The menace of vanishing snows now haunts the Himalayan region, taking away the very essence of the mountains for Indians and people from around the world. By Vipin Labroo

Poetry by Urmi Chakravorty: ‘Hope glistened on the peaks afar / while the russet dunes of chinar leaves / formed a gentle duvet for our fiery yen.’

Sayan Aich Bhowmik’s debut collection, I Will Come with a Lighthouse (Hawakal Publishers) dissolves the space between innate and extraneous, past and present, dreams and disillusionments, commonplace and cosmic, seamlessly flitting through rooms, cities, memory, borders and history. By Ritoshree Chatterjee

Written of a time under armed occupation in the Kashmir valley, Farah Bashir’s memoir Rumours of Spring (2021) entwines the geographical and corporeal, the social and psychological, where the violence of the world remains painfully connected to the violence within. By Paromita Patranobish

For decades, abandoned and alone in a desolate jungle mansion in Delhi lived Wilayat Mahal and her self-proclaimed royal family. After the death of the last prince at Malcha Mahal, Abhimanyu Kumar decoded history, personal accounts, and mysterious texts to explore if the family were the true inheritors of the House of Oudh.

An interview with author Saba Karim Khan: “Skyfall illuminates the soul of a Sufi love song. It is underpinned by a longing for hope, a desperation to see the glass half-full, despite the bleakness we envision about the future.”- By Chintan Girish Modi

‘The avalanche went to ground; in its path all snow had slipped off the mountain, leaving only rocks and ice. For a moment the world was suspended in fear and dread. Chaos followed.’ Zachary Conrad recalls a fateful snowboarding adventure in Gulmarg and the lessons learned at the mercy of snowy, Kashmiri peaks.

Performance artist Inder Salim has traversed the profane, the political, and the poetic. Abhimanyu Kumar explores the process behind Salim’s ground-breaking work, where the mundane becomes magical, imperfections are embraced, taboos are broken, and for fleeting moments, the audience and the artist share a sense of transcendence.

In recent years, journalists have been attacked, intimidated, and the likes of Gauri Lankesh and Shujat Bhakari murdered. Nikita Chatterjee explains how violence, government pressure, paid news, and more have shackled India’s press freedoms and landed a major blot upon our idea of democracy.

Gulmarg’s Raja’s Hut was the subject of the 2018 documentary Iron Khan. Citing the film and personal experience, Zachary Conrad recalls the guest-house and its owners, in the foreground of the Himalayas, snowboarding, and insurgency in Kashmir.

Four poems by Gopal Lahiri: ‘this calmness, this silence / the cruel and blasphemous are marking / an uneasy path; we can’t erase.’

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