OurStory
Forests First, Stars Always
The wildlife came first, almost by accident. A couple of friends had started a small wildlife tour business, and I found myself pulled into it — not as a guest, but as someone learning to run the thing from the inside. We planned the tours ourselves, handled the logistics ourselves, and answered every question a "camper" threw at us — back when a batch of twenty-plus participants was still the norm. It taught me things no brochure could: how to manage a group, how to listen to what a guest actually needed, and slowly, how to read a jungle the way you'd read a familiar face — the flora, the fauna, the small signs that tell you something moved through recently.
The sky came almost in parallel. I joined Pune's Jyotirvidya Parisanstha astronomy club, and what started as curiosity turned into genuine fieldwork — solar observations during eclipses and transits, meteor shower watches that stretched across several consecutive years, astrophotography, comet observations during the apparitions of some of the brighter comets of the era, and more Messier marathons than I can now count. I wasn't just looking up. I was learning to observe with real intent — a skill, it turns out, that isn't so different from tracking a tiger through dry teak forest.
Then life and career took over for the next two decades.
The pull never fully left, even when the forests and the night sky had to wait. In 2020, during the long stillness of the lockdown, it resurfaced in an unexpected form — I launched "Astronomer at Your Doorstep," carrying a telescope from home to home, running private, pre-booked stargazing evenings for families who'd never had a proper look at the sky above their own rooftops. Dozens of families, one sky at a time. It reminded me how much I'd missed sharing this.
A year later, wildlife found its way back in too. A trip to Kanha with cousins in February 2021, followed by Bandhavgarh and Khajuraho the following year, brought everything back into focus at once. Somewhere on those trips, I noticed something telling — I was the one scouting good properties, the one talking naturally and easily with park guides, often more fluently than the guides we'd actually hired for the trip. The old instincts hadn't gone anywhere. They'd just been waiting.
That's when I saw the gap clearly. India's safari industry, as far as I could tell, was built almost entirely around two models — large group tours on one end, and highly specialised photography circuits on the other. Almost nobody was building something quieter. Something personal. Something genuinely luxurious, without losing the intimacy of a small, considered journey into the wild.
Untamed Safariz exists to fill that space.
I still lead every safari myself. Not because I have to — because three decades in, this forest still feels like the first time, every single time. And I'd rather show you that feeling than describe it.
