The silence of snow has a quality that most of us crave. Everything is softened, dirt, rubbish and scarred landscapes are smoothed over, made ageless, as the flakes fall. This is how the lakes of the Kashmir valley in North India are in winter, a generation of conflict buried for a while, the wounds blanketed. But winter is not a time of tourists here. Perhaps that is why I come back over and over. But then there have not been many foreign visitors during the past 15 years of tension in thevalley. Even in the boom years of the 80s, when the tourist magnets of Dal and Nagin Lakes bulged with houseboats, the winter was too cold for most people. Read the full article…

Financial Times, Apr 21, 2007