In 2013, while leading one of my walks, I had my moment of inflection that words alone wouldn't save the city, I realised I needed to do something tangible.

I found a 1926 townhouse in the heart of North Calcutta, once the home of the Majumdar family, then abandoned for years. The walls needed more love than I initially anticipated but the bones were good, and there was something about the place that felt worth saving.

None of what followed was done alone. My closest friend and business partner Chris Chen came on board, designer Swarup Dutta brought the vision to life room by room, and a team of craftspeople did the kind of work that simply cannot be rushed.

It took two years to acquire and three years to restore the building to its original form and then in 2018, Calcutta Bungalow opened its doors to all.

It was one of those moments that made me realise that what felt like a very personal, very Calcutta obsession was actually speaking to something universal that people everywhere are hungry for travel that means something, that connects rather than consumes. I came back from that fellowship more convinced than ever that the work mattered.

Isa, our son, is obsessed with cricket. And so he taught himself mathematics through the game - scorecards, run rates, strike rates, averages, probability, statistics. Nobody sat him down and taught him any of it. The sport gave him numbers that actually meant something, attached to moments he actually cared about. That is what real learning looks like.

Shehrezad, our daughter, is the creative soul of the family. She reads everything she can get her hands on - fiction, history, philosophy, cookbooks. She attends workshops, makes things with her hands, draws, writes, asks questions that frankly leave us scrambling for answers.

Together, they learn by being in the world, meeting people from different walks of life, visiting places that have stories to tell, sitting with craftspeople and artists and farmers and historians and just absorbing. At 12, they have already visited 15 countries. But the travel is just one part of it. What we are really trying to do is raise humans who are curious, who are kind, who know how to learn anything because they have never been told that learning has a fixed shape.

What began as our family's private conviction has slowly grown into something larger. This is a community we are building for parents and children who are asking the same questions we asked and finding, as we did, that the answers are more liberating than frightening.

In 2024, Art Cafe became part of our family of brands. Shaheera, my wife and I came on board alongside Chris and Suman, and together with Pravesh and Yachna, brought it to Kolkata.

Two outlets in the heart of the city, each a partnership between old friends who happen to believe in the same things. Jhol momos, buckwheat crepes, flourless cakes, cheese sourced directly from the Kalimpong hills. And walls that have something to say.

When it came to us, we did not want to change it. We wanted to honour it. We renamed it Kalimpong Bungalow, not to rebrand it, but to root it more honestly in the place it belongs to. Kalimpong has a colonial past where Scottish missionaries, Tibetan traders, and Nepali communities once lived side by side, and left traces that are still visible if you know where to look. This bungalow sits inside all of that history.

My job, as always, was simple; listen to the land, learn from its people, and build something that feels like it belongs here. Warm, lived in, full of stories. Like those old Kalimpong homes that hold the memory of everyone who ever passed through them.

You may come for the mountains. You will stay for everything else.

Calcutta Rooms is our version of a home stay, but rooted in the same philosophy of slow, honest hospitality. We begin with Sen's Homestay, a lovingly kept home in the heart of South Calcutta. It will not be the last. There are too many houses in this city with too many stories still left in their walls and we intend to find them.

Through @mister.calcutta on Instagram & YouTube, I make short films about the city's Armenian community, its last Jewish families, its Chinese neighbourhood, its forgotten graveyards, its disappearing crafts. About the fact that the world's first fingerprint bureau was here. That the cure for malaria was discovered here. Calcutta is a city of firsts that somehow never got around to telling its own story loudly enough. We are trying to fix that, one video at a time, from the exact streets and doorways where these stories unfolded.

Alongside this, my team and I are building the Calcutta Creative Unit - CCU. The name is not accidental. CCU are also the three letters that have always stood for this city. Born here, shaped by everything this city has taught us about depth, about patience, about telling things straight. The market is full of agencies that chase reach, manufacture content, and measure success in vanity metrics. What it lacks is meaningful storytelling, real brand building, and the patience to see it through. CCU exists to fill that gap. We work with brands built with intention, helping them uncover their real story and bring it to the world through content, campaigns, and creativity that actually means something. We don't just grow audiences. We build communities. Calcutta taught us that. Now we want to take that to the world.