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Touching Upon the
Himalaya: Excursions and Enquiries
It comes as a pleasant surprise that somebody who enjoys the foothills or the middle mountains could actually dare to write such a book and even better (overcoming the "mine is bigger than yours" syndrome) some publisher has the courage to bet his money on it. However, Bill Aitken is Bill Aitken and Indian to the marrow of his bones, who hiked overland from England in 1959 and never went back. He fell in love with this functional anarchy that we call home and became a naturalised citizen. His subsequent love affair with the Himalayas and the Railways produced a body of literature that hasn't lost its Scottish saltiness. We see the middle Himalayas, which are one of the best trekking paradises where you can climb the height of Mont Blanc (15,782 ft) in canvas shoes and what Indians have been climbing barefoot. Middle-mountain trekking is different from the high altitude stuff because the mountain is alive at these lower altitudes and the view is not uniformly grey-brown or blinding white with vertiginous drops. Those who walk these hills can do so without humungous budgets and a hyperactive death wish. The pleasure of cresting the cuckoo ridge would be as sublime for us urban warriors as the gasless ascent of Everest was for Messner and Habeler. In the process if we pick up a love and appreciation for the fragile environment, all the better. This is an environment that must be protected if it has to yield water for the teeming hordes of humankind on the plains. In reading books like this, we become aware that there is more to the mountain than the ice-cream shop on the upper mall. Those who have walked off into the wilderness and drunk pure, clean water from a gurgling brook will connect with the author immediately. Others must do so immediately, lest they wait long enough for these to vanish under the garbage of the stilted resort sitting on the ridge top like Corbusier's cockroach. Some will discover an institute called the Himalayan Club and a computer called Radhanath Shikdhar, of the Everest conspiracy. Others will read about the little-known land of Arunachal Pradesh, and those with a round head on their shoulders will read about hill caps that don't fit all sizes, at least not the swollen heads of plainsmen. Some may even discover the only Hindu mystical cure for baldness. All this and more in a book with pencil sketches like geography books of yore make interesting reading and a compelling reason to don your walking shoes and walk under the deodars rather than eating and littering chip and namkeen plastics from apni PUPPY Pajeros and Indicas, listening to dear Daler, while missing the koels of the woods. |
There
is macho and there is masochist, but the lexicographer forgot the third
singular: "the mountaineer". A free climber or a base jumper
could be called an adrenaline junkie for the quick rush, but what do you
make of a man (or woman) who skirts danger for weeks at end burning
brain cells above 8,000 metres and is too afraid and tired at the top of
the peak he has climbed not knowing if he will make it back alive or
not. Whatever you may call him, it is he who is god of that rarefied
group and it is his word that you and I, Walter Mitty's of the world,
read in print, fantasising and yet cringing at the slightest possibility
of enacting such a Valkyrian fantasy.