Most of what I build disappears into a screen. This one won't.
On the side, Roma and I are renovating our ancestral property in Kunja, in the hills of Almora, into a small homestay — Kunja Village Homestay. The idea isn't to build something new; it's to keep an old place alive and running. It's the opposite of my day job in almost every way, and that's exactly the appeal.
I'll keep the work-in-progress notes here as it comes together — this is where the renovation lives.
What software doesn't teach you
- You can't refactor a wall. Physical things are unforgiving in a way code never is. "Measure twice" stops being a metaphor.
- Hospitality is the product. Nobody remembers the floor plan. They remember how it felt to wake up there — the light, the quiet, the chai. That's the whole spec.
- Place is non-negotiable. You can move a startup. You can't move a hillside. The constraint is the character.
Before we broke ground, I took a homestay-entrepreneurship program at Swami Rama Himalayan University — a useful grounding in the hospitality and operations side that software never taught me. Turns out running a stay in the hills has its own discipline.
It's slow, hands-on, deeply offline work, and it's a good counterweight to a life mostly lived in abstractions. I'll post the occasional update here as it comes together.