A Place I Call Home - {The Travel Issue }

Assamese music composer and playback singer Papon welcomes you to the real North East, as seen through his eyes

- Papon Angaraag Mahanta

Lead images of the writer shot exclusively for HT Brunch by Prabhat Shetty Travel images from the writer's collection of travel pictures

Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River Life is old there, older than the trees Younger than the mountains, growin' like a breeze

Country roads, take me home To the place I belong...

Change the names of the places, turn Shenandoah to Brahmaputra, and this might as well have been my song for my trip to the North Eastern Region (NER) during the second lockdown for Covid last year. Trust John Denver to evoke a yearning for home and poison it with the lure of the roads!

"WHAT MOST PEOPLE KNOW SIMPLY AS 'THE NORTH EAST' IS A SMORGASBORD OF VARIOUS CULTURES AND BELIEF SYSTEMS" -PAPON, SINGER & COMPOSER

I grew up in Assam, a land that the rest of India prefers to simply address as 'the North East'. The NER in fact comprises eight states-Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura and Sikkim. What most people know simply as 'the North East' is a smorgasbord of various cultures and belief systems. In no other region of the country can you find such diversity in cuisine, wardrobe, music, landscape, vegetation, and language. In fact, there are 220 ethnic groups and an equal number of dialects found among these eight states.