Writing by Vishal Mehra
Occasional writing on India, Nepal and Bhutan — the jungle, the people, the philosophy, and what thirty-five years in the field teaches you about both travel and life.
The pages most visitors never reach. The chapters only a few guides know how to open.
01
Most visitors experience only the first chapter — the monuments, the heat, the colour. The book runs to many volumes. Thirty-five years into it, I am still finding pages I have not read before. This is the essay behind the keynote. What India truly is, and what it takes to encounter it.
Read the essay →A hundred thousand people around me. I came out of the water feeling clean like never before.
02
The largest peaceful gathering on earth. A hundred thousand people in the river before me. What I felt when I entered the water — and what Indian festivals actually are, beyond the scale, beyond the spectacle, beneath everything that most visitors see and most itineraries miss entirely.
Read the essay →A camel crossing a dry field with the unhurriedness of an animal that has never been late for anything.
03
Ramathra Fort is not Amber. It is not Mehrangarh. It is the kind of fort that changes guests slowly, without their permission — and in ways they often do not understand until three or four weeks after they get home. On Ravi and Gitanjali, Kalisil Lake at the hour before dark, and what it means to be with people who actually live their legacy rather than manage it.
Read the essay →"We thought we brought civilisation to you. We were wrong. You were light years ahead."
04
A British historian who had spent the entire tour giving me grief descended into Rani ki Vav and came back up a changed man. Seven terraces of 11th-century sandstone carving. Over 1,500 figures. And one sentence that said everything about India's civilisational depth that thirty-five years of itineraries had been trying to say.
Read the essay →1993. Early morning. Hardly anyone around. I looked at the wheel and said words I will not reproduce in a professional context.
05
Konark Sun Temple in Odisha. 1993. Early morning. No group, no itinerary — just a 23-year-old standing alone in front of the wheel. On what Konark gives you that the Taj cannot, why Odisha is India's most criminally underrated chapter, and the German engineer who went quiet in a way German engineers very rarely go quiet.
Read the essay →"By destroying learning centres you can take away everything that gives a culture credit for itself."
06
Austrian Buddhists walking the ruins of the greatest Buddhist university that ever existed. One woman's question — why did the invaders destroy all this knowledge? — and an answer that shocked her. On Nalanda, what was lost, and why a civilisation that did not believe in violence could not defend itself against one that did.
Read the essay →Bandhavgarh · February · 6:47am
Eight hundred encounters across thirty-five years. This one, at Bandhavgarh in February, was different. A tigress and what she taught me about the act of witnessing.
15 years. The same mistakes. None of them about money.
After fifteen years designing exclusively for ultra-high-net-worth clients, the patterns are clear. Four mistakes, none related to budget. All of them fixable in a single conversation.
Ranthambore vs Bandhavgarh vs Kanha vs Pench. The honest version.
Nobody asks this question expecting a diplomatic answer. Sighting rates, lodge quality, crowd levels and which reserve suits which kind of traveller. The version I give in private.
The grass. The light. The temperature. February in Central India.
Every week someone asks me when to come. The answer is almost always February. Here is the full reasoning — ecology, behaviour, light and logistics.
Chitwan. Bardia. The Karnali at dawn. Why Nepal surprises every client who goes.
Every India client I have suggested Nepal to has called it the best decision of the trip. The case for Chitwan and Bardia, and what no Indian reserve can replicate.
Bera. Granite boulders. A leopard at thirty feet. The encounter that stopped me.
Fifteen hundred days in the field. I can count on one hand the encounters that genuinely stopped me. One of them was in the Aravalli Hills, on a granite rock, at thirty feet.