New Delhi, Feb. 28 -- As much as we are bound to deadlines, page views, news cycles and the other perennial challenges of magazine and culture journalism, to work at Lounge is to take the longer view, to contemplate and find an angle that's rarely explored, and to avoid the idea of spectacle for the sake of it. Inadvertently, that's become the idea that runs through our story on Mysuru, a city that allows people to embrace their own personalized work ethic, go down all sorts of rabbit holes, and welcomes different styles of living.

Over the last few years, I've been hearing people talking about relocating to the capital of the erstwhile kingdom of Mysore, drawn by its cosmopolitan culture, relatively clean environs, and slower pace. It's...