Why I Built Safarnama

I was a sprinter once. Then life got busy, and movement quietly slipped away. Safarnama is the app I wanted on the way back.

01Movement was just what I did

Gold medals in the 100m, 200m and long jump. Silver in high jump. Football, cricket, basketball. It never felt like exercise. It felt like being alive.

02The drift

Then academics happened. Then a career. The drift away from movement does not happen in one day. It happens across a thousand small decisions: stay late, skip the morning, sit a little longer.

By my late twenties I was carrying weight I did not recognise, stress I could not process, and an anger that surprised me. I knew something had to change. I did not yet know what.

Stillness is not the opposite of a full life. It is the foundation of one.

03The way back

The books came first: The Art of Happiness, The Power of Now. Then a corporate walking challenge. I picked the easiest distance, 25 km in ten days, and expected to be done with it.

I was not done with it. Something woke up on those walks, the same feeling that once carried me around a track at sixteen.

• Running came next, with Coach Bennett in the Nike Run Club app as my first virtual coach. Slower and more honest than school running.
• Swimming at thirty-three, in a pool, alongside my daughter who was learning at the same time.
• Cycling, first on the road with the New Gurgaon Cyclists community, then on a home trainer when an MSc in Data Science made time tight.
• Yoga and strength: yoga for the stiffness after long rides, strength as the foundation that made every run, ride and swim better.

04So I built Safarnama

I looked for an app that connected movement to meaning, something Indian that saw a kilometre as more than a data point. I could not find it, so I built it.

It is for anyone who drifted away from movement and wondered if they could find their way back. For the sprinter who became a desk worker. For the person who picked the easiest challenge and found something unexpected inside it.

It is, honestly, built for me.
And maybe for you too.