Most of us know someone who gave up a promising career and moved home from a busy metro to a small hill station, seaside town or village, leaving behind traffic jams, deadlines, bad eating habits and everything else that brings on the blues in the big city. For the rest, a shift to the simple life is a part of that clutch of wishes that may never come true, like becoming an astronaut.
Ashish Arora is part of the tribe that made the dream come true, and transplanted his life from the Capital to a hillside town in Uttarakhand. “Of the 100 people who visit us, 70 always say that we are living the life of their dreams. Of these, at least 30 ask how they should plan a small town move, five actually get down to it, but finally, it is just one or two who actually make it,” says Arora, who moved to Mukteshwar, Uttarakhand, from New Delhi in 2004 and now runs Himalayan Village resort, Sonapani. The reason only one or two actually pack their bags and make the change is because a drastic move to the outback takes much more than a well-laid-out plan. We picked up some lessons from those who went ahead and live the dream.
Mumbai to Peth village, Dahanu taluk, Maharashtra
Till just a few years ago, Venkat Iyer, a 41-year-old ex-IBM project-manager-turned-organic- farmer, never thought catching rides with truck drivers would become a regular commuting feature in his life. But nowadays, he finds it cheaper to thumb a ride from Mumbai (he gets picked up from the Western Express Highway) to his farm in Peth village, Dahanu taluk (a couple of hours’ from Mumbai), where he spends most of his time. “I have a Maruti Zen parked in Mumbai, but it is expensive to drive down regularly. Besides, it is safer to hitch a ride with a trucker than zip on the highway, and definitely faster,” says Iyer, who bought a 4.5 acre farm three years ago after he and his journalist wife, Meena Menon, 44, decided that they should move out of Mumbai.