BHUTAN

Day One

A 2 a.m. alarm in Gurgaon, airport chaos in Delhi and two hours later: Bhutan. We landed into a morning that felt almost unfairly beautiful. Cool air, clean light, mountains that don’t apologise for their scale. Kunzang, our guide, was waiting, and after coffee and croissants in the old bazaar we went straight into the festival. No easing in.

Rhythm, colour, masks, movement, and people with not a single frown among them. 

Day Two

We drove up to a nunnery at the edge of the sky, home to young girls, many of them orphans, who arrive as young as three or four and eventually become nuns. What stayed with me were the girls themselves: warm, open, deeply settled despite everything that brought them here. Loss and belonging, held together with grace. Bittersweet is exactly the right word.

Then the Paro vegetable market, where photography stops being a decision and becomes instinct, and back to a festival crowd that moved almost like a tide. 

The evening belonged to a children’s park: bouncy castles, face paint, golden light, laughter nobody was performing. 

Day Three

Cold and overcast. We returned to the nunnery, familiar now, which changed everything. Less photographing, more just being there, sitting inside the girls’ rhythm. Many were barefoot in the cold, so we went into town and came back with warm socks. No ceremony, just warmth passing from one hand to another.

Then a boys’ monastery higher up the mountain, and back down to the festival. We had stopped reacting to moments and started anticipating them. The surface had given way to something underneath.

We stayed for the closing procession, monks and high priests moving back into the dzong. We had stepped into a rhythm, and now we were stepping back out.

Day Four

7:30 a.m. and already moving. At dawn, the giant embroidered thongdrel was unfurled, believed to cleanse anyone who simply witnesses it. There’s a particular stillness in a crowd before something sacred happens. Then the scroll opened, and the whole ground seemed to exhale.

The King moved through the crowds with a warmth that dissolved any distance between ceremony and people. Gho and kira, colour everywhere, prayer beads moving through fingers. You weren’t photographing an event. You were inside one.

The afternoon slowed, and we sat with the devotees instead of chasing them. The evening gave us the counterpoint, the children’s park again, laughter replacing chants. A full arc of life in a single day.

It’s rare for a trip to feel genuinely complete. This one did. Quietly, it got under my skin and stayed there.