The Things That Matter, While They Matter!
I keep coming back to a strange coincidence. Two months ago, I was walking around Mount Kailash, completely present in a way I rarely am these days. No calls, no stress, no notifications. Just breath, altitude and rock. This week, I found myself watching footage of the cloudburst in Nepal, looking at a landscape not far from where I had been, now almost unrecognisable. Hundreds of people were gone. Just like that. The same mountains that gave me one of the most meaningful weeks of my life had, for someone else, taken everything.
That contrast has stayed with me. It is easy to romanticise mountains from a safe distance. The stillness, the scale, the sense of being small but somehow in a good way. It is harder to hold on to that feeling when you remember that nature is completely indifferent to us. Both things can be true. The mountains can make you feel grateful and humbled, and they can also be unforgiving.
Somewhere between grief for strangers and gratitude for my own trip, I landed on something simpler than a lesson: attention. Not “seize the day” as a slogan, but actually noticing where you are while you’re in it.
That thought runs quietly through this issue. You’ll find it in our conversation with Sunny Deol, who has continued to evolve as an actor without losing the qualities that made audiences connect with him in the first place. You’ll find it in our feature on entrepreneurs turning grazing tables into a reason to gather, eat and spend time together. And you’ll find it in our travel pages, which are a reminder that sometimes getting away is not about ticking off a list of places. Sometimes it is simply about being somewhere else for a while.
And then there is the world beyond all of that.
My Instagram feed, meanwhile, has decided this is the month for multiverses, ancient aliens and Area 51. I honestly have no idea what to make of any of it. But there is something oddly comforting about being reminded of how little we really know. If we can’t be certain about the universe, or even about what tomorrow might bring, perhaps the best thing we can do is pay a little more attention to today.
So maybe that is what this issue is about. Book the trip. Set the table. Call the person you’ve been meaning to call. Not because everything is about to disappear tomorrow, but because time is already moving, quietly, whether we notice it or not.