Harder Kulm, Interlaken, Switzerland
Selected by National Geographic Viajes, Spain — November 2019
Switzerland is heaven on earth, and hundreds of millions of people across India have known this since childhood, carrying it in their hearts long before they ever owned a passport.
It arrived through the cinema. Bollywood found Switzerland and understood immediately that here was a landscape equal to the grandest emotions a story could carry. The snow. The meadows burning with wildflowers. The lakes holding colors borrowed from somewhere more beautiful than earth. The mountains rising until they dissolved into light. Directors brought their cameras and their love stories here, and on screens across India, Switzerland became the visual language of joy.
Children watched and something settled in them that would not leave. A certainty, quiet and unshakeable. The world held a place like this. Beauty existed in these quantities. And one day, they would stand inside it.
One day is a very powerful thing to carry. It goes with you into the school mornings and the long careers and the ordinary accumulation of a life. It waits. It does not fade. It informs, in some unnamed way, a whole sense of what the world contains and what might still be possible.
And then the day comes. The flight lands. The train moves through valleys that look exactly like the screen, and also nothing like the screen, because the screen could never hold the actual scale of it, the actual cold of the air, the actual blue of the water blazing past the window. The body recognizes it before the mind does. Something tightens in the chest.
The dream was not exaggerated. The dream was, if anything, modest.
And Harder Kulm is where Switzerland shows you all of it at once.