AYUSHI DAHAL
Naman
Jain has spent years studying the human mind. He did his higher studies in
Italy,where he spent close to four years learning psychology, psychedelics, and
meditation. That foundation later led him to research work for Harvard, and to
a career as a psychotherapist, working closely with people through their
hardest moments. It was a career many people would call a dream intellectually
rich, respected, and comfortable.
But
Naman was a restless man, he wanted to for work for the community, for the
greater good, work closely with people on ground levels and help them
understand mindfulness & meditation.
People
who know Naman say he was always community oriented, even while doing work that
usually keeps people alone in offices, labs, and one-on-one sessions.
Psychotherapy is often private work, just you and one other person. Naman
wanted something bigger than that real belonging, not just one relationship at
a time. Psychedelics research, at its core, is about connection, to yourself,
to others, to something larger. So it makes sense that this path eventually
pulled him toward a village instead of another lab.
That
search brought him to Sikkim. Tucked into India’s northeastern Himalayas,
Sikkim has built a quiet reputation as a place unlike anywhere else in the
country. It was here, in the small village of Yakten in EastSikkim’s Pakyong
district, that Naman found something he wasn’t expecting a project already
trying to build, at the village level, exactly what he had been chasing his
whole career, real community.
Yakten
was declared India’s first digital nomad village under the Nomad Sikkim
initiative, built to give remote professionals a place to live and work, while
giving local homestay families income beyond Sikkim’s short tourist season. It
has about eight homestays co-working, fast internet running through misty
hillsides, organic meals grown a few steps from where they’re served, and
evenings spent over tongba and conversation instead of screens.
Naman
worked and supervised things here, helping shape daily life in a place built on
one idea working remotely doesn’t have to mean staying disconnected from the
people around you. It can mean the opposite.
Six
to seven months into this chapter, Naman hasn’t treated Yakten as a one-time
thing. He is now looking after upcoming projects in Rey and Gumbadara in Soreng,
West Sikkim. Each one trying to repeat what worked in Yakten homestays,
connection, and real relationships between visitors and the families hosting
them. Yakten proved the idea could work. These new villages are a bet that it
can grow without losing what made it work in the first place.
Day
to day, Naman teaches guests yoga and meditation, takes them on treks through
the hills, and gets them out hitchhiking instead of booking a cab, letting the
journey itself become part of the experience. He makes sure the local community
isn’t just watching from the sidelines but is a real part of everything
happening, and he ensures they take home the majority share of the profits, not
just a small cut. In the evenings, he dances like no one’s watching. It’s the
kind of life Gen Z talks about wanting, slow mornings, real connection, work
that doesn’t feel like a cage, and Naman isn’t just talking about it, he’s
living it.
Sikkim,
for its part, has plenty to thank him for. Naman didn’t just visit, he
volunteered, built something from the ground up, and helped push Sikkim further
along its organic, sustainable path, the same one that already made it the
world’s first fully organic State.
What
makes someone who researches for Harvard and works as a psychotherapist walk
away from a desk or a clinic? For Naman, it doesn’t look like rejection. It
looks like redirection. The same questions that shaped his years in Italy, how
people heal, how they connect, what actually holds a community together, are
the same questions he is answeringnow, just with homestays instead of case
studies, and Sikkim’s hills instead of a research office.
Sikkim,
in return, made its own case. Its people, its slower pace, and its culture of
warmth gave Naman something luxury and prestige could never.
