City Tales began as a social media page by Rameen Khan in May 2019 to document his extensive travels and explorations across India documenting its famous and forgotten heritage that survives in the cities, towns and villages. Due to diversity of places depicted with a lot of unseen heritage, the page grew in popularity reaching 1.2 L followers across Instagram and facebook. The page boasted of stories from 15 states and 160 places.
Since the stories to be told were immense and not everything can be accommodated on digital medium, it was the need of the hour to take the tales offline and begin in-depth offline exploration and storytelling events in historic monuments of Delhi.
With this in mind KHOJ – The Heritage Exploration series was launched in Nov 2022. The first heritage walk in this series was held in Qutub Minar on 11th Dec’22 with 40 people in audience.
With great response, the walks started happening regularly and the audience grew. The number of places covered via walks expanded to 20 in Delhi alone including Humayun’s Tomb, Red Fort, Purana Qila, Lodhi Gardens etc. With positive word of mouth, the audience swelled to 80 attendees on an average. During the onset of summers, to avoid prolong walking, baithaks were introduced with razor sharp focus on stories of famous historic figures
Now that Delhi was being extensively covered and talked about, it was decided to start outside of Delhi explorations as well to get people up close with historically rich, heritage cities of India. The first outstation tour was held in Kashmir in July’23 with monthly group travel to diverse places since then. The portfolio of tours covers places from Kashmir to Hampi, from Deccan to Rajasthan, from Lucknow to Agra to Mandu.
Currently City Tales conducts 40 unique exploration and storytelling events in Delhi along with 10+ domestic/ international tours. The average audience in local city events is 80+ while monthly tours get 30-35 people.
The heritage walks are quite popular with media coverage in BBC, Indian Express, Indiatimes.com, Deccan Chronicle, Frontline, Mid Day and Asian Age