Becoming

Today’s festival brings this spirit to life by creating spaces for communities, artists, storytellers, and audiences to meet. We are celebrating not only the richness of Himalayan heritage, but also the values it carries - care for the land, solidarity, ingenuity, and harmony with nature.

Endeavours like this festival are not just helping livelihoods but also the cultural pride of people in the Himalayas.

Conservation starts with communication. This is a platform where local youth get an opportunity to communicate with the outside world and vice versa. Whatever I have seen has been an eye opening experience for me.

Having necessary conversations through events like this with the larger audience outside of my territory is the first step to cultural preservation.

For young creators to find their voice, one way to do that is to come to places like these, see what is happening and have an internal journey so that the external journey can happen.

It was a good platform for me to tell what I really want people to know about – the real stories from the mountains. It's not just a story from people; it's a story from the gods.

I was so impressed with the scale, richness and the depth. I’ve been working in the Himalayan region for such a long time. And yet I'm learning so much more from just being here – there are things I've never seen before

Everyone, across the world is realising the importance of local communities and how they need to be part of decision making for their regions. So, platforms like this and the work that Royal Enfield is doing becomes very important because they are giving these communities a voice, to tell us what's happening.

Everything we got in our goodie bag was reusable. It tells us more about conservation and motivates us that we should use reusable things more so that we don't harm nature.

Usually in festivals of this kind, the retail area and exhibition area can be very overwhelming with a lot of banners and colours, and a huge variety of items in a small space making it very cluttered. Not here... visually it was very aesthetically pleasing throughout, and it was more harmonious. I could see that items of a similar kind were all placed together, and similarly for items of similar colour schemes.

I aspire to eventually relocate to the Himalayas. As a frequent traveller to the region, I hope to do something meaningful once I move. The interactions with community members and panellists were deeply engaging, bringing the unique identity and challenges of the region to light – something I hadn’t experienced in my travels as a mere tourist. I even made the trip to the festival from Mumbai at short notice after seeing the schedule of events on the RESM Instagram page.

In a time when the pace of crisis outstrips the pace of change, festivals like this offer something rare: the possibility of pause. As someone who has worked at the intersection of culture making, festival practice and systems thinking, I saw in the festival the kind of shift we need, one that is away from extractive programming and toward intentional, collaborative ecosystem building. The mountains are changing. Our ways of engaging with them must change too.