“I couldn’t fulfil my father’s dream for him. But I could build something that would help hundreds of others fulfil theirs,” says Saakshi.

For Saakshi Maheshwari (38), that thought became the beginning of something she had never planned to build. A travel writer and content creator for more than a decade, she had spent years helping others find places. But after losing her father in 2023, travel began to mean something different. It became a way of giving senior citizens the freedom to experience the journeys they had spent years postponing.

Today, she runs ‘The Original Travel Company’ with her husband, Rajat Arora, taking small groups of seniors across India and overseas. Since launching the senior travel initiative in June 2023, she says she has travelled with approximately 350 senior citizens across more than 40 domestic and international journeys.

But the story began with a man who believed retirement should not mean giving up on life.

The man behind the idea

Her father, Dr S K Maheshwari, was an army doctor who served for five years, including a posting in Tawang.

He later worked with organisations including WHO and UNICEF on India’s polio eradication programme and with the Uttar Pradesh government on leprosy eradication and grassroots healthcare. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when most people were afraid to step outside, he travelled to villages around Agra to help people who had contracted the virus.

“He was a doctor by profession, but service was at the core of everything he did. He believed that medicine was a way of serving people, and that compassion was as important as treatment,” she tells The Better India.

He also had a particular concern for senior citizens. He wanted to spend more time visiting old age homes and using his medical experience to help elderly people. But work and family responsibilities kept pushing that dream into the future.

He was also an enthusiastic traveller. He loved long drives, wanted to explore Kerala, and hoped to return to Tawang. He often spoke about travelling through the Northeast.

Then, in January 2023, he was diagnosed with stage IV liver cancer.

Two months later, at just 64, he died.

Just months before the diagnosis, Saakshi had travelled with her father to Kerala in October 2022. She remembers him dancing beside the sea, laughing whenever the waves touched his feet. “I didn’t know then that it would be one of our last trips together,” she says.

His death made her question something many families take for granted.

“Like many families, we had assumed there would always be ‘later’,” she says. “Later to travel, later to slow down, later to fulfil dreams. His diagnosis, and then his death, taught me that later is never guaranteed.”

She had already spent much of her adult life around travel.

Born and raised in Meerut, she completed her BTech in Greater Noida between 2004 and 2008. She then worked with Accenture from 2008 to 2011 before pursuing an MBA in Mumbai from 2011 to 2013. She returned to the corporate world, working with companies and startups until late 2015.

But travel had always been an itch she could not ignore.

Around 2015, she began travel writing and content creation while still working. She later left the corporate world and spent more than 10 years travelling, writing for publications including AirAsia’s in-flight magazine and working with tourism boards such as Assam Tourism, Madhya Pradesh Tourism and Malaysia Tourism.

“Travel taught me........

© The Better India