The girl from Abu Road who said 'not yet' to settling down
Abu Road is a small town in Rajasthan, the kind of place where life's milestones arrive on a fairly predictable schedule. Himani Mittal grew up there, in a middle-class Marwari household where money wasn't plentiful but expectations were. She's now 30, has never held a traditional 9-to-5 job, and has switched careers six times. The two facts sit together not as a cautionary tale but as a very deliberate choice.
Himani has spoken about her journey on Instagram, and what comes through isn't bravado — it's clarity. She says she understood early that financial independence was the only real route to personal freedom, so she started building it in whatever form she could, even when that meant figuring things out on the fly.
Learning Spanish at 21, teaching it on the same day
Her first pivot set the tone for everything that followed. At 21, Himani began teaching Spanish while she was still learning the language herself. It sounds chaotic, but it worked — and when Covid-19 hit two years later, she shifted her work entirely online, keeping her income intact while the rest of the world paused.
At 25, after completing a master's degree in filmmaking, she moved to Spain to teach English. She stayed three years, travelled across Europe, and credits the people she met there with fundamentally changing how she thought about timelines and milestones. "I learnt what a life of freedom actually looks like," she has said. When she returned to India two years ago, she moved to Delhi, and then, three months ago, to Kerala — following curiosity rather than convention.
Today she creates content around solo travel, everyday happiness, and the idea that there is no single correct age to figure your life out. She also runs an Instagram series called the SF Challenge, designed specifically for people in their 30s who feel boxed in by social expectations and want to explore new careers or simply begin again.
Why this matters for a solo travel audience in India
Himani's story resonates in a very specific way for Indian women who travel alone or are thinking about it. Her trajectory — small-town Rajasthan to Madrid to Kerala — isn't a fantasy built on inherited wealth or a safety net. It was constructed piece by piece, career by career, with a practical eye on earning enough to keep moving.
For solo travellers in India, especially women, the questions around financial independence and social pressure are rarely abstract. Himani addresses both directly, not by offering a formula but by being visible about the messiness of the process. She's open about not having everything figured out even now, which is arguably more useful than a neat success story. Her move to Kerala a few months ago — another fresh start, chosen freely — is the kind of detail that reminds you that this is an ongoing life, not a highlight reel.
The responses her posts generate tell their own story. Commenters write about wanting to leave their jobs but not knowing where to start, about feeling seen in someone else's uncertainty. That's a particular kind of community-building, and it's happening quietly, one Instagram reel at a time.