the eyes were always happy.

i have wanted the mountains longer than i have wanted any job. in 2019 i lived through a winter at hyatt in dharamkot, above mcleodganj, watching the mountains, the economy of the hotel and the life of people inside it, outside it and across himachal, and i fell in love with its good, its great and its angry. small places run on fewer things and more people, and that is what i keep going back for.

on my 28th birthday i landed in leh and spent twenty days without a phone, in homestays run by aunties running tight ships, at secmol, and hitch-hiking from leh to umling la and back, about 350 km each way, in the cars of people from ireland, haryana, karnataka, mumbai, punjab and the army. i went looking for a landscape and found people.

three weeks later that walk became the way i think about ut ladakh tourism at vinsan, where i lead content on a 50-page master brochure, 40 thematic brochures, 20 maps and 150 posts a month, and where the first line i loved writing was the harvest is in, the fields are resting, and nobody here is in a hurry.

writing ladakh for its own people is an honour i don’t take lightly, and you can’t write a place’s winter from gurugram, so i’m staying the winter, because on a mountain the adventure sport isn’t the trek, it’s living there when the water freezes and the roads close.