HIATUS!!!

Yes...I didn’t know how it was going to happen. I, with a childlike stubbornness just knew, I wanted to "do" Himalayas.

    

My mother was very specific when it came to questioning, when are you coming back, how many of you are there, will you call me every day. Without looking into her eyes, I got away with soon, many, sure, of course type of answers. My dad would have been more difficult to convince, but I had steered him into a “not on talking terms” phase conveniently.

Resignation from a lucrative job (that would mean, I got enough salary to get me through another month without using my credit card for cash withdrawal) and not succumbing to an arranged marriage to the prince (the kind matrimony.com dreams are made of and the best a loser like me can manage) worked very well for me and I could easily shift my gear into the rebel mode.

But I am a “good” Indian girl who loves home food

and made a mental note that this is the last time I am going to nurture any silly, teenage type, rebel streaks left in me. I would come back rejuvenated to a life governed by alarm clocks( mine is especially faithful, never wakes me up on time), power-points (where my creative juices overflow and sometimes I have to put a check on my own creativity), salary accounts (trivia: this is the only type of account that lets you have a zero balance), boys  (who think girls are deep and intellectual if they enjoy StarWars/Godfather reruns with beer), men (who think all good looking women are either dumb, loose or damsels in distress), old men (who keep wondering why they didn’t have jeans, discotheques, swimming pools, dating, live-ins during their times),                                 

bosses (who need an audience to listen to their  “when I was younger……..i was such a bore…..” banter), clients (who think they are tech savy if they have an account on facebook, twitter, gmail and check all of that in their blackberry’s) and other variegated elements  that make up my exciting life.

 Little did I know that the inception of the Himalayas idea in my head was a conspiracy of the cosmic fraternity to nullify 25 years of crap I thought I knew about life and that the transition back to normal life was going to make me more miserable

The only cause of distress that tugged my heart was that I had to put away my

• heels
•  skirts
• make-up kits
•  43 GB of absolute bliss (my survival kit which basically had a dose of ‘The Office”,  enough of  “House M.D.”, a lot of “Sex and the City” , movies and music)
•  leave my sorority sisters
•  all the  “to die for” Bangalore beer-bellied hunks
•  the arm candies of my gym
• live bands
•  everything else that made me fall in love with Bangalore

My innocent “do” Himalayas received a minor jolt when I realized Himalayas are a mountain range that spreads across 3 countries and a part of it spans as a border for 3 or 4 states in India alone

WHAT INSPIRED ME?

I was in 8^th grade when I received this book called “Autobiography of a Yogi” as a gift from an aunt who claimed she had all the answers to my teenage idiosyncrasies.  And this was one of the answers. I secretly thought that it was a gift she had received and had to pass it on because it was clearly not her plate of curd rice.

The book is Swami Yogananda’s rare account of the journey of his soul, an account of an ecstatic man enraptured of cosmic life.  An unabashed download of a spiritual legacy only India can boast of.  Accounts of Babaji (with a body who has lived for centuries for the benefit of mankind) who still lives somewhere in the Himalayas, the saint woman who didn’t need food to survive, yogis who could leave their body and manifest themselves in another part of the world. The book was filled with stories of such intricate details of incomprehensible prowess of the mystical mountain dwellers. In an age when I thought yogis who boasted of unearthly powers had become obsolete, here was a great man who propagated the very ideas and managed to capture the imagination of the West

I was in awe, a teenager who couldn’t understand why, people stood in long queues in temples, come all the way to the altar and close their eyes when they are in front of the idols they wanted to see so badly in the first place. My prayers included innocent wishes like to bump into Sachin Tendulkar in an elevator, come on paper for some reason, get the headboy’s attention and e.t.c e.t.c e.t.c. The cherry on the icing was the discussion of the book with my granny. She was an encyclopedia when it came to mythology and saints and history of Indian spiritualism.  She added the much required fuel to a fire that was already raging in my heart. And thatz when I knew I had to do Himalayas.  Life went on for the next 10-12 years, I left home for college, I left college for a job, I left the job for another job and then I again left a job for another job but this book never left me. I always came back to it and flipped through it here and then…

Life was very good. There was money to spend, boys to pamper you, a job to challenge you, freedom/independence at last to do anything you want with your life and every other luxuries that come with when you are on your own. And when God gives you materialistic pleasures in excess, there is a realization that dawns on you that you need more from life. When you stop running behind money and matter and look around, there is an urge to do something more which is beyond the realms of life. And then, it happened, backpacking to a place that inspired and kept me alive for 12 long years…in search of something...

END OF PART 1