Why a Researcher from Europe Traded Comfort for Villages in Sikkim, Leaving It All Behind

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.