I fell in love with Kashmir as soon as I stepped in for the first time in 2022 and since then have been finding reasons to keep going back.

Before Kashmir, I had already seen different parts of the Himalayas in other states of India and in Bhutan, which made me wonder “what is all the fuzz about Kashmir! It is the Himalayas after all, how different can it be from all the other Himalayan beauties that I have seen already? Why is it called Heaven on Earth”???

This curiosity made me choose Kashmir for my mountaineering and skiing course and now I can’t get over the beauty that I have experienced. The gushing sparkling rivers with prominent rocks underneath, mountains which keep changing their colors every 100 meters or so, so many wildflowers, snow on mountain top or on ground depending on the season, grasslands, forests, villages, wooden houses etc, etc, etc.  And might I add to the cliche “It is indeed Heaven on Earth”, and you have to experience it first hand to believe it.

I have travelled to the common tourist sites and the not so common ones, I have trekked a little, and I have walked in the markets and villages with general curiosity.

However, being a tourist, a traveller, an explorer and doing adventure sports courses there, I felt I had only experienced the place ,on the surface.

For the past 7 years, I mainly volunteer for inspiring grassroots ecological projects in India. To that end, I have been intently trying to get my foot in Kashmir to understand it better, deeper and broader. However nothing was working out in that space.

And then “Ecoversities Alliance Residencies Program” fell on my lap on the last day of the application. From the list of possible Farmversities in India and nearby, I was interested in SAGG Eco Village, which I had been following on social media for a while and was interested to explore in-person. That instantly was my first choice. I also gave a second choice because this was May, and the signs of war between India and Pakistan were in the air, instigated by the incident which took place in Kashmir itself.