McLeodganj, Dalhousie and...

In September 2001, Amit, Dipali, Rekha, Archana, Ashu, Priya, Lippika and obviously myself had gone for an outing to Mussorie. The trip was pure enjoyment. Right from the start of train journey to return to Delhi.

The photographs of the trip still take us back to those nostalgic days.

Its been almost 5 years to the trip. However, the magic still remains. A lot has changed since then. Amit, Dipali, Rekha, Archana, Ashu, Priya got married in the past 5 years. Archana even left the organization. But new people also joined the group.

So, when we decided to re-live the magic, it was a new group - Amit, Alpana (Amit's wife), Sambit, Lippika, Shweta and myself were the group of musketeers this time. We also had little Aayush to pamper.

Such trips tie the people together. One gets to know the friends in-out through such trips. Our relationships deepened over the 4-5 days that we spent in Himachal.

We went on adventure treks - down to the river and up to the point where the river entered the valley. We walked into the woods - just us - and captured the natural beauty of the dense forest. The clear blue skies, the remanents of powerful water currents, the tall conifers and the beautiful butterflies. The soft-mosses and the ferns. All giving hope that flowers can bloom even on rocks. That how difficult the life may seem, happiness exists... All you need to do is to find it.

We also saw the degraded mountains and some that had recently been stripped of their beauty by the land-slides. We also realized that the mountains that still had the trees had survived the onslaught of nature.

Both Dalhousie and Dharamsala (McLeodganj) are breathtakingly beautiful. Our hotel at Dalhousie gave us the view of snow-covered higher reaches of Himalayas. The visit to mini-Switzerland of India - Khajiaar - was equally exciting.

What was equal fun was the shrieking of Lippika whenever there was a sharp turn or the way Aayush ogled at Shweta. This one-year old just loves Shweta - at least from the looks of it... All smiles as soon as Shweta turns to see her :-)...

There were some lows too... Alpana was not in the best of health when we travelled down from Dalhousie (on the return)... Shweta was not well on the first day in McLeodGanj...

But the highs definitely outnumbered - the breathtaking views were accompanied with a real good news - of Sambit's selection into IIM Bangalore. Despite high work pressures (he was spending more than 12 hours in office those days), he had the determination to go ahead and give the CAT. That he cleared the GD and the interview with almost no preperation was a very pleasant surprise and an absolutely fabulous news for all of us. May he be successful in his career and may he cherish the memories of times that we spent together - not just in Dalhousie and Dharamsala but also over the past 2 and a half years at Delhi :-)

Life brings with it new friends and it takes the ones that we have to far off places, but that is the way we all grow as individuals... Life is good :-).

Colors, me and America

Looks like a reasonable topic... The posting is possibly not going to be this reasonable. Its going to be anything but reasonable...

Colors are beautiful. They should be appreciated for the joy that they create.

However my brief stint in the US has distorted my way of thinking with respect to colors. Light pink or for that matter any light pastel color is not a color that a guy in the US will wear - or he will be considered as gay. The society there relates all colors to the type of people who wear them - they bind themselves even to the color of clothes that they should wear and think of themselves as a free society.

Colors are so strongly associated with gender that even a small girl would not choose blue because blue is meant for boys. The girls would wear pink. When these young children grow up, they carry this conditioning with them.

That this conditioning is very strong is evident from the fact that a 'free' soul like myself is also sub-conciously influenced by it.

When I see a guy wearing a pastel color or wearing a pink wrist-band even here in Delhi, I end up remembering that he would be considered gay in the US. This has completely spoiled the joy that the color would otherwise give me.

In India, wearing light shades is a necessity. Its terribly hot in summers and you have to wear colors that reflect light (and heat)... And people are not conditioned into believing that blue is for guys and pink for the girls. So, I come across such situations often. And every time I decide to not to think on the same lines again...

Hopefully, writing the problem down - and throwing out the gubbar - would help me overcome it... Keeping my fingers crossed :-)...

Clothes!!! Me???

As soon as I wrote the title to this post I realized that someone would think that this is about the nudist line of thought...

As much as I may want to be at the recieving end of the nudist view, I don't have a body to desire to be a part of the nudist camp myself... This post is definitely not about the nudist way of life.

This post is about the fact that clothes don't matter to me that much... I was wearing a very loose shirt today. I know that with my frame, it looks as if the shirt has been put on a hanger, but I still decided to wear it... Why? because, otherwise I will have to throw away a good piece of cloth and unnecessarily create more pollution (that goes into making fabrics these days) and increase costs (by creating more demand for new clothes).

So, why hit-out on someone who may not have enough to purchase a shirt even at its present prices and the thousands of people who are living in the negative impact of immense pollution that the textiles industry (by dyeing and tanning etc.) causes everywhere in India (wherever they are located).

So, to me, fashion and my looks are secondary. It is important that I don't spoil someone else's life simply because I wanted to look better to people who are not actually impacted by my looks :-)... Thinking about how I am looking would only be a passing thought. I hope that people keep my company not for how I look but for how I bring more joy and happiness to their lives.

If all of us wear our clothes just 10 more times before disposing them off, we would definitely bring about a perceptible change in lives of many people who are living under the burden of our high consumption.