Story behind the book cover of ‘Rhythm of Remembrance’:

Is it possible for a stranger to touch you so deeply while just passing by?

I clicked this photograph during our trek to Stok village in Ladakh. This trip gave me a lot of time to reflect on my emotional landscape at that time. When I saw this old woman walking with a basket on her back, I somehow couldn’t help thinking about the life she must have led in these mountains, which must have been home to her happiness, sadness, ecstasies and griefs. Restless thoughts started rising, as my mind wandered thinking about this stranger, wondering about her childhood, her youth, her family. Had she lived all her life here in this small village where I had just come for a trek?

I had no way of understanding people who lived here, just a helpless desire to do so, which was of no use if it was not backed with any productive action. I wrongly thought this place and its people will soon slip out of my memory. A suffocating feeling of each of us being completely isolated from each other started to crawl upon me, the kind of feeling that makes us feel tiny and insignificant in this vast universe, with no way for us to get to know people in little corners of the world, to understand their lives, to empathize with them… All this started feeling so impossible… I had to shake myself out of that feeling as it had started making me feel increasingly helpless. However, this photograph stayed with me and I knew in an instance, which photograph to select when I was choosing the cover of my second book.