Karwendelhaus is a lodge in the mountains north of Innsbruck in Austria, and as the sun settled down in the alpine valley to the west, I scribbled the concept of Himal on a notepad. That is essentially where Himal was born, back in June 1986, as a Himalayan magazine.
It has always been a struggle, and it is a struggle still, to bring out a magazine that seeks to define new boundaries for journalism by going 'regional', where there is no loyalty base to provide foundational support. This is why readers over the years have found Himal experimenting with content layout and frequency. It might have been disconcerting, but we have always been forgiven by readers who know what we have been up against in putting out a magazine that seeks to define a regional journalism that is idealistic yet hard-headedly non-romantic.
Returning to New York where I was working at the United Nations, I found my spouse Shanta more than willing to move back to Nepal with the magazine, just as soon as her PhD was defended. I took leave and prepared the first issue, which came out in May 1987. To publish the magazine, I sought the help of my brother Kunda, then editor of InterPress Service, based in Colombo. The prototype issue of Himal was published at the Sarvodaya Press in that city.
The subsequent issues of Himal were laid out with the help of a first-generation pagemaking software called Byline. Layout was done by Shanta and a friend from the UN who lived in Brooklyn, Robert Cohen. Many a dawn was brighting the sky east of the Brooklyn Bridge as we headed back to Manhattan after all-night layout sessions.