manu's blog

When I felt that there was nothing else to do and life was complete. I can only remember 2 instance now (those also recent) when it really happened to me: 1 - when I was in Badrinath temple last year and 2 - when I said 'I love you' to my girl :) Why did I feel like that in Badrinath. I don't know. There was something special in that space, in that time. The whole atmosphere was full of energy and that energy filled me. I felt kind of dissolved into the surroundings. I felt that 'this is it'. This is what we come to live for. Humm. Amazing feeling it was. As you might be tempted to think so, let me make it clear that I am not a mindlessly religious person. I believe in certain ideas of Hinduism and Buddhism, but I don't follow anything mindlessly. Now the second instance. Feeling liberated after saying probably the most abused sentence of the whole english language? Yeah. For me, it was accepting the fact that I loved someone. It had never happened to me be

Day 7, Fri Aug 29, 2008: The day had come to start our journey back to the noisy and polluted city life. We visited the temple again that morning. Morning experience was completely different from the evening experience. There were very few people. We could do darshan easily -- without any push from anyone. It was all great, but we still relished our evening visits more. I think evenings provided kind of coziness and isolation from the rest of the world. After checking out from the hotel, we went to the bus station to catch a bus going 'down' (to low lands). The buses, or rather timings of the buses, on Badrinath-Joshimath route are controlled by a concept called gates. Authorities on both sides coordinate with each other and let buses go only at specific times. I heard from someone that it's to ensure that there is not much traffic on the single lane road between Joshimath and Badrinath at any point of time, but that hardly seems to be the case now. It has become a way fo

I think, it's the time to finish the VoF series. In my previous post , we were sleeping in Badrinath, at the end of Day 5 of our journey. Badrinath was a 'Rivendell' for us, a place to relax and rejuvenate. The dawn of Day 6 (Thursday Aug 28, 2008) brought us a pleasant morning. Though we got up early, we started the day at a slow pace. Only thing on agenda that day was a 3 km walk to Mana, a border village. In earlier days, when Tibet was not taken by China, Mana village was a much used gateway to Tibet. Now it is a closed border. Walk to Mana was pretty cool. A plane road along Alaknanda, the river that had been with us all along. In fact after doing trekking in last 4 days, it felt pretty much like how you feel when you read Harry Potter after reading Moby Dick. After a nice and easy walk of 35 min, we reached Mana. It was a small village - very few houses, populated mostly by people of Indo-Mongolian origin. We interacted with few kids there who were selling some medic