Cycle Yatra, Across Rajasthan, 2015
Overview
• Journey: One-month solo cycle yatra across Rajasthan (2015)
• Mode: Traveled without carrying money, packaged food, or digital gadgets — relying on trust, community, and simplicity
Core Intentions
• To slow down and listen to the inner calling beyond the structures of career and success
• To explore the difference between hard work and heart work
• To build personal resilience for a lifelong journey of social and systemic transformation
Core Practices
• Trust-based travel and hospitality
• Deep listening to self, land, people, and silence
• Practicing humility, vulnerability, and interdependence
Impact
• Strengthened emotional, physical, and relational resilience
• Clarified personal vision toward regenerative, dignity-centered work
• Prepared internal founadtion for larger healing journeys like 52 Parindey and Travellers’ University
After completing my work at Jaipur Rugs in March 2015, a deeper restlessness began to surface, a sense that the next steps of my journey could not be found within structures I already knew. There was more I needed to listen to, not just in the world around me, but within myself.
In response, I undertook a month-long Cycle Yatra across Rajasthan, traveling without money, without packaged food, without gadgets, on a simple bicycle. I chose vulnerability deliberately: stripping away conveniences and protections to listen more honestly to the land, to the people, and to the stirrings of my own heart.
This Yatra was not motivated by achievement or endurance, but by inquiry:
• What does it mean to move at the pace of life rather than the pace of systems?
• What is my heart's work, beyond hard work?
• How can I serve the people and places I care about with the best of my abilities and what abilities, mindsets, and resilience must I cultivate for that?
Each day was an encounter with both external realities and internal thresholds:
accepting hospitality from strangers, depending on the goodwill of communities, learning to trust slowness, discomfort, uncertainty.
Listening became a way of moving — listening to the silence between villages, the stories shared over simple meals, the landscapes scarred by development, the quiet wisdom of living traditions.
This journey became a crucible for building resilience — emotional, physical, and relational — preparing me for the longer, more uncertain path of regenerative work ahead.
It reaffirmed a simple but profound truth: that real service cannot be imposed from above; it must emerge from deep listening, mutual trust, and an ongoing practice of humility.
The Cycle Yatra marked a turning point, the beginning of my commitment to walk alongside communities, not as an expert or a savior, but as a companion in the shared work of reimagining futures rooted in dignity, justice, and interbeing.