Skip to main content

Adventure: the flighty temptress

Outside Nehru Institute of Mountaineering, Uttarkashi [2012]


In one of her Harry Potter novels, J K Rowling describes adventure as “that flighty temptress”. Life is a flighty temptress and adventure is the wicked witch with her magical potions. I have drunk deep from both: the witch as well as the temptress. Life would be sheer wasteland without these two seductresses!

The best adventure I have had was in the Garhwal Himalayas. The school where I taught in Delhi gave me the opportunities to trek on those rugged landscapes that belong to the gods and apsaras. My first such trek was to Hemkund with its altitude of 15,000 feet. Another unforgettable trek was to Gaumukh a few years later. There were many less adventurous treks in between in the Land of Gods where, as Arun Kolatkar would say, every stone is a god or his cousin.  

Mountains seduce me far more immodestly than gods and their cousins. Mountains tease you with their peaks. When you conquer each peak, you transmute the tease into a triumph. It’s a game in which every surrender is a capitulation. The gods and their cohorts join the peaks in mockery. No, you needn’t take that mockery. You needn’t buckle down and start chanting mantras and offer aartis. You need to pull up your boots and move on. That is life. Your gods are no kinder than the mountains. The apsaras are worse: they titillate like fireflies in the emptiness. You have no choice but mock them back by moving on. Move on till your last breath. That movement is the adventure of your life.

I’m waiting for the pandemic to subside, to walk hand in hand with the temptress, sipping the magical potions of the witches. I long to step onto the mountain trail once again and embrace that flighty temptress, adventure. I want to breathe in the cold mountain air, stand in the caressing mist, and whisper words of romance to the tickling winds.
 
En route to Gaumukh [2012]
PS. For Indispire Edition 336: Adventure is not taking risk, adventure is doing what we have not done so far. Coming out of our boundary. What is adventure inn your view ? and what have you done recently? or planning to do? #adventureboundaryfear

Comments

  1. जितेन्द्र माथुरJuly 31, 2020 at 11:45 AM

    I endorse your philosophy. And your quote in the PS - 'Adventure is not taking risk, adventure is doing what we have not done so far' is one of the biggest as well as the simplest truths I have come across.

    ReplyDelete
  2. SOCIAL CONCEPTJuly 31, 2020 at 12:12 PM

    Nice way to deliver your thinking on adventure.

    ReplyDelete
  3. DashyAugust 1, 2020 at 11:03 AM

    Trekking in those areas must've been great. The pandemic makes us miss our adventures more.

    ReplyDelete
  4. ArunAugust 4, 2020 at 3:59 PM

    An excellent itinerary that can inspire anyone to have a trip on the beautiful Himalayas! It is my long time wish to conquer the high snowy mountains and sing out loud all Indian music genres at the top of my voice. Thank you, sir, once again, for this excellent travelogue.

    ReplyDelete
  5. FeliciaAugust 28, 2020 at 4:50 PM

    I love adventures. Every rainy season, my friends and I would go trekking. Unfortunately, this year nothing is possible due to the pandemic. Your post really took me down the memory lane.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Break Your Barriers

  Guest Post Break Your Barriers : 10 Strategic Career Essentials to Grow in Value by Anu Sunil  A Review by Jose D. Maliekal SDB Anu Sunil’s Break Your Barriers is a refreshing guide for anyone seeking growth in life and work. It blends career strategy, personal philosophy, and practical management insights into a resource that speaks to educators, HR professionals, and leaders across both faith-based and secular settings. Having spent nearly four decades teaching philosophy and shaping human resources in Catholic seminaries, I found the book deeply enriching. Its central message is clear: most limitations are self-imposed, and imagination is the key to breaking through them. As the author reminds us, “The only limit to your success is your imagination.” The book’s strength lies in its transdisciplinary approach. It treats careers not just as jobs but as vocations, rooted in the dignity of labour and human development. Themes such as empathy, self-mastery, ethical le...
3 comments
Read more

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
47 comments
Read more

Mahatma Ayyankali’s Relevance Today

About a year before he left for Chicago (1893), Swami Vivekananda visited Kerala and described the state (then Travancore-Cochin-Malabar princely states) as a “lunatic asylum.” The spiritual philosopher was shocked by the brutality of the caste system that was in practice in the region. The peasant caste of Pulayas , for example, had to keep a distance of 90 feet from Brahmins and 64 feet from Nairs. The low caste people were denied most human rights. They could not access education, enter temple premises, or buy essentials from markets. They were not even considered as humans. Ayyankali (1863-1941) was a Pulaya leader who emerged to confront the situation. I just finished reading a biography of his in Malayalam and was highly impressed by the contributions of the great man who came to be known in Kerala as the Mahatma of the Dalits . What prompted me to order a copy of the biography was an article I read in a Malayalam periodical last week. The article described how Ayyankali...
14 comments
Read more

The Irony of Hindutva in Nagaland

“But we hear you take heads up there.” “Oh, yes, we do,” he replied, and seizing a boy by the head, gave us in a quite harmless way an object-lesson how they did it.” The above conversation took place between Mary Mead Clark, an American missionary in British India, and a Naga tribesman, and is quoted in Clark’s book, A Corner in India (1907). Nagaland is a tiny state in the Northeast of India: just twice the size of the Lakhimpur Kheri district in Uttar Pradesh. In that little corner of India live people belonging to 16 (if not more) distinct tribes who speak more than 30 dialects. These tribes “defy a common nomenclature,” writes Hokishe Sema, former chief minister of the state, in his book, Emergence of Nagaland . Each tribe is quite unique as far as culture and social setups are concerned. Even in physique and appearance, they vary significantly. The Nagas don’t like the common label given to them by outsiders, according to Sema. Nagaland is only 0.5% of India in area. T...
13 comments
Read more

Rushing for Blessings

Pilgrims at Sabarimala Millions of devotees are praying in India’s temples every day. The rush increases year after year and becomes stampedes occasionally. Something similar is happening in the religious places of other faiths too: Christianity and Islam, particularly. It appears that Indians are becoming more and more religious or spiritual. Are they really? If all this religious faith is genuine, why do crimes keep increasing at an incredible rate? Why do people hate each other more and more? Isn’t something wrong seriously? This is the pilgrimage season in Kerala’s Sabarimala temple. Pilgrims are forced to leave the temple without getting a darshan (spiritual view) of the deity due to the rush. Kerala High Court has capped the permitted number of pilgrims there at 75,000 a day. Looking at the serpentine queues of devotees in scanty clothing under the hot sun of Kerala, one would think that India is becoming a land of ascetics and renouncers. If religion were a vaccine agains...
8 comments
Read more