Mumbai to the Mountains and Back: Working Remotely Across Five States

Somewhere between Chopta and Sari, my "office" was a wooden guesthouse balcony with one bar of signal and a view that made the lag genuinely hard to be annoyed about. That's roughly when it stopped being a trip with some work squeezed in, and started being work that happened to move through some incredible places.

The route

Mumbai to Delhi, then north into the hills — Haridwar, up to Chopta, further into Sari, back down through Roorkee. Then a long swing east: Varanasi, Kolkata, Varanasi again, and finally back to Mumbai. Five states, a laptop, and a phone hotspot doing most of the heavy lifting.

What actually works out there

• Treat spotty internet as a design constraint, not an excuse. I started committing more often and in smaller chunks, and leaning on things that work offline-first — the same instinct that makes for more resilient software, it turns out.
• Protect one real deep-work block a day, non-negotiably. Mornings before the day's travel started were mine. Everything else — calls, replies, admin — flexed around that block, not the other way around.
• Pack for connectivity, not comfort. A second SIM, a power bank that could survive a day of no outlets, and offline copies of anything I couldn't afford to lose access to.

Varanasi, twice

I passed through Varanasi on the way out and on the way back, a few weeks apart. It's a strange kind of bookend — the same ghats, the same river, but I'd changed a little in between, and so had the backlog of things I was thinking through about the next project. There's something clarifying about revisiting a place instead of always chasing the next new one. You notice what actually stuck.

What it changed about how I build

Working like this for a few weeks was a decent stress test — of my setup, but honestly more of my own discipline. It reinforced something I already believed about building products: the best systems degrade gracefully instead of falling over the moment conditions aren't ideal. Turns out that's true for a workday in the mountains too.

Still figuring out the next route. If you're building something and want someone who ships reliably regardless of what's happening around them — let's talk.