was showing people, but the culture behind them — and what it feels like to arrive somewhere with your own assumptions, and discover that the things that seem strange usually have a perfectly good reason for being the way they are.
Understanding another culture rarely happens all at once. It happens in small corrections to the assumptions you arrived with.
Some things become visible only when you leave home
Coming back changes how you see home.
I returned to India, then went back to Oman in 2022, and back to India again in 2025 — years spent moving between two countries, two cultures, two ways of seeing.
Growing up somewhere makes a lot of it invisible. You stop noticing things because they feel normal — until someone from another culture asks, “Why do you do that?” and you realise there was something worth explaining all along.
Guiding has given me thousands of those moments. Some over something significant, most over something small — a question asked at lunch, in a car, at a market. They’ve made me increasingly interested in the India that doesn’t appear in a brochure: the habits, contradictions, hospitality, humour and everyday life.
So, why write?
That’s what I want to explore here. These days, it also means helping people design their own journey through India or Oman — and sometimes coming along for it myself.
I write about India as someone who grew up here. But I also write as someone who has lived elsewhere, spent years working with people from different cultures, and knows what it’s like to be the outsider.
What you’ll find here
India
The country I grew up in — familiar, complicated, contradictory and endlessly interesting.
People
The behaviour, relationships and interactions that often say more than a monument does.
Places
India, Oman and other places encountered along the way.
Ideas
Thoughts that don’t fit neatly into a destination or category.
I know India. I know Oman. And I know something about what it feels like to stand between cultures, trying to make sense of both.
I don’t have all the answers. I just find the questions interesting.
If any of this makes you curious about experiencing India or Oman for yourself — message me on WhatsApp.