Slow living in India is not just about pace—it is about who you end up sharing that slower life with.
The first Cuppa Convos was a big hit.
I had announced it quietly. A simple gathering of Dehradun professionals, honest conversation over coffee, and no agenda. I was new to the city. I did not know who would come. To my surprise, 13 people turned up.
Vijay was one of them.
He is a CA. He had left a senior role at Amazon to FIRE and settle in Dehradun. His wife had her own work. His daughter was adjusting to a new city and doing better than anyone had expected. He had done the financial architecture with the precision you would expect from someone who builds financial architectures for a living.
He sat down across from me at that first coffee meet, and within twenty minutes I knew two things: he had drawn the same picture I had drawn, and he had arrived at it through a completely different door.
That was the beginning.
I want to tell you what the Cuppa Convos actually was. Because I think the name sounds more organized than the reality.
It was a simple idea. I had moved to Dehradun, and I wanted to meet people who were genuinely interesting rather than conventionally connected. Not a networking event. Not a seminar. Not a mastermind. Just people who had something real to say gathered over coffee, with enough time and enough quiet for the conversation to actually go somewhere.
The first event had 13 shows. The conversation was good. Vijay was one of the reasons it was good. He asked the kind of questions that make a room more honest rather than more impressive.
After it ended, our conversations continued. Over the phone and over WhatsApp.
The friendship that followed was not manufactured.
We introduced our wives. Our children met. We started going for walks—the specific, unhurried kind that only happen when neither person has a meeting after. It was, in a quiet way, the version of slow living in India we had both been moving toward without naming it. We planned small things: dinner, a film, a drive to somewhere neither of us had been. The ordinary infrastructure of a genuine friendship rather than a professional relationship.
What I did not expect was how quickly I came to trust his thinking.
Vijay has a particular quality that is rare in people who are excellent with numbers: he does not mistake the numbers for the destination. He understands, from his own experience, not just from professional knowledge, that the corpus is not the point. “The life” is the point. The corpus is the vehicle.
This is not a common understanding among people who are experts at building corpuses.
After some months of friendship, we started noticing something.
The people who came to me after the viral post, and there were many of them, could be broadly sorted into two categories.
The first category: they had the picture but not the financial architecture. They knew what life they wanted. They did not know if the money was right. Or they had the money but had never done the systematic thinking about how to preserve and deploy it through a transition.
The second category: they had the financial architecture but not the picture. The spreadsheet was detailed, the corpus target was named, and the withdrawal rate was calculated. And the question of what life all of this was supposed to fund had been effectively, though not intentionally, set aside.
Vijay solves the first problem. I work on the second.
We were talking about this one morning on a walk and realized we were solving different halves of the same problem. Most of the people we were both encountering needed both halves. Most of them were asking for only one.
Here is what I have learned from watching Vijay work.
The financial expertise — the real kind, the kind he has — is not about having the right formula. It is about asking the right questions before the formula.
What is this corpus supposed to fund? What does the monthly draw need to cover? What are the fixed obligations, and which of them are truly fixed versus which are choices that have been made habits? Where is the insurance, and is it actually adequate? What is the realistic income from the transition work and over what timeline?
These are different questions from the generic FIRE calculator. And the answers — when they come from someone who has himself made the transition, who has lived the first year of uncertainty, who has had the specific fear of watching the bank account move in the wrong direction — land differently than answers from someone who has only studied the theory.
Vijay has the theory and the scar tissue.
That combination is unusual. It is also exactly what most people need and cannot find.
We are building something now. Not a company in the conventional sense. A partnership built on a genuine friendship between two people who made the same choice and found each other in the city they both chose.
The specific thing we are building: a way for people who are trying to make this transition to get both halves of the answer in the same conversation. The picture and the number. The life design and the financial architecture. In the right order — picture first, then number — because that sequence is the one that actually works.
I am not a financial advisor. Vijay is not a life coach. But together we cover the territory that most people need covered when they are standing at the threshold of this decision.
What I keep thinking about is how unlikely this was.
I moved to a new city and started coffee meetups without any specific expectations about who would attend. Vijay came. Within twenty minutes I could tell he was someone worth knowing. Within a year he was someone whose judgment I trusted completely.
This is not how professional partnerships are typically built. There was no pitch, no proposal, no complementary skill analysis. There was a coffee morning, an honest conversation, and the slow accumulation of trust that comes from showing up for someone in the ordinary ways that matter.
The Pause Collective, the Cuppa Convos, the community events — these are not marketing initiatives. They are the conditions I am trying to create for this kind of encounter. The right people finding each other. Not through a database or an algorithm but through a room and a question and enough time for the conversation to become real.
Vijay is proof that it works.
What Slow Living in India Really Means
Slow living in India is not primarily about pace.
It is about choosing the conditions that make the right things possible. The right friendships. The right partnerships. The right work that emerges from genuine trust rather than strategic calculation.
You cannot plan this. You cannot manufacture it. You can only create the space and show up honestly.
The rest finds its own shape.
If you are at the threshold of this kind of transition — if the picture is forming but the financial architecture is unclear, or if the corpus is growing but the picture is missing — you do not have to work it out alone.
You can reach both of us directly. Here are the links to my LinkedIn and Vijay’s.