What it took to build this
How this site was built
A plain account of how this site was made.
All of AboutWhat this is
How it's built, plainly
This page is just what it says — the parts this site is made of, and how they fit. No story to it: the craft, the stack, the photographs, and who built it.
The science of it
The engineering — what came first
Engineering came first — logic, the way a thing fits together and holds. It was the first thing we ever had a real hand for, learned in school and carried into a trade: years of backend systems, and the unglamorous craft of making software that does not break.
And beside the building, the discipline of making sure it actually works — the patient checking that a thing does what it was meant to, that nothing quietly fails. That is Roma's half of it: quality, held to, until it holds.
None of it matters here for its own sake. It matters only if it can make one real thing better — a homestay that can take its own bookings; a village that can put itself online without a city agency and a city bill; a record of a wedding that outlives the people in it. Whatever we have learned was never really ours; it belongs to the house, and in time to the village.
The art of it
The eye — gathered, never trained for
The art was never studied for; it gathered. A camera was always around — for years just snapshotting, not photography; the instinct less to make a beautiful picture than to keep things, to record them. Documentarians more than photographers — which is, it turns out, exactly what a house full of vanishing things needs.
The rest came the way everything good here does — by living. The drawing and the colour — acrylics, mostly, and of late a thing we do with the children, a pastime that grew through the long quiet of the covid years — the feel for light and shadow, the years of travel: none of it set out to be learned. We only built a life, and an environment around it, that let such things happen on their own. It is all cumulative, and the house holds the whole of it now.
And an honest place deserves to be shown honestly, and well. Too much of these hills gets flattened into the same tired template — a stock photo, a cramped page that could be anywhere at all. It does not have to be so. Up here, beauty is not a luxury; it is how a place earns the attention it is owed.
The photographs & films
Shot, gathered and kept by the family
Almost every photograph and film on this site is the family's own — most from Manohar's lenses, gathered over years on mnegi.com. The one exception is the weddings, where professionals were brought in to do the day justice.
And it is more than content. This is a house that keeps things, and the gathering runs from today's frames all the way back to the old photo albums and the family diaries. Building the site became a way to preserve all of it — heritage, documented, and shown honestly.
The stack
What it runs on
The plain technical picture — a React front end, with the INUK ecosystem doing the heavy lifting behind it.
Front end
React and Next.js, written in TypeScript, styled with Tailwind CSS.
Back end
Built on the INUK ecosystem's APIs.
Auth & profiles
User sign-in and social profiles brought in through the INUK API integration.
Messaging & features
Messaging and other features come from INUK's CXP — its customer experience platform.
Images & video
Served over INUK's CDN, backed by AWS CloudFront.
Hosting
Hosted by INUK on AWS, via Amplify.
Who built it
The two of us
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