Tarana Chauhan successfully developed her career for a long time, which was considered a model of success in work and advancement. She worked as a Senior Business Analyst at Tata Consultancy Services and later moved to Enheuser-Bush InBev, where she held a position in analytics and business. According to her LinkedIn profile, she holds bachelor's and master's degrees in economics from Punjab University.
However, amidst promotions, workload, and increasing salary, there came a moment when she started asking herself a question that was not related to her job, but rather how she wanted to build her life.
Tarana shared that when she started her career, her annual income was about 7 lakh rupees, but after leaving her job, this income dropped to only 2 lakh rupees per month.
Moreover, the decision to leave her job was not sudden. In 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic began, Tarana returned to her home in Himachal. Returning to the mountains, she had the opportunity to rethink her city life and career. She started renovating an old family home and decided to turn it into a guesthouse.
Information about these changes became public through her Instagram account. In one video, she pointed out the rooms on the first floor of her two-story ancestral home, saying that she started by renovating these three rooms, then built two more premises, and is now building a yoga studio upstairs. All this work she started parallel to her corporate employment.
According to her LinkedIn profile, she managed this business for about two years while continuing to work full-time. During this time, she developed a working system, automated many processes, and figured out if this business could provide her with financial support in the future. This approach became an important part of her plan to change her entire life.
She did not give up until her side business succeeded. Only then did she decide to leave her corporate job. Chauhan reached a point where the guesthouse became stable enough to handle changes. Now she has been fully managing Nirvana Homes for about three years.
Nevertheless, the income from this venture was not constant every month. She reported that in some months her earnings exceed 5 lakh rupees, while in other months she might earn less than 1 lakh rupees. For an employee with a fixed corporate salary, this might seem frightening. However, she notes that she now has more control over what is most important to her—her time, place of residence, and way of working.
Chauhan added that life in the mountains looks different on social media, but it is not that simple. Managing a guesthouse does not mean that every morning can be spent drinking coffee against a mountain backdrop. She mentions the real difficulties of running a guesthouse in the captions of her Instagram posts. Among them are the need to answer calls even when sick, fixing leaking pipes, cleaning sewage, organizing gas cylinders, and dealing with power outages.
She writes that there are no separate departments here; she handles many of the guesthouse's responsibilities alone. She deals with guest reception, front desk work, cleaning, assisting clients, procurement, and maintenance. If necessary, she has to perform plumbing and electrical work. Her journey also involved problems unrelated directly to the beautiful guesthouse in the mountains. When she tried to add her property to Google Maps, there was no information about the place. But it took about a month to identify the location and get it approved.
Her conclusion is very simple: when you start something from scratch, there is no other person who can help you solve problems. The entire responsibility falls on you alone.