Our Own Elsewheres

A Place Where I Shall Meet My Father Again

Saher Hiba Khan

Death, in religions around the world, is seen as a journey after life—while for some, it is nothing more than worm food. When I lost my father in 2021, I didn’t know whether to believe in the journey or the worm-food theory. The only thing that continues to eat at me, four years after his demise, is that I don’t have him to share my achievements with, or my losses, or the things that bother me. I feel clueless. I feel an unexplained rage—a despicable hatred towards him at times. He isn’t there when I think I need his assurance or guidance. My mother keeps reminding me of his absence, even though I have become quite accustomed to it, because that is my only coping mechanism. It’s not normal—I am aware. You ignore your trauma long enough to have a once-a-year nervous breakdown. I have mine on his death anniversary, every time.

In many religions, everyone who dies is believed to embark on this after-journey towards hell or heaven. What has somehow made me feel better is the belief that I shall meet my father again in heaven. In my imagination, he is waiting for me under a tree, with his arms wide open and I run to him as I always did before he passed away; I hug him, sob my eyes out, and tell him about all the ups and downs of my life.

I shout at him for not staying long enough to see his kids become independent, make a name for themselves, and continue his legacy.

I tell him about all the plans I had for him and Ma—sending them off to explore new places, letting them spend time together after all their struggles, sending them for Haj together. All the things he never did for himself because he sacrificed everything for his kids. Me walking beside him forever... That’s my imagined place.

Remembering Nani Ka Ghar through Borrowed Memories

Ainnie Arif

Earlier this year, while dusting the back of my father’s cupboard, I came across an old photograph of my elder sister cradled in my grandmother’s arms. I sent it to my sister with the caption, “You have a photo with nani.” 

All my life, I have grown up on stories of nani ka ghar—the walls that are withering away, the doors that creak, the steady tick-tock of the old clock, nani ki kahaniyan, the china cabinet filled with treasured tea cups, the laddoo ka dabba and the endless servings of food. 

Unfortunately, I never truly got to experience it. My grandmother passed away when I was a toddler, taking away her presence from the world and nani ka ghar from me. For me, it remains an ‘Imagined Space’.

As a premature baby, when my mother fell ill after delivering  me, I was sent to my nani ka ghar. I am told I had the time of my life there during the first six months of my life. Needless to say, I have no memory of it. All that remains are stories—from my eldest cousin, who helped nurse me back to health alongside nani; from my mama, who says, “tum bina nani ke soti nahi thi”; and from my mother, who tells me, “Mata ne tumhara bohat khayal rakha hai.”

I only get to hear tales of it. I long for a life I have already lived, one whose textures I can almost taste, yet it feels like a memory implanted rather than lived. Nani ka ghar carries its own values and lessons. I hear friends say, “Nani ne achaar banana sikhaya,” and my mother reflects, “Mata ne humko itni azaadi nahi di jitni humne tumko di hai.”

For me, nani ka ghar exists only in borrowed memories, repeated sentences, and stories retold so often that they almost feel like my own...  

I wish I had a photograph with her—the woman who made my mother who she is; who instilled in her the pride of independence, despite never having made the 60-km journey from Unnao to Lucknow herself. 

My nani, who taught my mother what education truly means; a woman who was gone too soon.

I am certain she would be proud of my mother for raising two daughters, educated and independent. And even though her house remains an Imagined Place, the principles she bequeathed to me are anything but imagined.

A Candle Across the Kohistan-e-Namak

Aasheesh Sharma

An entire mountain range made of rock salt. The first time my grandfather uttered the words ‘Kohistan-e-Namak,’ he conjured up an imagery that boggled my mind. As a seven-year-old resting under a quilted blanket with him in the winter chill, I thought grandpa was making up a story. I had no clue that a 300 km-long mountain range in the Punjab province holding the world’s largest deposits of pink Himalayan salt actually existed. But the tales flowed effortlessly out of his mouth and I looked at his withered face and one-and-a-half day old stubble with the wonder reserved for grandpas.

He said the range spread along the south of the Potohar Plateau and the north of the Jhelum River where his village was.

“If you lit a candle on one side of the mountain, you could see it from the other,” he said, even as I gaped at him.

He went on to share anecdotes about how my great- grandfather could pull a horse out of a well with its tail. The tales continued. His father would swim across the Jhelum every day for work. And then one day, the sailab took him. He died trying to rescue his son from the river in spate. From then, my grandfather developed a fear of water.

When the Partition uprooted our family, my grandmother took the train to Shimla, to another mountain, carrying my father. My dad, a Midnight Child, was conceived in the Jhelum province and born in Himachal Pradesh.

Even as I consider Shimla my home-town, stories of that village on the banks of the Jhelum that my grandfather told me refuse to leave my mind.

A newspaper assignment took me to Pakistan in 2004 for a cricket story. I got a single-city visa and returned home. But I still long to visit that riverside village and light a candle at the Kohistan-e-Namak. Till that comes true, the village will remain a place in my imagination.

Spaces Built from What One Has Endured

Fozia Yasin

Spaces which exist only in the imagination. No fantasies, no mythical lands, no legends. These spaces are built out of the experiences:

Quiet rooms. Open windows. Mellow mornings. 

Peaceful voices and calm breathes. 

Sunlight is streaming in on the floor, a child sleeping without fear. There’re unpretentious smiles and uncomplicated joy.

Imagined places have: Women who survived, women who imagine, women who rebuild, women who didn’t explain. 

Women laughing loudly because survival must also sound like joy. For them courage, like quiet fire. And love, that begins with themselves. 

Imagined places are held close, built slowly and lived into. 

When Nina Simone sings Feeling Good and you suddenly believe her because hope isn’t linear.

Some Urdu words that taste like ache: qurbat, rehmat and sabr. 

Books stacked on the floor: Agha Shahid Ali, Parveen Shakir and Arundhati Roy. There’re dog-eared pages and many more stories that refuse to betray us. 

Traces of perfume on winter shawls. 

Snow from the homeland when the world refuses to be kind or the memories of almond blossom air. 

Photographs of the person you once used to be. Prayers that no longer know what to ask for. Grace again because we keep trying. Hurt again because life keeps insisting. 

Borders that don’t bleed and countries that do not punish the living. 

At imagined places, tomorrow is kinder. Joy stays, Gaza lives and Kashmir heals. 

Faiz Ahmed Faiz softly in the mind: “dil na-umeed to nahi, na-kaam he toh hai...” 

Kindness of strangers:

Someone holds a door; someone pays a fare quietly; someone sends chai when the world collapses; and someone says 'I see you' without asking for your story. 

Somewhere, Kendrick Lamar in the background, reminding us that survival can be defiant; that pain can speak without breaking. 

That dignity is not a gift, it is claimed, even when bodies ache, even when the world trembles. 

Even when small victories are swallowed by headlines. 

At imagined have: 

Dua, the everyday kind that keeps you standing; 

Sura, half-remembered from the childhood, when the world trembles; 

Tasalli, arriving without permission. And Tawakul. 

A heart unafraid of hope.

Leonard Cohen on a rainy evening… “there is a crack…” and healing suddenly feels possible. 

Roads that lead home even when you don’t know what home is anymore. And in your imagined places, you are not perfect. You are you. Unapologetically. You are enough. You are allowed. You are whole.

A Liminal Space

Vineetha Mokkil

I once asked a favourite writer—famous, but not blinded by fame—how to write about this world while also being in it. How does one take in all the beauty and ugliness, all the kindness and cruelty, all the information and disinformation, all the innocence and intrigue, and find a way to weave it all into a coherent narrative? His answer set me off on a search: to find a place that is elsewhere, a place which offers a vantage point to all that is going on, but also offers a certain remove from all the storms that sweep across our seas.

This place isn’t on any map. Its latitude and longitude are not set by geographers. Its borders are fluid. It glides between the past and the present, between the real and the surreal, between the here and now and the hereafter. It stands still, it is quiet. But the silence is not the silence of the grave. The cries of the world can be heard from there, the colours seen, the rumbles sensed. Nothing is shut out, but nothing overwhelms. In this liminal space, fragmented thoughts coalesce. Ideas, buried deep in the mind, sprout like tender shoots. Stories take shape. Characters become flesh-and-blood figures. There is freedom to wander in this liminal space; room to let my mind out of its iron cage. To let go of jaded thought patterns; to cut through the everyday chaos and arrive at clarity.

Nostalgia Is Elsewhere

Champak Bhattacharjee

When I think of Tezpur, Assam, my birthplace, I don’t just remember a place—I remember a feeling. Slow mornings, green everywhere, fresh air, clear blue sky, rain that used to change the shape of my days. Life felt lighter. As a child, I lived in that real world and spent a lot of time with my friends. 

Growing up took me far away from that world. Work, metros, deadlines—all real, all necessary. But somewhere, those earlier days in Assam stayed in my memory. I always imagine that I would go and live there again. 

But today, that place has changed completely. I can't feel the same way about it and the way it was preserved in my memory. 

Now, I always feel the place I want to live in is elsewhere—not in another country, but in that older space I once knew. An imaginary place shaped by nostalgia, where time moves slowly, and life feels great again. Like Assam once did.

Seeking Solace In Nature

Subhashree Rath

One of my earliest childhood memories happens to be that of taking an early morning stroll under the summer sun to pick flowers in a wicker basket. My grandmother would use these for her morning prayer. Little did I know that this ritual would cultivate my lifelong curiosity about the natural world. I distinctly remember the first time I wanted to ‘capture’ a moment—the home garden was drenched in fresh rain and little creatures buzzed and flitted about, 12-year-old me was fascinated by the fleeting formation of water droplets on leaves. There was no turning back; I would eagerly wait for it to rain in Bhubaneswar so I could see what nature had in store for me to capture with a point-and-shoot camera. It makes sense then that so many years later I continue to seek solace in nature. I am pleasantly surprised if I spot the moon or the rare star, twinkling in the Delhi night sky, watching over us city dwellers waiting to get home so we can stare at a bigger screen than the one we have at office.

My favourite place is now perhaps fiction, a world where I don’t have to document every crescent moon and tiny lady bug because I’m not sure how many more of these I will see.

In My Imagined Place, Memory Is Shelter

Mohammad Ali

I did not set out to imagine another country. I wanted only to write on the one I lived in. But somewhere along the way, the nation I thought I knew became harder to describe, and then harder to name. Words I had once used freely began to feel heavy in the mouth. Sentences arrived already rehearsed, already cautious. I found myself writing not what I saw, but what I could safely phrase.

That is how my imagined place began to take shape. It grew quietly, through small acts of subtraction. A word I chose not to use. A detail I softened. A paragraph I rephrased to avoid misinterpretation. Over time, the censor moved inside me, settling into instinct.

I am a journalist. Or at least, I used to think that was the most relevant thing about me. Increasingly, it is not. In public debate, online abuse, television studios, police paperwork, and casual conversation, my professional identity is overridden by something else: my religious one. I am not encountered first as a reporter, but as a Muslim reporter. Sometimes not even that—just a Muslim, fullstop. The nation has a way of shrinking you like this.

You are allowed to belong, but conditionally. Your grief must be measured, your anger moderated, your questions phrased carefully. You learn quickly that some stories will always be read as confession, not reporting; as grievance, not inquiry. This produces a strange form of internal exile. I live in the country of my birth, speak its languages, report on its institutions, and yet feel increasingly foreign to its official imagination. I have not crossed a border, but a border has crossed me. I carry it into newsrooms, courtrooms, airports, social media feeds.

The imagined place I inhabit now is built around this awareness.

It is a country of pauses. In this place, silence is not emptiness; it is a strategy. I know when not to speak, when to lower my voice. I know which words will trigger suspicion or surveillance, which will summon a mob of good-faith interrogators asking me to prove my loyalty.

The public language of the nation is loud, muscular, triumphant. Flags wave constantly. Slogans repeat until they sound like truths. As a journalist, this is disorienting. Journalism depends on friction—between claim and fact, power and accountability. But friction is precisely what the nation increasingly refuses. It wants affirmation, not inquiry. Participation, not critique.

I find myself returning obsessively to the past—not because it was better, but because it felt less surveilled. There were arguments then, bitter ones. There was violence. But there was also space to disagree without being assigned a permanent identity. Today, remembering that plurality feels almost subversive.

In my imagined place, memory is a form of shelter. I remember cities before they were renamed into uniformity. Neighbourhoods before they were policed into silence. Newsrooms where disagreement was expected rather than pathologised. These memories operate as proof that another way of being national once existed.

Violence, when it arrives, often does so indirectly. A threat on the phone. A message forwarded “for awareness.” A list circulating quietly. A case filed to teach a lesson. You learn to feel it before it happens. This anticipation changes how you walk, how you speak, how you choose your words. The imagined place I inhabit is attentive to these bodily cues. It is always alert, scanning. Exhaustion is part of its architecture.

Language fractures under this pressure. I notice it in my own writing. I rely more on quotation, less on assertion. I let others speak for me.

When direct speech becomes dangerous or futile, writing finds other routes. Allegory, memory, reflection, fragmentation—these are not aesthetic choices alone. They are survival tools.

My imagined place is a space where contradictions are allowed to coexist. Where I can be a journalist and a Muslim without apology. Where silence is chosen, not imposed.

Home, in this place, is unstable but real. It is made of friendships, shared meals, late-night conversations. It is sustained by those who recognise the difference between criticism and hatred, between faith and fanaticism. It exists despite the nation’s narrowing imagination.

This imagined place feels fragile. It depends on memory, language, and the stubborn refusal to surrender complexity. But for now, it is where I write from.

My Imaginary Landscape is Actually Real

Lalita Iyer

A move to the hills means different things to different people.

For me, it was being able to reconnect with my parents. 

Once I moved to my house-with-a garden in Kodaikanal, I invited my father over (he is the one who has land skills in the family). Within two weeks, he had cleared my backyard, planted some wild sevanthis (chrysanthemums) in my front yard to join the poinsettias, roses and hydrangeas. There is a plantain and a pink lily uncurling in my backyard, revealing one leaf at a time. We cooked together every day with fresh produce from the local Sunday market. I made notes, because none of these recipes are on the internet.

And we talked. Something we hadn’t done in years, decades. It helped that the frequent power failures induced many candle-lit evenings where he mostly spoke about his childhood, his aunts and uncles, working on the land with his father and his many travels on Indian Railways...

Legend has it that if you ever encounter a bison in the Palani Hills, there’s only one thing to do—step aside and wait for it to pass. It could take hours but wait you must, because everything is smaller in comparison to the bison—you, your car, the path to your home. Sometimes, I would spend hours watching a family of bison from my window or terrace until they were sated and left.

And then I realised, I don’t need an imaginary landscape to escape to. I live in it.

My Ancestral Village That I Never Visited

Animikh Chakrabarty

My father left Bangladesh in the middle of the night with a few tattered sacks, accompanied by his mother and grandmother and his ailing younger brother. The riots of 71 had spread over the land, including the village of Narail, where we had our ancestral home. I grew up in a small room, of a humble home my father managed to raise a year before my birth. We struggled as a family, with my father’s job in a jute mill, and my mother, still studying to get a job as soon as possible. At night, after work, my father would tell me stories of Narail, of the river that flowed past our ancestral house of generations, the fields, the mango trees. He would tell me how he used to go to the market to sell mangoes after my grandfather’s death, about the Durga puja in the village, his school, the vast landscape… He created this idea of Narail in my mind, where, if we had stayed, we wouldn’t have had to struggle as we did. Before falling asleep, I often wished I was playing with my father in the fields of our ancestral house. I could imagine him as a boy of my age.

I never visited Narail. I have been to Bangladesh, as an invited artist. I have been to many other places, but never Narail. I felt that the reality of the place will break my imaginary perception. It will not be enough for me, it will never be satisfactory.

A Space Where No One Else Can Enter

Jagisha Arora

Since childhood, there has been an imaginary place that lives in my mind—a place of my own. When the world grows too loud or stops listening, I go there quietly. It is a place where I exist without explanation.

In this place, there is a single flower pot with red roses. Beside my bed, there is a small shelf of my favourite books which are familiar and comforting. A music player plays the songs I love and melodies that seem to understand my moods. A writing desk stands nearby where I write without interruption. Here, I cook my favourite meals, and there is no hurry to do the dishes. No one is waiting. No one is watching. This place remains entirely mine.

This imaginary place was not escapism but survival. It held my fears, my loneliness, and my dreams.

It appears when I write—my very own imaginary place.

Elsewhere, Away from Everywhere Else

Anwiti Singh

The idea of elsewhere is a very raw, feminine desire for me. 

And when I think of my elsewhere, I think of ducks. The cute little yellow ducklings, the brown and white adults, some swimming, some asleep, some flapping their wings violently at their mates and attempting flights over the small body of water I own. Is it a pond or a lake? Pond, I think. Even in my fantasies, I do not own a parcel of land large enough to have a lake. Let’s have some realism in our fantasies. But there are trees, tall and dense forest walls in our escape from the world. It is protected by nature. 

I yearn for this piece of land. It is my revenge against this world. The world that wants to stifle any desire among my kind. Where even owning land was not allowed for my ancient and long-dead sisters. But my imagined land will have a coven of sisters (witches). We will work the land. Not like Mother India. No, a lot more sophisticated because we won’t have to deal with an evil Lala. In fact, there will be no Lala of any kind, good or evil. This will be a reclusive space, an escape, from the world build by men, for men.  This land is also my revenge against my relatives. It will look a lot like the land my father once owned. They first tried to plant semal and seesham. The roots failed. They then tried mangoes. Those, too, died. 

The litchis, though, survived. And thrived. It was the sight of my father’s labours, his most prized possession. A spot where my sister and I ran through fields of mustard on terribly hot afternoons of the chilly winters; before departing to the madahi (shed) under the litchi trees where my father sat looking down at his jewels. Red rubies of litchi, yellow sapphires of mustard, green emeralds of guava, and strings of other vegetation living in between these. 

I loved this place. It was where I met friends, all four-legged. The cattle of the villagers which came to graze. One time, a herd of goats befriended me. I started plucking litchi leaves from the lower branches to help my horned friends eat more. Too late I realised, there was a bee or a wasp’s nest. I was attacked brutally. Bitten all over my face and body for attacking their home.

The villagers from the musahar toli  who lived around the orchard—slathered me in mehndi paste. I was orange for weeks.

But years passed, the mustard farm was sold to get some much-needed funds, the ganne ke khet gone during another financial crisis. All that remained was that litchi grove. The stubborn patch of Bihar’s most famous fruit next to a nala (drain).

The land, which he didn’t inherit but bought, was passed on to his youngest daughter—me. I was to go back, build it anew. Mushrooms. Maybe flowers. Something long-lasting perhaps? I settled on an idea. Wait till you get better, we go back, and chart out a plan. It will be a cold storage, a ginger farm, and a mushroom farm. He agreed. He rejoiced, his daughter was thinking of his legacy. Then, he died. He left me alone. The idea of reviving that land kept me going. Three years later, another shocker came my way. The land was ‘sold’, by a relative. It was ‘sold’ or promised to a Bahubali, Bihar is famous for them after all. There wasn’t much I could do. He must have assumed my father didn’t have sons so why not!

My ‘Elsewhere Land’, which is as real in my fantasies as the laptop where I type this, is planned as a two-fold revenge. One against this cruel world. One against the patriarchal relatives. No Twitter allowed on my land. We choose peace. We laugh as we grill the mushrooms we grew and the chickens we raised. We drink rum as we watch the sunset across a hill far away from our land. Our ducks have to sleep now.  My dogs are awake, along with my coven, and we dance barefoot on moist grass till midnight. We wear our heart’s desires to cover our bodies; nothing for anyone’s gaze. Billowing robes of a forgotten medieval era to satin nightgowns well suited for a rich heiress. We don’t have to care. We just have to be. 

The fire dies down to embers and embers are now being smothered by the foggy envelope around us.

I go inside, our mansion we built together. The lights are dim, we are away from people but not away from technology, duh! The light aches in our feet soon ebbs away as we cocoon ourselves in blankets made of fleece.

Ready for a new day. To harvest more mushrooms. To feed more chicken. To write my next best-selling thriller novel. To read till my eyes hurt. To feel safe in my coven and know no betrayals are imminent. 

My Favourite Imagined Landscape: A Country Where My Friend is Free

Apeksha Priyadarshini

A chilly night at the dhaba, where your breath turns to steam and goosebumps run through the breadth of your body; a bonfire, whose warmth seeps through your woollens, as if lifting your soul from a slumber; a cup of tea that keeps your enthusiasm invigorated as you shiver in the December winds; and friends talking into the night, without a care for when tomorrow arrives. 

My favourite spaces have always been defined by the people who inhabit them. And nothing comforts me more than to recall the times that I spent with my friend, Umar, at our university, when he was a free man. When I think of a landscape that I would want to keep going back to, I conjure an alternate imagination of the five years that my friend has spent behind bars as an undertrial, for the crime of dissenting against the powers that be. 

In that happy place, my friend is not hounded for who he is, not criminalised for what he believes, not persecuted for his wants and needs. There, we speak over each other incessantly in the heat of our arguments, we fight for what we think is right without fear and we laugh at the terrible jokes he loves to crack. In this imagined world, there are no limits to learning or to loving. There is no one to abuse or harass you for choosing a friend who happens to belong to another religion. You don’t live under a cloud of suspicion and hate for believing in something that others may not always agree to. It’s a place where smiles don’t perpetually carry the painful awareness that someone has been torn away from you and condemned to a life of isolation and infinite darkness. It’s a place that is just and free. Only in one’s imagination does this world come alive, but what a wonderful place it could have been!

Elsewhere, Where I Can Step Back And Find My Rhythm

Agnideb Bandyopadhyay

X types out a few words, tilts his head, and looks at the screen. The gentle tap of the keys turns into a loud thud of the screen being shut. The anger at not being able to write is consuming. The despair palpable...In a bit, X reopens his laptop, looks at the screen, and toggles between the countless open tabs. This was his sixth piece of the day. He goes back to his published pieces for the day and reads the first one loudly enough to drown out the ticking clock. Research, facts, clarity—it has all of these. It reads well. X hides a smile and toggles back to the blank page on his screen. He still has three more to do for the day and must find a way. Taking a deep breath, he looks out of the window, staring at the city lights till they blur into oblivion. He snaps out of the short-lived daze. Reminds himself that it was only normal to feel frazzled. He has done good work and claws back to the dream he chases with every word he writes —of becoming a journalist who dives deeper into issues, asking difficult questions, holding people in power to account.

My imaginative escape is into a world where news isn't content, where traction doesn't control creativity, and where populating websites don’t define X's work. A world where the impact of the 24*7 news cycle is critiqued and where information overload is acknowledged.

My favourite 'elsewhere' is a land where X can choose to take a step back and find his rhythm without the ticking growing louder. A land where X is a journalist and gets to call himself one— where every word he writes reminds him of the reason he chose to pursue the profession in the first place.

The Pride Lands: Where Balance Matters More than Conquest

Rani Jana

Frame9, TextboxMy favourite landscape is the Pride Lands—the fictional savannah at the centre of The Lion King. A vast swathe of golden grasslands, acacia silhouettes against burning sunsets, and Pride Rock rising like a witness to time—the Pride Lands are imagined as a world governed by balance rather than conquest.

What draws me to this landscape is how it visualises responsibility. The land flourishes when its ruler understands stewardship; it withers when power becomes extractive. In this sense, the Pride Lands feel less like fantasy and more like allegory. Seasons change, herds migrate, life and death are part of a visible cycle—a reminder that belonging to a place means recognising one’s smallness within it.

In a world facing ecological collapse and leadership crises, this imagined place continues to offer a quiet lesson: landscapes are not backdrops to human ambition, but living systems shaped by how we choose to lead, inhabit, and listen.

The Pride Lands stay with me because they ask a simple, unsettling question: what does it mean to deserve the land you stand on?

Multicultural Malaysia

S. S. Jeevan

When I went to Malaysia in 2005, I was told that the country’s landscape had been crippled by racial tensions. But it was only when I stepped out of the airport, I saw Malaysia’s amazing tryst with multiculturalism. Though an Islamic country, Muslims enjoy much more freedom than most other countries. Women wear the tudong—a tight drape framing the face—along with jeans or T-shirts. But it is not a mandatory dress code.

Pork and alcohol too are available in almost every part of the country. The multiculturalism manifests itself in the rendang that peacefully co-exists with the kway teow or the butter chicken in numerous food courts. And for a country with a huge ethnic minority—Chinese and Indian—Malaysia’s inclusive culture is truly remarkable.

Close to seven per cent of the country’s population comprises second and third generation Indians, most of them employed in the service sector. Indians came to Malaysia as illegal workers in the early part of the century. A growing number of new generation Indians now occupy Malaysia’s upper middle-class society, working as doctors, engineers and computer professionals. In many ways, Indians add colour to Malaysia’s multi-cultural society and they hope to get a bigger share of the country’s fast-paced developmental cake.

It was a classic David versus Goliath story; but for the world of publishing. In 1995, a small group of enthusiastic journalists, led by an even more enthusiastic editor, launched a tiny, low-budget magazine called Outlook. It didn’t even have an office building yet and operated out of two rooms of a government-owned Lodhi Hotel (not the present swanky version). Their aim was clear – to rival a media giant named India Today, along with smaller titans like Frontline and others. The time for print was dead, said the naysayers. TV had arrived. It had faces and words (not as loud as today) and early news delivery. But Mehta and co. didn’t care. They had a job to do. To slay the giant. To report. To bring change. Outlook’s first issue opened with Kashmir. Copies of the magazine were burnt. But the magazine already showed its irreverence to prescribed notions, standards, and everything else at a time when reporting from the region demanded courage, patience, and clarity. We did it. Unafraid, unapologetic, unhinged. Over thirty years, governments fell and rose, culture transformed, the internet reshaped the world, globalisation accelerated, and Outlook, too, changed. Leadership evolved. Inclusivity deepened. Lenses were swapped. The magazine expanded its horizon, moving beyond the urgency of the moment to reflect, analyse, and step back. Through a ten-day cycle, thematic issues now explore politics, culture, conflict, and resistance in depth, finding meaning in poetry, art, and literature alongside reporting. The past is present, the present is immediate, and together they shape the future. Thirty years of questions, investigations, breaking news, and building stories. From Vinod Mehta to Chinki Sinha. From a newly liberalised economy to a post-truth world in which asking questions is dangerous. From old masculinities to inclusive journalism. This hundred-page special issue captures fond and forgotten memories. The future will hold all these thirty years—and more. And we will continue to be irreverent.