Why GoTrustelle?

It started with a baby's smile at Freedom Café in Rishikesh. It was May 2022 when I noticed Melissa sitting there with her little one — and because I have never been able to walk past a baby without stopping, I sat down beside her. What began as a brief, warm moment turned into hours of conversation: about travel, about India, about what it truly means to arrive somewhere and feel completely held by it.

We stayed in touch across continents for years, making plans that life kept kindly postponing. Then in early 2026, Melissa returned to India — and this time, I didn't take her to a resort or a tourist trail. I brought her home. To my family in Madhya Pradesh, near the Rajasthan border, where culture lives in every corner and festivals fill the air with colour and music. A big local celebration was underway. She stayed for three days, wrapped in a traditional Indian outfit, eating my mother's home cooking, joining the pooja, wandering through the fair, and sitting in our courtyard long after midnight as the festival lights flickered around us.

On the last evening, she said something I have thought about every single day since: “This is what we miss when we travel to India. We don't just want to see India — we want to feel India.” That one sentence became everything. GoTrustelle was born not from a pitch deck or a spreadsheet, but from the belief that travel, at its most beautiful, is really just connection — to a place, to its people, and to something deeper in yourself that you didn't know was waiting to be found.