I have spent decades reading maps that mark borders and contours nobody can see with the naked eye, lines drawn on paper but defended with combat action.
Last month, in Hyderabad, I watched a different kind of line being redrawn.
The one between heritage as sentiment and heritage as strategy.
The occasion was the 15th International Heritage Tourism Conclave, hosted by the PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry on July 24.
Defence budgets get scrutinised line by line. Heritage rarely does. Yet a nation's oldest bazaars and palaces carry a kind of influence no missile system can buy.
Walk through Charminar and Laad Bazaar and you are walking through six centuries of trade, craft, and coexistence. That is quiet diplomacy.
Countries that have understood this - Italy with its piazzas and Japan with its temple towns did not stumble into heritage tourism.
They planned for it, the way a General plans a campaign. India, with over 3,300 protected monuments, has the terrain. What it has lacked is the doctrine.
In the Army, we learned early that morale wins battles, logistics win wars. Heritage tourism in India has had no shortage of morale. Every State proudly lists its monuments.
What it has been short of is logistics, financing structures, certification standards, and insurance frameworks that make a 400-year-old fort as investable as a 40-storey office tower.
That is the gap this conclave tried to close. Delegates spoke of private capital, of technology adoption, of community participation as the supply chain heritage tourism has never properly built.
A monument without a maintenance fund is a photograph waiting to fade. A monument with an investment-grade certification is an asset that compounds.
An independent director sitting through enough governance reviews knows the difference between an institution that is managed and one that is merely maintained. Heritage sites in India, by and large, fall into the second category: Looked after, rarely governed.
Heritage bodies have to behave like institutions with balance sheets, not just custodians with keys. That shift needs board-level thinking. ESG frameworks that treat a heritage precinct the way they would treat a factory with metrics, audits, and accountability to the communities.
Culture, once it is financed properly, stops being a subsidy line. It becomes a growth engine that also happens to protect what made a place worth visiting in the first place.
Heritage tourism is a long game. Hyderabad has played an early, well-judged shot. Jaipur, Varanasi, Madurai, Kolkata, Chennai sit on centuries of unclaimed potential now have a course to study.
India has never lacked heritage. What it has lacked is the discipline to treat culture as the economic asset it has always been. That discipline, once it takes hold, will outlast any single tourism season.
(Colonel MV Shashidhar (Retd) is a Defence & Strategic Affairs Expert, Certified Independent Director (IICA), ESG Advocate and Governance Thought Leader)