My First Story

My wife and I moved home and practice from Mumbai to Alibag in 1999. I wanted a better quality of life for ourselves and our team. It is now 26 years and we have made our carbon footprint almost zero. We initiated the first farm to fork restaurant for a couple of years and established an architecture practice that attracted several people from Mumbai to making second homes here. A thousand people must have worked on and off in direct and indirect jobs developed by us. An entire spectrum of local contractors evolved with us.

We blended into the local community by offering to build a temple and donate an ambulance. We soon transferred our passports, aadhar registrations etc. and became citizens of Alibag. Our move attracted so much media attention that i had to christen Alibag as the Hamptons of Mumbai!

We sponsored community iniatives through an art auction in our home and later on we built an art museum dedicated to our guru the late Padmabhushan Dashrath Patel. We have employed local youth and trained them to become architects, interior designers, furniture designers and more. We work closely with our panchayat and participated actively during Covid for managing vaccinations as well as self protection gear, to enabling estranged temporary workers. Several schools and colleges send their students to us for motivational talks.

We still run a furniture workshop and showroom employing in total about 75 people directly. Almost all of us walk or cycle to work. We all lead non stressful lives and live a green yet effective life close to nature.

The purpose of this write up is only to encourage others to believing in themselves and making life changing moves that are ideologically rich and existentially enabling at the same time.