The story behind this

Most companies like this tell you a version of the same story: grew up somewhere else, heard about India secondhand your whole life, went back as an adult, had the trip that changed everything. It’s a good story, and for plenty of people in this industry, a true one. It isn’t mine, and telling it as if it were felt worse than just being honest about what actually happened.

I was born in Delhi and grew up in Lucknow, the same school from start to finish. I wanted to learn drums as a kid. Tabla found me instead, and it turned out to matter more. I also spent years idealising going abroad, the way kids do, right up until I was old enough to actually apply for it, and stopped myself. I wanted to see India first.

Lucknow does something to you that’s hard to explain unless you grew up inside it. It’s a city built in layers (ancient Hindu, Nawabi, colonial) that somehow never stopped speaking to each other. I woke up most mornings to incense drifting over from the Hanuman temple down the road, one of the oldest in the city. And a few streets over, there’d be Eid, then Lohri, then Diwali, then Christmas, each one treated like it belonged to everyone. It’s changed some since (most places have), but that’s the city I grew up inside of, and it’s the reason “secular” never felt like a word I had to think about. It just described India.

Then there was the food, which is its own argument for going. Puri-subzi, nihari, malai makhan at dawn, chaat that ruins every other city’s version for you afterward. I still put on a few pounds every time I go home. Worth it.

The travel started early too, on school trips: Agra, Jaipur, small pockets of Madhya Pradesh most adults never think to visit, each one built around a history, an activity, real food, nothing wasted. One of those early trips was Jim Corbett. Four or five days going back into the same stretch of jungle for the chance of seeing a tiger, at a time when everyone said there were only a few hundred left in the whole country. That kind of stakes stays with you.

The perspective you’re paying for isn’t mine because I’m Indian. It’s mine because I never had to go looking for it.

I kept exploring as an adult, trekking through the Northeast, Assam and Meghalaya especially, and later watching the startup energy in Bangalore, Kochi and Chennai up close. Different ends of the same country, living completely different lives, chasing versions of the same dream. Somewhere in all of that, I picked up a belief that travel is one of the only ways to actually find out who you are, not just where you’ve been. That belief is the backbone of how a Rooetd trip gets built.

What actually pushed me to build it, though, was meeting people here in the UK: people of Indian descent who’d lost the language, who’d go quiet and a little wistful whenever India came up, who wanted to go back properly but didn’t know anyone who could take them. More than one asked, half-joking, if they could just come along next time I went. Around the same time, working across UK hospitality, I started to see food as its own act of representation, and learned how much weight the word sevā actually carries when you take it seriously. There was a real want here nobody was properly serving, and the more trips I looked at, heritage-focused or not, the more I saw the same root problem: generic itineraries that never bother finding out what a place should actually mean to the person visiting it. That’s the gap Rooetd exists to close.

It’s also why the pricing looks the way it does. I grew up with jugaad (the instinct to get somewhere properly without paying for things you don’t need), and that’s the same instinct behind every price on this site. We’re not selling a resort package by a pool. We’re trying to show you how life is actually lived there, at a price that doesn’t insult the place you’re trying to understand.

And there’s one place that isn’t on the map above, because it was never going to be a trip. It’s Lucknow: the mornings, the temple, the food I still crave. If enough of the above speaks to you, at some point, I want to take you there myself.