Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, best known as the author of The Little Prince, was a pilot who often flew at night, which inspired his writing. “Night, when language fades and things come alive,” he wrote in Flight to Arras (available online in a 1942 issue of The Atlantic). He was a wartime pilot, and his flights took him over enemy lines, so he probably wasn’t imagining nocturnal tourism when he wrote “all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again” of the night. Yet the sentiment that one sees by night, what is often hidden in daylight, is one that many tourists have come to identify with, making night tourism the big travel trend of 2025.
Our cover story explains that noctourism, or night-time tourism, is more than just stargazing and encompasses a host of activities and experiences that show a different aspect of a destination. Apart from crowds being smaller, curiously, the travellers say they engage with the place more deeply, often spotting things they had missed when they had visited in the daytime.
In a similar vein of looking for the details, Sandip Roy marks Gerald Durrell’s anniversary by revisiting the ever-popular My Family and Other Animals, and remembers how the book made him—a young boy in Kolkata—pay attention to all sorts of creatures on his terrace. Wildlife biologist Neha Sinha points to the importance of paying attention by comparing the journeys of migratory birds with the ways we travel and migrate. We’re not so different, she writes, making a case for better land-use that gives animals the space they need.
If you’re wondering what to watch this weekend, we have you covered as always, with a list of suggestions that includes the 1990s gangster film, Satya, which is back in theatres. A wonderful companion read to bring the film, the genre and the entire era into context is my colleague Uday Bhatia’s 2021 book Bullets Over Bombay, which, for me, created a sense of excitement and curiosity for a film I hadn’t watched but that has influenced a generation of filmmakers, scriptwriters, viewers and critics. Well-paced and tightly written, it makes you think about the influence of a film beyond its runtime. More about the wonder of the things we don’t see.
Write to the editor at shalini.umachandran@htlive.com
@shalinimb
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