Uttarakhand - Comfortably Numb

Book review: Becoming A Mountain by Stephen Alter

Becoming a Mountain Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime By Stephen Alter (Aleph Publications) Mountains, says Alter, have been endowed through history with nobility, wisdom, omniscience, as well as described as fearsome, treacherous, demonic. Of course, all this is but the expression of human sensibilities towards the natural world. The…

Travel: Sun Temple in Katarmal

All hail the Sun King! In all of my admittedly peripatetic life, I have learned two things: one, to go with the flow du jour; and second, to quickly sit up and grab every hint of opportunity that floats past me. So it was one unseasonably hot morning, just as we were passing the…

Travel: Jageshwar Temple, Kumaon

Temples of solitude It is a hot April day, but not too hot. I am gazing at the cluster of stone temples that makes up the ancient Jageshwar complex, 125 temples devoted to Lord Shiva. In turn, I can feel someone gazing at me; the compelling intensity of the scrutiny is like…

Travel: Dhanaulti, Uttarakhand

Silence of the wildflowers Dhanaulti in the Tehri Garwhal hills is a walker’s paradise This is what my cousin Mallika had to say about Dhanaulti. “I went for a walk. Kept walking towards the horizon. And then, all of sudden, I was at the edge of what seemed an abyss. A deep valley opened…

Feature: It Takes a Village

It takes a village An education camp held in a remote hamlet of Uttarakhand dispelled some long-held notions about people and about education. In India, the dispensation outlining a Rs. 40,000-crore programme for primary education was concomitant with the United Nations urging governments around the world to spend around six to eight billion US$ (Rs….