Curated by host Krishan Anand, The Secret Charter in Sonamarg abandons the usual conference script—no decks, no pitches, no central activity. Guests drift between mountain biking, quiet walks, bonfires, DJ nights, and reflective sunrise moments by glacier-fed rivers. The event becomes less a networking retreat and more a slow, immersive Kashmir experience.
A cup of kahwa—sweetened with honey and scattered with rose petals and almond slivers (and Champagne for those who drink)—arrives before I’ve finished taking off my shoes. The steam is a warmer welcome than any greeting could be. There’s a table in the corner with local Kashmiri snacks vanishing before anyone exchanges names. I’m at Heevan Vilas in Sonamarg, two and a half hours out of Srinagar along a road tracking the Jhelum and then the Sindh, mountains closing in slowly enough that I stop noticing when the city ends.
This is The Secret Charter, the third edition of Krishan Anand's invite-only gathering, and by some distance its strangest premise yet. The first, in Gulmarg, ran on skiing. The second, at Club Med Seychelles, ran on padel. Sonmarg isn't built around any single activity, though a padel court sits ready for anyone who wants it. This time, Secret joined forces with The Charter, one of India's largest private founder communities, and the room reflected it: twenty-five founders, ten investors, ten senior founders who'd already built at scale, and five voices from entirely outside the startup world, fifty of us in total. Although, a few of the guests come down with a bug before the journey could begin. The one rule that holds regardless: nobody pitches.
Anand's family has hosted in Kashmir for six generations. "The craft is old," he tells me. "What I've pointed it at is new." He grew up watching his grandfather handwrite dinner menus, not as a business but as a way of life the household simply ran on. Secret, he says, answers a problem no one in his family had to solve—a room full of senior people where nothing actually happens. Devarsh Saraf, who runs The Charter and helped decide who filled half the room, puts it more simply: founders spend most of their working lives inside meetings, conferences, and investor conversations, and this was meant to be the few days where none of that structure applied, where people could just spend time with each other. For Sonmarg, that meant no ski slope, no agenda, just seventy-two hours and an instruction to leave the pitch decks at home. "If you're cool, you should be in the room," Anand says. "If all you have is a follow count, you don't belong here."
The first evening builds slowly on purpose, cocktails by Top Banana, a bonfire barbecue running into a musical evening, and eventually karaoke, guests who met four hours earlier singing like old friends.
The next morning offers a mountain biking expedition; I walk the last stretch instead, with a few others drawn to moving slowly. A herd of sheep crosses our path, unbothered by us, straight out of an Imtiaz Ali frame; I can't shake "Maahi Ve" out of my head for the rest of the walk.
Lunch is riverside, served along with coffee, courtesy of AnyDay, and cocktails. The menu has eggs to order, French toasts, salads, quiches, and sandos. I opt for the Chocolate Chantilly & Hazelnut French toast and the Fried Oyster Mushroom Sando, before settling in with the view.
That evening, Namrata Uttsav, a life and energy coach who works with Akashic Records and shamanic and quantum healing modalities, leads a sound healing and breathwork session out in the open, built around moving from noise into stillness. A forest trail follows. I skip the conversation for an iced Americano and sit with the view instead—something Mumbai’s fast-paced life hands you rarely. The night rounds off with more cocktails by Top Banana, wood-fired grills, flatbreads and plates passed around the table, and a live DJ that keeps things going well past dinner.
Day three was supposed to be a hike toward Zoji La, but the weather had other plans. Rain settled over the valley, and on the cliff directly opposite us, we watched snow actually falling in real time, beautiful, but enough to make everyone agree the Zoji La could wait for another trip. So after lunch, we set off on a shorter, gentler trek instead; nobody was particularly upset about the change. On our way back, we savoured a hot cup of kahwa and Maggi to chill out after a long day.
On the final day, night falls on the centrepiece: a Sham-e-Wazwan, Kashmir's traditional feast, served in full alongside its non-vegetarian courses, with a dedicated vegetarian spread that carries, as the menu itself puts it, "the same discipline and heritage as its royal counterpart," a relief and then a genuine delight, given I'm vegetarian myself. My table moves through Dum Aloo, Nadru Palak, Waza Paneer, and Gucchi, wild Kashmiri morels cooked gently enough to keep their earthy character intact, easily the dish I keep returning to, ending with a Phirni I make sure is the last thing I eat that night.
What follows is Sufi night, live music of the kind you don't so much listen to as stand still inside of, letting it move through you rather than past you, and an after-hours party that outlasts most people's intention to sleep.
The next day, I have a flight at nine in the a.m., so a few of us decide the only sensible send-off is to watch the sunrise at 5:30 a.m. by the glacier water river, the valley still and pale. I pack up, join them for those last quiet minutes by the water, and say my goodbye to a destination that by now feels less like somewhere I visited and more like somewhere I'll have to come back to. Gar firdaus bar-rue zamin ast, hami asto, hamin asto, hamin ast, as the old couplet has forever encompassed Kashmir: if there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.
I keep looking out of the flight window on the way back, watching the peaks fold into clouds and then disappear altogether, already working out when I'll find a reason to return.
I have a habit, wherever I travel, of bringing a piece of the place home with me, not as proof I was there, but because some things are worth keeping close long after the trip itself has faded. From Sonamarg, I come back with three kani work stoles, one for myself, one for my mother, and one for my to-be mother-in-law; a fridge magnet shaped like a chinar leaf, joining the small collection I've built from every place I've travelled to; and a Kashmiri kurti I haven't yet found the right occasion for, though I suspect I will soon enough. The chinar, incidentally, is as much a symbol of Kashmir as its mountains, a tree said to have arrived in the valley centuries ago, now so entwined with local identity that its leaf shows up everywhere from embroidery to jewellery to, evidently, my fridge door.