Some places do more than stay in your memory, they heal you. Kashmir has been that healer for me. My journey began just after the second lockdown when the world was still learning to breathe again. One simple question, “Kashmir chalein?”, turned into a journey that quietly changed me. What was meant to be a short escape became a love for winters, and since that first visit, I have returned every year drawn back by the snow, the silences, and the tender stillness of the valley.
This series, Melancholic Ecstasy, grew from those returns, especially during Chilai Kalan when Kashmir lies wrapped in white and time feels suspended. In that quiet, life moves in its own gentle rhythm. Fog drifts across the fields, lone figures wander through the streets, and trees stand waiting. Each scene carries a quiet tenderness that speaks louder than words ever could.
Through my lens, I tried not just to see Kashmir but to feel it. To listen to the soft confessions of a land both fragile and eternal. Every photograph became less about what I saw and more about what the valley made me feel.
Kashmir is not just a landscape, it is a presence both melancholic and ecstatic. It showed me beauty in silence that heals, in solitude that comforts, and in loss that somehow restores.

Melancholic Ecstasy draws its title from the Indian Ocean song of the same name, a phrase that articulates the coexistence of longing and grace. This sensibility became the emotional backbone of the series, aligning instinctively with Kashmir’s winter landscape where silence holds weight and beauty arrives without declaration.