From code to moss: how a techie's hobby became Nirvana Nest
A terrarium on a desk started as a way to switch off after work. It became a small studio in Moulali. This is the story, told by Hanuma.
The first jar
For years my days looked like most days in tech: a laptop, a queue of tickets, calls that ran into each other, and an evening spent scrolling to come down from it all. The work was good. The quiet was missing.
The first terrarium was an accident. A glass jar that had held something else, a handful of moss from a damp corner of the building, a little soil, a lid. I put it on the desk next to the monitor and forgot about it. A week later the glass fogged in the morning and cleared by afternoon, and the moss had turned a deeper green. Nothing on my screen had ever done that on its own.
Why a sealed jar changes how you sit
A closed terrarium runs its own weather. Water rises as vapour in the warm part of the day, gathers on the cooler glass, and rains back into the soil. Once it is balanced you do almost nothing. You watch.
Watching turned out to be the point. I would come home, make tea, and sit with the jar for a few minutes before touching a phone. New leaves on the fittonia. A fern frond uncurling over three days. A snail I had not planted, going about its business. The mind that had been running all day slowed to the speed of the glass.
From one jar to a bench
One jar became three. Then a bowl with a tiny house and two hens, for a friend's daughter. Then a cylinder with a Buddha for my own shelf, because the figure said what I felt when I looked into it: sit still, breathe, this is enough.
Friends asked for pieces. Then friends of friends. Weekends filled with substrate layers, charcoal, driftwood and moss, and a corner of the flat turned into a bench. That is the whole origin of Nirvana Nest. There was no business plan. There was a hobby that kept asking for more room.
What the side hustle actually is
Today the studio in Moulali makes closed terrariums and paludariums to order, runs 1-on-1 workshops, and takes gifting and bulk orders for weddings, festivals and offices. The day job is still there. The bench is where the rest of me lives.
What I sell is a glass world that looks after itself. What I actually hand over, I think, is a few quiet minutes a day. The same ones the first jar gave me.
If you are a techie reading this
You do not need a studio. You need one jar, some moss, a lid and the patience to leave it alone. Put it where you work. Look at it before you open your inbox. If it does for you what it did for me, you will know within a week.
And if you would rather start with a piece that is already balanced, or learn to build one in an afternoon, the studio is a message away.