Skip to main content

Yes to the World



My first trekking in the Garhwal Himalayas was a decade and a half back. Along with a few colleagues, I was asked to take a group of students to Hemkund whose altitude is about 15,000 feet. On the first day we trekked from Govindghat to Ghangaria. It took us almost the whole day to reach our destination because it was raining in the entire afternoon and we were not prepared for it. Drenched to the marrow of our bones, we continued to climb up and up ignoring the weariness that knocked inexorably against our knees. We reached our destination by sunset.

An icy cold bath in the morning filled me with the vigour required for the next lap of the trek, the steep ascent from Ghangaria to Hemkund. That first date of mine with the mountains urged me to undertake many more treks to equally challenging peaks in the Garhwal Himalayas in the next many years. I cannot claim that I learnt to trust the mountains blindly, but I realised that the mountains have a unique charm and that they offer a romantic challenge.

That is why I find my soul longing to walk into Bhutan and trek to the Tiger’s Nest without a crowd for company. My wife and I along with a guide who is non-intrusive and self-effacing. The trek won’t terminate at that monastery, however. I would like to walk on, walk across national borders, walk into the mysteries of the Eastern rugged terrains, into forbidden cities, walk with the liberty of the birds, walk on without passport and visas, and make an endless date with the world.

That would be my ultimate Yes to reality. Reality is an infinite spectrum from the microcosmic pebble at your feet to the stars and the black holes in the endless cosmos out there. Somewhere along my trek, will I grow the wings required to fly into that infinite space and its mysteries? I wish I would.

I say yes to the little pebble and the giant star, and everything that comes my way; yes to the freezing wind in the mountains and the scorching heat of the deserts; yes to the humming bees and the stinging fleas; yes to the amazing grace of the rivers and the forbidding façade of the cliffs. What else is a meaningful life but an affirmation of what lies ahead of us at each step?

Will I meet Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince somewhere along the way? I wish I would. And listen to him say, “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

My Yes will resound in the infinite spaces. Let it be a Yes that comes from the perceptive heart.

PS. This has been inspired by Lufthansa’s exciting new campaign: #SayYesToTheWorld and #TheBlindList.
My Blind List is highlighted in the text.


Top post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...