Aditya & Khushi, Co-Founders, ElSi Experiences
As a child, she scolded strangers for throwing garbage because, to her, it felt like the land was being hurt. Money was the dream until life surprised her, and she ended up working with communities across states on issues of education, gender, and sexuality. She taught Gender Studies at a University, until exhaustion outran passion, and the mountains became the only place that rewarded mindfulness.
Today, she's building ElSi Experiences, a library and a community space where women, children, and LGBTQIA+ persons can simply be, because she believes in the irony: it is through sharing that one can preserve wealth.
Read Khushi's full storyHe has built programs that reached people across states and communities, yet the journey he's most invested in is the one that leads back to himself. A mountaineer, paraglider, and photographer, he doesn't conquer peaks — he learns from them and points his lens at what most people walk past.
A published author and midnight reader, he's as comfortable in boardrooms with CSR giants as in village kitchens with women weavers in Himachal. If you've ever felt tired of performing and wondered what it might feel like to walk a path that's older than your resume, his story is for you.
Read Aditya's full storySat in more meetings than we can defend. Filed monitoring and evaluation reports on things that resist being monitored or evaluated. Attended sessions on psychological safety where everyone performed psychological safety at each other. Taught Gender Studies. Travelled across India working with women, LGBTQIA+ persons, and adolescents from Ladakh to Kerala.
Processed the politics of caste, gender, migration, and human trafficking with colleagues who used words like impact and ecosystem and learnings in the same sentence.
Also, one of us, at nine years old, scolded adults about throwing garbage. Completely unbothered by their size. This information remains relevant.
We have both been described as passionate. In most professional contexts, this functions as a warning label.
The path we had arrived at, calling a trek, was someone's Monday morning. Shepherds moving animals to higher pastures. Women carrying medicinal herbs down from the forest, also carrying the children. Devotees walking with the deities of their villages on days that needed no calendar to matter.
These are not scenic recreational corridors. They are the infrastructure of seasonal life, brimming with folklore and biodiversity and a kind of intelligence that took centuries to grow and that a tourist with a Bluetooth speaker can damage in an afternoon. We have come to understand this as paying attention.
After years of sharing home-cooked meals, travelling with the devtas, working in their fields, teaching at their schools, mourning with them in hours of grief, performing Natti in celebrations, and volunteering to run their shops and kitchens, we look at these mountains and their people as our home.
It began as a hesitation. As a question we were almost too cautious to ask aloud.
What if we tried to do this differently?
Differently does not mean perfectly. We are still mid-process. We are learning. We make mistakes, and we ask the community we live with to correct us, which they do, with a patience we do not always deserve.
Eating food cooked by people whose grandmothers taught them how. Spending time with communities rather than photographing them from a polite distance. Building economic value that stays in the valley rather than passing through it.
Creating spaces — a marketplace for the women who hold this ecosystem together, a library and community room for the people often left out of the tourism conversation that exists.
ElSi is not a fixed idea. It moves with time, space, and the people who walk with us. Those willing to sit with the discomfort of unfamiliar rhythms, of slowing down, of not having the vocabulary for what they're feeling will find something here that they didn't come looking for.
If you have read this far and felt something shift, even slightly, even uncertainly, that is enough. You don't need to know exactly why you're here. We didn't either.
We will see you in the valley.
Aditya & Khushi
Himachal Pradesh
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