This is the Guardian.

Today, a trip to the Indian Himalayas for a glimpse at India's possible future. India is such a vast country and its election is a almost unfathomably huge exercise.

You know, it's going on for seven weeks, over seven phases.

You know, it's happening during an insane heat wave.

Delhi, where I live, it's 47 degrees here.

Hannah Ellis Peterson is the Guardian's South Asia correspondent,

based in India,

where nearly a billion people are casting their votes

in the biggest elections ever held anywhere in the world.

Voting takes nearly two months,

across 36 states and territories with more than 700

parties in the running and all of it overshadowed by one man. That's the country's prime minister Nore Moi. Norengra Modi whose party the

B.P. is widely expected to win a third term in power.

Hannah's been all over India these past few months, but she's telling me about one

particular trip to a place called Utreakand.

So Utrekand is a state in North India.

It's a beautiful place, very mountainous, it kind of stretches up into the Himalayas. It's also a particularly hoden. place.

Very mountainous, it kind of stretches up into the Himalayas.

It's also a particularly holy place for Hindus.

It's known as the land of the gods.

So they believe that the gods kind of live up high up in the Himalayas.

It's home to tens of thousands of shrines. It's where their holy cities are. It's where the Ganga

...