Of monkey business and life lessons

“Yatrigan Kripaya dhyan de. Gaadi no 11212, Pune se Mumbai jaanevaali Deccan Queen, platform no 1 se ravaana hone vaali hein” warned a pre-recorded female voice which echoed in the misty but otherwise mostly empty Shivaji Nagar Railway Station.

“Hurry up! Let’s get the tickets” exclaimed Sangam. Nisarg scurried to the counter. We were on a weekend trek to Bhimashankar.

As the train moved slowly, Anil, Nisarg, Sangam and I barely managed to get into a general compartment. It was packed with people, goats, hens and what not. It was very difficult to move. Luckily, being skinny, Nisarg and I managed to move through the crowd towards a window. As the train swerved out of Pune, the tender rays of the Sun kissed the skin of the people near windows. It was a perfect sunrise in the back drop of hills - much like a kid’s first scenery drawing.

The train snaked across the hills of Western Ghats through a few tunnels on the way. One could see kids waving at the passengers in every village the train passed through. They seemed to enjoy both the sight and the sound of train. It was a delight to beholder’s eyes. For those kids, even an old cycle tire is a prized possession.  These sights bore testimony to the ultimate fun and bliss of enjoying even the simple things in life.

As we grow, we get caught up in the quagmire of monotonous jobs. Obviously, I am not asking you to wave at the passengers in trains. I mean, are we digging the wrong places for fun and happiness? We no longer seem to enjoy the so called ‘simple things’. Is that what makes us grown-ups?

Meanwhile, we reached Karjat. From there, we took an auto to Khandas, a village in the base of Bhimashankar hill. By the time we began trudging up the Bhimashankar hill, the Sun looked like an egg yolk on a frying pan. As we continued our trek, we saw a few Macaque monkeys along a cliff on the way. As they seemed quiet and unmindful of our presence, we clicked a few photos.

   

Suddenly as if after a meticulous planning, the whole group of monkeys attacked us. Sangam and I ran pell-mell while Anil and Nisarg were trying to find a way to escape. A monkey jumped on Nisarg’s bag and scattered its contents. Sangam was a little paranoid and was shouting at me to stop running. He was mad at me for leaving them. Nisarg had lost his rain coat, gifted by his father, in the commotion.

Somehow, all the four of us managed to meet near a tree. The Alpha male showing off its extra sharp canines inched towards us. Surrounded by monkeys in three directions and a steep cliff in the other, we were rendered helpless. We could neither run nor fight. So we decided to open up all the bags and show them that there was nothing left. The Alpha male pulled all the stuff out of bags and sat with us for a minute probing a piece of soap. After some time, they lost interest in us and vanished into the canopy.

It resembled a rape scene of typical Indian movie—scattered clothes, bags, bottles… It was a life time experience for all of us: of getting surrounded by monkeys, sharing space and time with the scary Alpha male…

I am sure we have all read many stories of valour in our schools. Some of us even imagine ourselves as the protagonist of the story. Do we really have those characters in us? Can we imbibe them just by being enclosed in the four walls of a classroom? May be, if we had stayed together, Nisarg might not have lost his precious rain coat.  

I realise that treks are not just aimless trudging in the wilderness. They teach us life lessons. They reveal our inner selves, improve our learnability and make us mentally strong. Until we are confronted with unexpected situations, we don’t quite know what we can and what we can’t. It is in such situations, we learn that life is not linear. But, isn’t that the beauty of it?

So, Yatrigan Kripaya dhyan de! What makes Life worth it is the journey—the people we meet, places we see, things we learn or unlearn, the joy we find in the simple things… What say, readers? Hellooo!! Anybody there..? Was I that preachy? J

Feel free to share your views and stories.

PS: Sitting through a boring lecture was the driving force for writing this article. After all, anything can be turned useful. Why not a boring lecture?!

Photos: Nisarg P Desai

I write, can I?

Mind-- it was a dried up desert. No thoughts, no ideas-- and feelings? None at all!

He sighed into the cold air. All of a sudden his mind had homed vacuum. It was one of those writer’s block thing. He could neither sleep nor eat. The sensation of emotional word shower was suddenly numb. He stared at his laptop, as if he wanted to emotionally black mail the word document to seed some ideas in his mind.

 Of course, what could a word document do? It was a mere lump of clay waiting to be shaped.

kismet.blogs.com

 The sound of silence lodged his heart. Everything around was as still as the printed words in the books. His mind felt emptiness even in the enigmatic expression of Mona Lisa in the portrait which hung wobbly on the shabby wall of his room.

He felt as if he was fighting a war against the words and they were too cowardly to come near him.

“Why? Whaai are the ideas afraid of me?  What do I write on for my next book?”

supernovacondensate.net

He started fantasizing himself as a frog in a swarm of word flies. He could see the flies but could not catch them right. He turned away from the laptop and had a fleeting glance of his reflection in a mirror nearby.

“Unfortunately, ideas don’t fly around in the air. But definitely, some thought, good or bad, does arise in my mind. Why don’t I write down whatever hits me and compile them as a piece?” he asked himself introspectively.

It was as if he saw ‘desert’ as ‘dessert’. He was more affirmative than ever. His dried up mind was replete with words, live words! His thoughts rolled down at will as if they were set free from a jail. The words sprinted along the page as his fingers danced on keyboard. He went on till he reached the saturation.

“Err……….err….Umm now what do I write?”

vintageanchor.tumblr.com

The water fall - the word fall - had stopped rolling any more.

His eyes whooshed through the cramped columns of his writing, like a boy running in an alleyway of a slum city. The editor in him took over his mind. He started editing the piece.

“Oh!  I should delete, ‘and feelings? None at all! ’,in the first line. It does not sound logical. Emptiness is a feeling too! A full glass cannot be filled. Emptiness is a sign of seeking more…” he thought to himself. “I write, can I?”

                                                      A Letter to let her...

To

The letter

Post box

Date: today

Dear letter,

Everyone writes you. A few long for you to arrive. But, none writes to you!

I am glad to meet you in this postbox where messages meet and share the secrets, joy and gloom equally. It seems as if it is a carnival of emotions. Each letter has its own emotion to communicate: the excitement of the birth of first child, a young man’s romance in his Love Letter, a letter replete with the sadness of demise of a valiant soldier …

The reason, I write to you today, is to leave this letter with you. She is very innocent. She has not seen the real world out there. She feels lonely and abandoned since the e-mails have pervaded the world. She feels as if it is the end of her world…

I want you to let her communicate the way you do. Let her feel the emotions of writing, reading and most importantly, of being a letter!

Let her know that this post box homes both good news as well as the not so good ones. Letters convey myriad emotions-- acceptance, rejection; love, hate; joy, sadness…

Teach her how to relish when the postman thumps the seal on her. Let her dream about the gusto of getting her first stamp. Let her understand the absolute bliss of communicating through the letters.

Before the postman arrives, let her know what this life thing is anyways!

Let her…….let her…..for she is a letter!

Yours verbally,

The words of this letter

Photo credit: naturalparentingtips.com