Himalayan Memoirs: The Summer of Love

They said the world will end in 2012. For me my world ended in 2011. Or so it looked.
2011 is when my stay in Isha Yoga Center became crazily tenable. I was taking classes in Delhi and was having a blast. Rams got married. Shanti from Home School would feed me comfort food whenever i longed for Chocolates/Italian food. I could sit in Ardha Siddhasana for an hour and not realize it! :)
However a variety of circumstances forced me to leave the ashram.
I had too much pride in me to do something which would have made lesser human beings celebrate.
Anyways, I chose to go and live in the Himalayas.
In retrospect, I really don't know how I let myself do it. What I do know is that those 6 months of my life that I spent as a nameless life walking the mountains were my proudest.
There was too much life happening in those 6 months. Too many experiences, too many emotions, too many sensations in my body packed into 6 months. I managed to get some scrap paper and maintain a journal. I wanted to publish this for a long time but I was waiting for the right time to come.

Why do this now?

I am publishing these memoirs also as an effort to create awareness and raise money for the awesome work done by Isha Vidhya.

You would be providing me positive incentive to continue to blog if you can join me in supporting this effort. The person who contributes the most in my fundraising page will be acknowledged in my next blog post. Anything will help. Even 100 INR.

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Reflections on Sandekphu and Salesforce

So I just reached back to Bengaluru and I keep thinking perhaps this is a good moment to write something. Some kind of mental snapshot is warranted. I am hoping to join a new company - Salesforce after working in Visa for just 1.5 years. I just completed another trek - some 80 kms walk in the park. During the trek, I wrote down a bunch of mental sticking points and the advantage of having such a list is to see which one of them are perhaps temporary and which ones might stick around for sometime and haunt one. During the trek, I kept reminding myself that I should not fixate on the destination - that lofty peak or that supposedly pretty valley. The trek itself was the prize that I have earned. And the one that I wanted to celebrate. And celebrate is the right word for it. There is nothing that comes close to describing what it was. Just stretching the body and mind and asserting its capabilities. During those walks, I got reminded of Illayaraja's song "Pitchai Pathiram" ...

Hotel California

I was dropping off S for one of her meetings. The conversation meandered into how some of our volunteer friends were talking about me leaving IYC. S was observing that we would have never got married if I was not a Isha teacher at that time. She also observed how my deciding to move to Blore was kind of thrust upon her. It was a fair observation yet painful for me to hear it. At some point, I felt the need to justify/explain/clarify that i am a seeker. Still a seeker. After I said it, I felt a moment of pause within me. Am I a seeker? I felt embarrassed that I have to claim me being a seeker in so many words. Am I really a seeker? What does being a seeker mean? Does it mean that I should be living in an ashram? Does it mean that I need to work 100% and more towards a larger-than-life goal? Does it mean that I am checking out of "Hotel California" ? i.e. I am done with the world and ready for something else? Does it mean to live a constant affirmation that I may not know every...

Revisiting America

I have been open about my obsession with America. I recently visited US after 7 years. Revisiting US was like discovering an old T-Shirt which was hiding at the bottom of your wardrobe for many years - feels alien initially but then it fits like a glove but then again, you sneer at your own juvenile fashion choices. I feel I resonate with US because it has some of the growing pains and dual identities that I have. It was interesting to see how some of my reactions to it have changed over the years. In a way, revisiting was an act of looking yourself into a time-machine mirror - feeling and juxtaposing your feelings with what you felt so many years ago. I went to the US for the first time in 2005 when i was a graduate hire for Microsoft. Its been almost 20 years since i first set foot in the US. So a few things changed. America's juvenile antics amuse me less and less - I feel so sad/ridiculous that a country supposed so far ahead on so many things can get such basics twisted arou...

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