Recently a family from Pune fell for the hills in a single day and started talking about moving to Dehradun before the sun went down. I have heard that conversation before, and I have lived the other side of it. This is what I told them and what I would tell anyone thinking about moving to Dehradun or any smaller city.
The doorbell in Pune
On 29 June, my daughter rang a doorbell in Pune, even though she was not supposed to be anywhere near it.
It was her best friend’s birthday. We were in Pune that month, and we had planned the surprise with her friend’s parents for weeks. The friend knew nothing. Her parents knew everything. My daughter had been told to keep a straight face and, for once, to keep a secret.
The door opened. There was a silence of about two seconds. Then came a scream that I am fairly sure the neighbours still remember.
“You are supposed to be in Dehradun!”
“It’s your birthday,” my daughter said. “Where else would I be?”
I stood behind her and watched two best friends hold on to each other as if the distance between two cities had been an argument they had just won.
Remember that picture. It matters later.
The second surprise
In September, that friend’s father called. I’ll call him Rohan. That is not his name, and I have changed a few other details so this stays his family’s story as much as mine.
“We are going to Kedarnath and Badrinath,” he said. “We’ll keep one day to meet you in Dehradun. But don’t tell your daughter. We want to see her face.”
“Is this the revenge for June.”
“This is a trade,” he said. “One surprise each.”
So I said nothing. For weeks I said nothing, which for a father with a teenager is its own kind of discipline.
On the day, we told my daughter we were meeting friends for breakfast at Gandhi Park. She sulked, the way teenagers do when plans are announced without asking them. We were standing at the main gate. I kept checking my phone like a man waiting for a bomb to go off.
Then Rohan’s daughter walked up behind her and put her arms around her.
My daughter turned. And she stared.
She did not scream. She did not laugh. She just stared, as if her mind refused to accept what her eyes were telling it.
“You’re in Pune,” she said eventually.
“I’m here,” her friend said.
“No. You can’t be.”
It took my daughter over fifteen minutes to believe it. Fifteen minutes of “Is this real?” and “Say something that proves it”, before she finally started laughing, and then the two of them vanished into the day as though they had never been apart.
I watched that, and something in my chest went quiet.
“Nobody comes back the same.”
A while ago I scrolled past a reel that began: “Nobody goes to the mountains of Uttarakhand and comes back the same person.” I thought it was the usual thing, beautiful footage and big promises. I scrolled on.
That same day, I understood what the reel was pointing at, because I watched it happen.
Rohan and his family had come straight from Kedarnath and Badrinath. They had that look people have after the high mountains, a little scrubbed clean, a little quiet. And they had a request. His wife, Meera, and Rohan had both been moved by a web series called Musafir Cafe, and they wanted to see where it was shot.
So on the way up, we went to Jharipani Castle, the old building that was turned into the cafe for the series. We found it closed. The place became so popular after the series, with people arriving for reels and photoshoots, that it is now open only to its resident guests. It was fully booked until December, and the shoot for the new season starts in January and February.
Meera looked at the gate for a long moment. “We came all this way.”
“We’ll still eat with the same view,” I said.
We had lunch at a cafe right next door, called 19th Century. It has the same magnificent view of the Himalayas and the valley below. Honestly, nobody missed the castle. We sat there for a long time, with the plates going cold, looking out.
That is when the talk started.
“You’re so lucky,” Rohan kept saying. “You just did it. You actually did it.”
By the afternoon, the plans had started arriving, one after another, as if they had been waiting in line.
Rohan said he would look for his next job to be a remote one so he could work from here. Meera, who is finishing her PhD in pharmacy, said, “There are so many colleges here. Almost all of them have pharmacy.” Then she looked at me. “Maybe I should start applying.”
And their daughter, my daughter’s best friend, said quietly, “I could come after my 10th. Then we can do 11th and 12th together.”
My daughter did not say anything. She just looked at her friend. That look is not something I can describe.
It was the kind of conversation that happens on a mountain, when everything seems possible and the air smells of pine.
What I told him about moving to Dehradun
Later, when the girls had wandered off, Rohan asked me the real question.
“Tell me honestly. Is it as good as it looks?”
I said, “If it’s in your mind, don’t keep it there. Act on it.”
I meant it. And I told him why.
When we decided on moving to Dehradun, nobody around us clapped. I remember when we broke the news to our family friends. It was Holi, and everyone had gathered to play colours near the garden in our society. We told them, and they stared at us in disbelief.
“What? Tell me you guys are joking,” said one of them.
“But why?” said another.
The questions came at us from all sides. Why Dehradun? What about the schools? What would we do there? Nobody seemed happy. Not one person said it sounded like a good idea.
Later, while I was washing the Holi colours off my face and hands, those voices were so loud in my head that I stopped for the first time and wondered whether I had made the right decision. Not one of them thought it was a wise one.
But I had already thought it through. I had done the careful thing they were asking me to do. And I did move.
What I found, once I got here, was that I was not alone. Retiring early and moving to a smaller city is quite normal here. People do it quietly. You find them at the market, at the school gate, on the road to the hills.
I told Rohan about three friends from Pune who had visited last year. They arrived with the same doubts I once had. They saw how we lived, and they left with different opinions. One of them told me, with a half-smile, “I’m a little jealous.”
“Many people are doing this kind of work today,” I said. “There is no point spending your life inside big-city chaos if you have another option.”
The mistake most people make when moving to Dehradun
Then I told him the thing I most wanted him to hear.
“Most people who come to Uttarakhand,” I said, “come for the treks or the temples. They treat Dehradun as a base camp. A night here, maybe a day. Then off to somewhere else.”
“That’s exactly what we did,” he said, a bit embarrassed.
“That’s the mistake,” I said. “You cannot know a place in a day. Give it a week. No agenda. No list. No ticking off sights. A week of waking up here, buying vegetables, walking around, and getting a little bored. That is what a holiday should be anyway, not a row of tick marks.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“That’s what I want,” he said. “And not just for a week. Permanently.”
I did not take that sentence lightly. It is the kind of sentence that comes easily on a good day, from a man standing on a mountain with his family and a hot cup of tea.
Because a holiday and a Tuesday are not the same test. You can fall in love with a place on holiday and still be unsure whether you can live there. The week with no plans is how you find out. It is a small, cheap, boring experiment, and I think it is the most useful thing a family considering moving to Dehradun can do.
Can you keep your job after moving to Dehradun?
Rohan’s next question was the practical one.
“What about work? I can’t just stop.”
So I told him about my friends. Several of them have jobs in Pune, Bengaluru and Delhi. They do not live in those cities anymore. They work remotely from here and travel to their offices when it is needed, whenever the company calls them.
“Dehradun is well connected,” I said. “By road and by air, to all the big cities. If you need to be in Pune for a meeting, you can be. You are not cutting the cord. You are changing where you spend most of your days.”
That is how I think about it. You do not have to give up the city you came from. For a while, you can have both: a city life that is easier than the big metros, and the hills a short drive away.
Rohan was already nodding. “So I don’t need to quit. I could ask for a remote role first.”
“Start there,” I said. “See what your company says. See how you feel after six months. Don’t burn a bridge you can still keep.”
That is the part people miss when they dream of a move. It does not have to be a leap. It can be a series of small, reversible steps.
The professors’ garden
Meera and Rohan had been staying with her brother and his wife. Both of them are professors at the architecture college here, and they moved to Dehradun five years ago. They too are in love with the place.
That evening, we went to their home for tea.
I watched Rohan and Meera watching them. They were not looking at the house, which was lovely. They were looking at the two of them, sitting in their garden in the late light, unhurried, talking about students and rain and the week’s lectures as if none of it was a sacrifice.
On the way out, Meera whispered to me, “They look happy. They actually look happy.”
“They are,” I said.
“That’s what I want to know. That it’s real. That it lasts.”
She had put her finger on the whole thing. A reel can show you a view. A holiday can show you a good week. What you need is someone five years in, sitting in their own garden, telling you what an ordinary day feels like.
That is the second thing I told Rohan to do, after the week with no plans. Find the people who made the move before you. Not the ones who post about it, but the ones who live it. Ask them what is hard. Ask them what they miss. Ask them what a normal Tuesday looks like.
What living in Dehradun is like on a Saturday
I want to be fair, because I do not want to sell a fantasy.
Living in Dehradun is not always quiet. On weekends, tourists pour into the town. The roads fill up. The popular spots are packed.
We have learned to avoid all of that. Most weekends, we do not go to the touristy places. We go to the offbeat corners, where there are no crowds, or we simply stay home, where we still have our slice of nature and a good view of the mountains. That is not a compromise. It is one of the real pleasures of living in Dehradun. But you find it only after you have lived somewhere long enough to stop behaving like a visitor.
And the feeling Rohan and Meera had that day, standing at that view? That feeling has a half-life. I know, because I felt it too. The high is real, but it does not stay at the same height. Routine arrives. School timetables arrive. The first big rain arrives. A good life here is not a permanent holiday.
None of this is a reason not to move. It is a reason to know what you are moving towards.
The girls
There was one conversation I did not expect to have, and it was about my daughter.
While Rohan and I were talking, I told him how she had taken the move. “At first she found it tough,” I said. “She missed her friends. She missed the life she knew. It took time.” Then I told him where she is now. “She says she doesn’t want to go back.”
He looked across the terrace at the two girls, sitting with their heads close together.
Later that day, my daughter said something to her friend that I have not forgotten. “I don’t mind visiting Pune to meet you guys, or to travel,” she said. “But I don’t think I want to come back there forever and settle.”
Her friend did not argue. She just nodded, slowly, the way you do when you are hearing something that will take a while to sink in.
This is the part nobody puts in the reel. When a family moves to a smaller city, the adults think about careers and costs. The children consider people. A move is not only a change of address. It is a change in who is close enough to hug you from behind at a breakfast table. And yet, the same child who cried over that distance can, a year later, say she doesn’t want to go back.
Rohan’s daughter has understood something wise for her age. She suggested a timing: after her 10th, when a school move is easiest. Meera had spotted her opening in the pharmacy colleges. Rohan had a way to keep earning. They were not dreaming blindly. They were looking for the places where a move could actually be made to work.
That is the third thing I would tell anyone. Do not move on a feeling. Move on a plan, with a natural break in it: a school year ending, a project finishing, and a contract coming up for renewal. Let the hills do the wanting, and let the calendar do the deciding.
What I hope happens
They left the next morning, still full of it.
“We’re seriously thinking about this,” Rohan said at the car. “I mean it.”
“I know you do,” I said.
I did not tell him what I was also thinking. That the routine of Pune is strong. That on Monday morning the alarm will ring, the traffic will wait, and the lunch with a Himalayan view will begin to feel like a dream someone else had. That the plans they made so easily will be tested by an ordinary week.
Whether they make it happen or the routine makes them forget, only time will tell.
But I did one thing that evening. I opened a message to Rohan and wrote one line: “Come back for a week. No plans. Just a week.”
If you are in a big city right now, reading this on your phone, with the hills on your mind and a list of reasons not to go, do not decide anything today. Take a week. Go to the place you are thinking about and live in it as if you already belonged there. Then ask what an ordinary Tuesday would look like.
Moving to Dehradun is not for everyone, and I would never tell you it is. But it is a question worth testing properly. And if you want to think it through with someone who has done it, that is what Nishchay is for.