behind the counter x Hasan Babai
One Earth Retreat, Mulshi, India
This week behind the counter, we are stoked to have Hasan Babai, a friend of the planet beyond doubt; a man who put in 10 years (and continues to do so) in conserving and regenerating 65 acres of forest land!
One Earth retreat is situated in Mulshi, an eco-tourism village in Pune, India. It’s an organic paradise created with a vision to support all life forms, including humans. A place where you can dive straight into nature’s lap, relish the visual treat of the local flora and fauna, appreciate the peek-a-boo presence of the local wildlife and enjoy its many options of water bodies; from lagoons to dams, to waterfalls, it’s got it all.
Join us as we get to know Hasan’s epic green journey, the challenges he faced along the way and his altruistic vision of building a self-sustaining piece of earth with a loyal tribe of community who keep coming back for more!
What was life like before starting out One Earth Retreat?
I don’t have one particular school of thought or training or a formal educational background, but I’ve done diverse things.
I didn’t study to become an engineer or a doctor, that’s not been my path towards life or learning because I’ve always become that person through doing. Education-wise, I walked out of college in my second year of pursuing a Bachelor’s of Arts and went from science to commerce till I got bored with it all and didn’t bother finishing anything.
At 17, I got an opportunity to intern for a big architectural company in Bombay, called Talati and Panthaky and ended up spending two and a half years working for that company.
I became an interior designer without studying for it. That was the start of my career and then at 19, I started my first interior design company in Bombay, called Inner Space.
In the nineties, somebody approached my brother, a DJ by profession, and told him he wanted to start a nightclub, my brother then approached me and that’s how I designed the interiors of the first club called Avalon.
That eventually led to spending seven to eight years of my life specializing in designing nightclubs in Bombay back in the nineties. At some point, we started managing the place too. Once again, not something I was qualified for. It just happened, and we followed through on it.
How did you end up moving to Pune?
I needed a break so I took a 3-month sabbatical from work. I wanted to collect my thoughts before going back to it. Also, my mother had already moved to Pune, so I used to visit Pune often. Somehow, she convinced me to help her find a piece of land because she wanted to have a farmhouse.
It started with a simple intentional seed of helping my mother build a farmhouse.
However, being from Bombay, I had no exposure to plants and living things. My mom definitely had the green thumb, but I had never planted anything in my life or done anything to do with plants before that.
I worked on different projects, but it was always a fantasy created on an idea or a concept and it was time-bound, so we would work round the clock and do three shifts a day. I tried to apply that to landscape design, which was a colossal blunder.
So we started looking for a piece of land and we got one touching the riverbank. It was a garbage dumping ground then, just a barren piece of land, but the price was a steal, so we bought it.
It required a lot of work and I started looking for full-grown trees that could be uprooted and planted on the land because, like everything else in my life, there was no time factor to sit and watch it grow for years. To transplant, each tree was a 20–30 day job. It involved a lot of deep science to get it right. Then, after a few years, I was obsessed with finding large boulders to make unique rock formations.
I planted every single plant and tree, placed every rock and boulder, did all the contouring and forming on that piece of land. That project was called Garden of Eden. That’s how I was introduced to landscape design and learnt more about it.
It was also at this point in my life that I met healers and people coming from all different walks of life who were seekers, but still masters in certain different individual fields, and that opened up my world to a lot of different spiritual practices alongside.
When and how did the concept of One Earth strike you?
Up until the garden of Eden, I was always working with inanimate dead objects like wood, stone, steel, but when I worked with the landscape, it blew my mind. It’s a living medium and you can have all these ideas about the forms and shapes, but you have no control over the factor of time and the nurturing environment that is required.
No matter what you do, beyond a certain point, it’s just about watching, observing, and being part of that process. You don’t create the order.
Being involved in landscape design made me stop and rethink the way I perceived life, and you realize that through time, truly, there is beauty in everything.
I knew if I ever have to do this again, if I had to go through this madness in my life again, my focus will not be beauty, I’m going to focus on the magic of all the different symbiotic relationships.
I decided to see if I can do one more crazy project, by then my focus had already become about sustainability and about co-existence. So based on that seed of thought, I sold the property and began to hunt for land for almost 2 years.
I needed to get one piece of earth, and make sure that it’s completely off-grid and disconnected from the entire planet; a completely different microcosm, a universe in itself that would support everything in it. How do you create the perfect ecosystem that truly would be the garden of Eden, that whole utopian dream? How do you do it? These questions kept nagging me.
I finally found this massive 65 acres of land that is surrounded by the mountains on three sides and for me, the mass quantum is a very important aspect of it, so I sold everything; businesses, houses, investments, properties, land, everything really.
What was the kind of initial challenges?
I’ve been here since 2010 and I started with a tent and a sleeping bag. Initially, I would park my car on the main road because there was no road leading to the property, to find the compound’s boundary markings took me six months. It took another year to get electricity on the property. Water was the task of my life, digging wells and all that, so this journey started in 2010 purely based on conservation. I didn’t want to make the same mistakes I made in the garden of Eden project where I went for landscape and beauty, instead; I was going for forest regeneration.
There is this group in Pune called the ecological society of India, and a private company called Oikos; they have the best minds in the country and are encyclopedic in their knowledge. They did a biodiversity survey on all the flora and fauna that used to exist in this area for the last 200 years and they identified all the sacred groves in the zone 3 ecological barrier belt.
After the survey, we figured that all that was supposed to be here was missing and came up with a plan to reintroduce these back. When you do a forest regeneration process, you’re creating the right conditions so that the birds can do what they do so that the insects can do what they do, and the ants can do what to do; all the different pollinators come into place. You’re creating the perfect conditions and giving life a fighting chance to do what it does best, to go towards life.
For example, there’s fencing so that not too many cattle wander in to graze, so that the grass has a chance to grow, which in turn holds the soil, so that when a seed falls from a bird dropping, that seed has a chance to grow. A lot of work has gone into it, from stopping the slash & burn farming, to creating gentler contours, to creating percolation systems, to creating continuous line trenches so that you want to get as much water within the soil as possible. So that’s been a whole process of creating the perfect conditions.
Each aspect was treated as a different subject. Water was different, and soil was different, with separate headings and separate individual sciences in itself.
When did you open the doors to guests to visit and enjoy the environment you created?
August of 2019, after 10 years of conservation.
I spent eight years watching the rain through the entire monsoon, following every single water drip-line around every single mountain, making one-one channel throughout the monsoon so that now, even when it rains on any part of this land, within a minute or two, all the water reaches the dam I built. It’s all been micro-layered and managed to come and collect back there.
Every area that was threatened by soil erosion factor, I’ve terraced in a way that, let’s say, if I want to develop one corner and it’s a slope land, first I remove the top soil, then mark the surrounding existing trees, then I get the contour level and cut it.
The same soil and stones would be kept aside, we would use the small pebbles for pathways, the bigger boulders were used to make these, these living, retaining walls in which I put roots inside, the loose soil would be put behind it and we added fibrous roots which are basically fine binding roots like lemongrass and use it on the edge.
So instead of using concrete walls, I used roots as a mortar for the regeneration process. I worked like that on every corner of this massive land, so it was a step-by-step process till we opened the door to our guests.
I’ve learned to work with an everyday target now, for example, I want to see this much by this evening and that’s my satisfaction. Of course, I have a bigger vision and goal and I’m working towards it, but for me, I take it one day at a time and I enjoy it.
Talking about the bigger vision, can you tell us more about it?
The vision was, is and always will be about creating a sustainable piece of the world that supports creating the perfect habitat to nurture all life forms, including humans.
For me, opening the doors of the retreat helped pay the bills, but I see the potential and envision it to be a learning centre because that brings in awareness. That’s where you change people’s perceptions and the understanding of it.
One Earth retreat was never meant to be a resort, so we’re trying to create a tribe of conscious, like-minded people. I’m in the process of reaching out to various different, inspiring souls that I’ve met in my life and that I’ve known or whom I would like to meet and learn from.
I’m going to be setting up a long-format green school next year with some of the top minds in the country, as guest lecturers and as mentors and they’ll cover every single aspect of green learning; from entomology to waste management to renewable energy to water to soil, every single sub-topic that you could be introduced to, under permaculture. It’s going to be a deep actually hands-on experiential learning centre.
So one aspect is the green school. Another aspect would be a health and wellness centre, which would be a mix of Ayurveda, yoga, healing and naturopathy because it just blends in perfectly with this space.
Then create a little camping and adventure zone, which is going to be based on experiential learning through short-term workshops; two to five days workshops that include real-life short format skill sets. So you’re not coming here just to do camping, you’ll come here to learn bushcraft and survival, astrophotography, tree-house building, etc. I also definitely see a centre for performing arts and music, so that’s happening too.
At the end of the day, if you really want to know who you are, see what surrounds you, that reflection is you, and if you don’t like it, change it.
My vision is to be surrounded by beautiful, inspiring people who also believe every day is a learning process and find out what excites them because we have so much to look forward to. This entire project is about a collaborative effort between like-minded people. Everybody has certain skill sets and everybody can learn from everybody else.
What about accommodation? Are there going to be different kinds of accommodation for the learning centre and workshops?
We plan to build different types of accommodations. For the retreat, it’s a different type of accommodation, obviously.
For the short-term workshop guests, we plan to do luxury tents or even dorms. Guests who are here for the workshops or the green school won’t be looking for luxury accommodation compared to those who come for a 1 or 2-day retreat of leisure and comfort.
How do you manage guest experience, especially when you have such varied kinds of guests?
It depends on the level of facilities you provide. Some guests are purely looking for luxury and high-end facilities, who want room service and need someone on call 24 hours. Their expectations are totally different, which is not what we are.
We just try our best to keep the food simple and wholesome and our rooms and beds are very clean and comfortable. However, our focus is purely on nature, it’s not a place where you would say, “okay, now what do I do? Where do I go next? where’s the pool? what are all the amenities?”
It’s a place for people who want to feel, learn, and want to understand what kind of life surrounds them and have the sensitivity to see it, feel it, and absorb it.
So it’s been a filtration process, but our guests are our biggest natural filters. I can sense who’s going to come back for a second visit and I know who was touched by it, or who was not. It’s okay though because we are willing to lose those, but we’re not willing to lose our core and the sense of who we really are and what we really came in here for.
At the end of the day, in two and a half years, we’ve created a tribe of 10,000 very conscious followers and many of our guests have come, not just the second time, but the 10th and the 12th time too in a span of 2 years.
So it’s a conscious tribe that we are building; there would be a thousand and one resorts that would come up, but their entire focus will be towards making money. We, however, focus on conservation and the money is going to be a by-product of that and of our actions and not the whole focus and goal of our lives.
We’ve noticed One Earth Retreat is not listed on any OTAs…why is that?
We aren’t on any OTAs because there is no such thing as client control with it. It’s not about filling up the rooms and increasing your occupancy rate, it’s about who are the people that came here. Only after two years of being in business did I put up signage on the main road, even that was not there before because this is not a place for everybody.
This is a sacred space and people who need to find us will find us. We then focus on the people who have found us and we try to give them the best experience possible so that when they leave, they leave feeling like family.
I’ve seen in the past two and a half years, that strangers walk into this place and my life with whom we build a personal bond. With each and every one of them, that’s 90% of them, not 100%, but 90%.
That’s what makes them feel like they’re part of the tribe and they keep coming back and they will share it with only their very select few friends that would understand.
My guests are the biggest filtration process and my biggest marketing network. If anybody was unhappy about something or brought something to my notice that could improve, I make sure they won’t need to complain about it the second time they’re here.
Lastly, what would your advice be to people like you who want to make a difference and contribute back to the planet?
First and foremost, there are two parts to learning, one is through your own experience and mistakes and the other is through other peoples experiences and mistakes, but there is a combination of both that has to happen.
You can’t just be constantly making mistakes and learning from them, it’s a very difficult part. It’s a permanent path, no doubt, and you’ll learn some very harsh lessons, but you can choose a gentler way.
Understand your field and all the pros and cons first, don’t get into it blind and because it’s passion-driven, you might find yourself in a sticky situation.
So whatever you are setting out to do, first try and find someone who has pulled it off in that particular field, what is the success story? What projects failed and why? Do an honest analysis of it, it’s very important.
