Namaste, from Jatin Chhabra. A Stepwell Traveller, & a planted aquarium hobbyist.

Hi all, I’m Jatin Chhabra, and thank you for visiting my blog. I am from Delhi, in my 30s, married, and in 2020 I became a dad. I’m now 40, living in Jaipur, and God gifted me a hobby that saved my brain and health in 2024 — the planted aquarium.

All the posts below are from my personal trips, which I have been engaged in since July 2016. My style of traveling is more inclined towards collecting. For instance, since 2016, I have visited two dozen ancient stepwells in India and have also written a guide on Indian stepwells, which you can check below. And this paragraph was from 2016.

In 2024, I bought a 5-liter glass bowl with 2 gourami and 2 molly fish. I was against buying it, but my kids insisted. Within 7 days—actually the very next day—both mollies died, and I posted the bowl picture on Reddit. And hell broke loose on me. I then realized that for these 4 fish, I need a bare minimum of a 10-gallon or 40-liter tank just for basic survival. So I took my kids’ tub, which could hold 25 liters of water, went to an aquarium shop, and they sold me an internal filter, an air pump, fish food, along with a water conditioner and a fish medicine which they told me to add 10 drops of daily.

Within a day, I realized that this medicine was an antibiotic, and no living organism can live happily with daily antibiotics. I stopped adding it and watched many YouTube videos on healthy fish keeping, which led me to Mr. Mayur Dev’s YouTube channel. Their staff told me some basics of fish keeping, water changes, and the advantages of planted tanks. I ordered some products from them, but sadly both my gourami died within 3 days as they were under continuous stress.

So then I took 4 months to study the basics of keeping an aquarium, like tank cycling, setting up planted tanks, water maintenance, and checking water parameters. Then I started a 1-foot cube, which held 22 liters of water, and I added 6 neon tetra (again a bad choice, as I later shifted them to my 3 feet tank) and 3 guppies. From here—8 November 2022 to April 2026—I made around two dozen planted tanks, sold quite a few of them on Facebook Marketplace, and still have 3 of them, with a total of 15 different varieties of fish, 13 of which are nano fish.

Now I have good knowledge of which plants to grow, which fish to keep, when to do water changes (some weekly and some every 3 weeks), which food is best for fish and why, and most importantly, which fish I should keep in a city like Jaipur, where in summer noon temperatures can go above 50°C.

So today, on 20 April 2026, I have finally decided to start writing blogs on my experience of keeping fish in planted tanks and share practical knowledge so that fish in your tank don’t die of stress.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to drop me a mail at this link.