Some places choose you. That’s what they don’t tell you in travel guides or Instagram reels. That beneath the palm trees and postcard sunsets, there’s a quiet magnetism that grips your bones and whispers, “Stay.”
Morjim did that to us. And here’s why we had no choice but to begin there:
1. It wasn’t crowded. It was calm. Like breath. Like pause.
North Goa screams in neon. Morjim exhales. While the rest of the state throws its chaotic party, Morjim folds its hands, sits by the sea, and listens. We didn’t want to build where people came to forget. We wanted a place where people could remember who they were.
2. Every morning smelled like coconut husk, salt, and second chances.
You don’t need a therapist when you’ve got the Arabian Sea telling you, “It’s okay to begin again.” In Morjim, the air doesn’t just refresh you. It makes you feel like time is elastic. And if you’ve ever wanted to heal, this is where your past forgives you.
3. The locals don’t sell Goa. They live it.
No tourist traps. No plastic smiles. Just people who know the tides better than timetables. That mattered to us. If we were going to build a space rooted in honesty, we needed it surrounded by people who had never faked their way through life.
4. It gave us space to be wrong, then right.
We made mistakes. We chose the wrong tiles. Fought over kitchen layouts. Blew through budgets. And Morjim didn’t care. It gave us rain to slow us down. Sunlight to push us forward. It let us fail, quietly. Then rise, quietly too. That kind of patience is rare in places with signal bars and urgent deadlines.
5. It reminded us: Slow is not stuck.
Slow is sacred. It’s what lets you taste your coffee, notice how a chair feels, listen to a stranger’s story without rushing them. Morjim taught us that movement is not always the goal. Presence is.
6. The soil had soul.
We planted our first lights into that soil with shaky hands and hopeful hearts. The land held us. Not because we were special, but because we were sincere. That’s the only offering Morjim ever asks of you : sincerity.
7. It didn’t need us. We needed it.
And that’s the truth. Morjim would have been just fine without ALTR NATIV. But we wouldn’t have been fine without Morjim. It gave us the blank canvas. The quiet stage. The raw, unpolished beginning that felt more honest than any plan we had on paper.
This isn’t the end of the story. It’s just where the first line was written. And if you ever find yourself here, in the middle of nowhere and the center of everything, know that you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.
– Jaiwardhan Saraf, ALTR NATIV
