From Baethi, we started walking on the forest path.
Occasionally the canopy of endless greenery would clear up and reveal small
settlements. One such settlement was Atkuni: a small hamlet which had an
ancient Bhairav temple. After some time the forest path ended and we came into
a small town. We had to descend a mountain whose entire valley was under paddy
cultivation. It was quite tricky. The greenery of the endless paddy was almost
blinding. After the endless paddy fields we came across an auxiliary road which
will take us to where we intend to stay the night: Gothu. Once we reached
Gothu, Maamaji told everyone that tomorrow’s trek would the most difficult one
so we better get some good sleep. Nevertheless, I decided to join maamaji for
the sathsang that he was supposed to convene at the nearby temple. He openly
admired and approved my peity. Sathsang was fun with the now familiar Garhwali
tunes and impromptu dances by 70 year olds. Gothu was also incidentally the last
place where I could keep up my asana practices.
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" ...
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