In 2019, I watched a small but stirring film called Axone, set in Delhi and threaded through the everyday lives of young people from the north East. What stayed with me long after the credits rolled was not only its humour or its gentle storytelling, but the quiet ache beneath it. The film speaks of the rawness of being treated as an outsider in your own country, of being seen as the other because of the way you look, the way you speak, the food you cook or the scent rising from your kitchen. It names this simmering prejudice with lightness, yet with clarity.
Axone, or akhuni, the fermented soybean paste at the heart of the story, becomes a metaphor in itself. Its sharp, earthy aroma arrives before the dish does, a perfume built from smoke, time and tradition. For many communities in Nagaland it is the taste of home. For many in the north it is labelled strange. And that is where the wound sits. In our cities, food that does not resemble what someone grew up eating is often met with suspicion, as if unfamiliarity were something to correct. It is an injustice to the breadth of our geography and the cultural abundance that comes with it.
I think of this often when I remember my college years. We would wander through Majnu ka Tila, drawn by the steam curling out of kitchen windows and the promise of something new simmering around the corner. It was there I first tasted la phing, cool and smooth against the heat of the day, and shaphale with its crisp edges and soft centre. Tingmo pulled apart like warm clouds and ema datchi carried a depth of comfort I had never known. I can still recall the fragrance of chilli and broth drifting through narrow lanes alive with chatter. Those meals felt like a doorway to a larger India, one most of us were never taught to imagine.
Today, Humayunpur in South Delhi holds that same spark of discovery. It has grown into a neighbourhood where food from the north Eastern states, Sikkim and Tibet is not only served but welcomed, and where palates have slowly begun to widen. This shift owes much to the rising interest in micro regional cuisines and even more to the home cooks and chefs who carry their heritage forward with care. Delhi based home-chefs like Snehalata Saikia and Tanisha Phanbuh remind Delhi that diversity is not a slogan. It is lived, cooked, shared and passed on.
These thoughts echo as Royal Enfield’s Social Mission opens the second edition of Journeying Across the Himalayas, a week long festival at Travancore Palace in New Delhi from 4 to 10 December. This year’s theme, 'Ours to Tell', invites us to see the Himalayas not as a distant silhouette but as a living archive of memory. Through close collaboration with Himalayan communities, the festival becomes a space where indigenous stories are honoured rather than filtered, where art, language, conservation, oral traditions and contemporary expression come together to reclaim narratives long overshadowed.
It is a reminder that the beauty of this country lies in the voices that rise from its edges. The food, the stories, the landscapes and the people of the north east and the Himalayas are not peripheral. They are central to who we are.
Chef Doma Wang, the celebrated home cook turned entrepreneur from Kolkata, will open the festival with an inaugural dinner shaped by the mist laden hills of Sikkim and north Bengal. Her food carries the memory of highland farms, buttery yak cheese, earthy chillies and busy market stalls washed in colour. It promises to set the tone with a sense of place that lingers long after the plates are cleared.
Three intimate sessions during the festival deepen the experience. Avantika Haflongbar opens a window into the plant based, foraged traditions of the Dimasa community in Assam, tracing flavours shaped by forest, field, memory and identity. Kunzes Angmo brings the Trans Himalayan region to the table through story, ritual and tasting, revealing how Ladakhi food holds landscape and history in every bite. And with Yash Saxena, the foodways of Kargil unfold through stories of soil and survival, showing how shared meals can hold both resilience and belonging.
To honour these cultures is not an act of generosity but an act of recognition. Their stories have always belonged here. It is time we listened, learned and finally gave them the space they have long deserved.