RAMBLING ON THE INTERNET

When friends and others ask me what I do on the net, I tell them I ramble about this and that. Does anyone care to read all these thoughts, is the next invariable question posed to me.

As all questions go ,I look for answers within me. or should I? The net is a medium to express ones ideas and longings and desires and if there is no audience does it matter anyway?

There is some vicarious thrill in writing and seeing ones name in print and a blog does just that. Satisfies an inner need,I mean. It helps me to articulate my jumbled up thoughts in print and hope that someone somewhere will read it. Like a camp adventure looking for thrills in the unknown, writing or conversing on the net with others is like an intellectual adventure with faces and profiles that are imagined via their writings.

Is there a motive to all this? What if there isnt? Is man always to act because of some intrinsic or extrinsic motivation? What do I gain? I am still looking for answers. Man is alone and writing is a lonely pursuit so maybe I look for souls to connect via the ether.

The bottomline is I still dont know why I share so much with you all on the net about so many events happening in the world. The human mind is suppose to query and if I ask questions am I not true to my species?

Travelling with a skull

Travel with a skull…….vignettes of travel in the Himalayas.

Traveling in India by road can be an enlightening experience, most highways connecting major towns are in good condition so the journey is more enjoyable especially on mountain roads. Viewing the vast Himalayan landscape one can forget mountain sickness but the queasy ones will still stop the car to puke out their sumptuous breakfast or lunch occasionally. Still others will sleep through the journey like my son does to overcome this uneasy feeling on a traveling car and waste an opportunity to soak in the majestic landscape. After every kilometer, one encounters people sitting on a small shack selling fresh juicy fruits like cherries, apricots, plums and pears. This is the time when one can gorge on these fruits in India and even the trees by the roadside are full of these luscious temptatations. The box of cherries I bought were the juiciest I have ever had in my life.

What does one do on a mountain road? Besides watching the scenery around which can get a tad boring after a while? So one fine day we decided to give a lift to two mendicants or sadhus as they are called in India in the hope that we may get some ancient wisdom from their erudite minds. With a black cloth tied around their waist, a stick in hand, body smeared white with ash and one of the sadhus even had a human skull hanging around his neck along with other bead necklaces!!!! Was I scared? Well no. As they got into the car for a free ride with us, I did have visions of us being robbed or even killed….the skull was white and shiny and my biology lecture in college came to mind . Our skulls are supposed to look yellowish, no??

Nothing dramatic happened and the wise guys chatted with us normally, asking us about our lives and what we do, where we live etc. They were happy to get a free ride and a meal too as we had lunch together on a road side eatery. Lives of sadhus in india come in many shades and varieties. These ones are called tantrics and they worship in human graveyards and invariably go around with a human skull around their necks. They worship the goddess Kali and travel to all the temples of Kali in India on foot to offer prayers. Goddess Kali bestows power to her devotees and many Indians are devotees of this POWERFUL goddess.
At the dead of night the tantrics will light a fire near a human corpse and offer prayers and chant mantras. The idea is to gain some power and knowledge and some who do are very popular. Ordinary folks will flock to them and offer prayers to these sadhus and they in return promise to solve your worldly problems. WHEN ONE GOES TO RELIGIOUS TOWNS IN INDIA, one can see many kinds of sadhus who have different ways of worshipping God. India is rightly called Nirvana land as people are offered quick fix solutions to attain enlightenment in these towns and temples by enlightened souls.

To continue with the story, Baba Amaranth , one of the sadhus , told me he was reminded of a disciple he once had as she resembled me. Maybe he is trying to make me a disciple I thought suspiciously. Both of them smoked premium cigarettes borrowed from my husband. After a couple of cigarettes smoke blowing around me I told them how can you be wise if you have such vices!!! Alas I did not get any wisdom from them , or maybe they did not want to share what little they knew about lifes miseries and joys. To cut a long story short he did offer some secret advice to my husband and told him to wear some stone ring to be happy and successful in life. He left me alone perhaps realizing that I had no need for any solutions to imaginary problems.

Next time I am going to give a free ride to some more interesting people on earth. I don’t fancy being engulfed by smoke from an ash smeared human donning a skull ever again !!!

PALACES AND KINGS----FROM INDIA

Long ago there was a prince of Patiala in north India and he had many wives. He built some lovely summer palaces for his frolicking and which even today dot the Himalayan landscape. Chail is one such place, Shimla has some palaces too, we even saw one in Sadhupul. Where did you go last summer? If not Chail in Himachal Pradesh then you have missed something. With its pristine beauty and chilled mountain air it offers lovely walks through the forests of deodhar trees, birds abound and flowers add colour everywhere.


The small palace in Sadhupul is called Indira home as it was donated to Indira Gandhi , once the prime minister of India and she used it for holding children’s adventure camps. Amidst lush green mountains it’s a piece of flat land where about 1000 students can be provided with tents, a river called Ashwini flows by. The little palace becomes the store and administrative block during these camping days.
A small tea shack in Sadhupul is running since the past 80 yrs and the couple Mr. and Mrs. Verma play host to all the tourists passing by on the road. They will organize food, camping trips and even sit and chat with you over cups of coffee and talk about the history of this place. He even tried selling us some land to grow fruit trees as we found the place very beautiful and the river down below has some good opportunities for angling. We wished we had gotten our fishing tackles on this trip. Mrs. Verma said that she doesn’t want her kids to run this shop but go out in the city and get educated and do some job there. The TV and papers have given her this idea that her pastoral life is not to be envied and big cities offer more by way of a life!!!!

The other palace at Chail is at a ht of 7200 metres above sea level, there is a fabulous military school there, and the playground is marvelous. The late prince use to play regular cricket matches there. The main palace is a hotel for tourists; there are playgrounds and tennis courts too, also a lovers lane which the honeymooners find delightful. Here the city folks come and spend some quiet moments to bond with nature and breathe the unpolluted air. It’s a great hideaway for the people living in north india who want to escape the scorching heat. Mrs Verma , let me tell you that yours is a cleaner and better life in many ways as you get to help so many people and make them think about investing in a slice of your clean green land.

I saw a huge maple tree in the Chail palace grounds, it looked beautiful as green leaves were covering the naked branches and some old yellow leaves were still hanging. I once heard a poet describing a maple tree in autumn with flaming yellow leaves…..

Maple don’t show your fierce colours
My anger is more fiery than yours
So much so that I burn with anger
As you burn yellow in autumn air .