Kashmir

I often used to marvel at the imagination of landscape artists. One stroke of a paint-brush and a stream would start flowing from a snow capped mountain peak, arguing its way across rocks of various sizes, eventually ending up in a semi-frozen lake. Living in a polluted city, these appeared to be imagined paradises. And then, last week, I got a chance to put behind my daily grind and visit Kashmir, and I realized that sometimes adages are fitting, for indeed Kashmir is no less than heaven on Earth.

My expectation from the Kashmir Great Lakes trek with IndiaHikes was to disconnect from the drudgery of a routine immersed in information overload. For months, mornings would begin with checking stock prices, the latest poker player rankings, cryptocurrency prices, number of covid cases and a new startup getting funded. While each of these individually are engaging topics, in cumulation they reduce life to just numbers. A long time had passed since I could wake up and expect to be among tall mountains, winding rivers, and a shy sun. It is correctly said that to be plucked from your daily routine into something alien breeds familiarity with oneself – you go back discovering something more about yourself. And so, with some degree of anticipation, I landed in Srinagar with a close friend Siddharth.

To be honest, I thought Srinagar would offer more excitement than it did. Media coverage around the city paints it as a hotspot of unrest and violence, but our brief stay was eventless, even though it coincided with the death anniversary of militant/martyr Burhan Wani. Local people were welcoming, the food was good and overall it appeared to be just like any other small city with everyone going about their lives. We headed to Shitkadi (near Sonamarg) the very next day, and this is when I realized I was now in the real Kashmir. Over the next few days, we witnessed the beauty of several lakes, punctuated with boulder sections, long walks in extremely green mountains with several hundred sheep for company, and also the occasionally challenging river crossing. The trek was harder than we had anticipated, with more than 15 km of walking almost every day, but it was also highly rewarding.

The first immediate thing which struck me is the kaleidoscope of lives we were met with. As we get older, we rarely get a chance to meet people outside our circle. But on a trek, people come from all walks of life, they get to be whoever they want, without any fear of judgement. While everyone has their own story, on this trek I found new friends in a very patient and relaxed fixed income trader Saurabh, his super-fun wife Amita who is into wealth management; Saurabh’s incredible sister Neha who works three jobs and runs a business in Bombay; a very charming Shubham from Lucknow who works with UP’s power board (he has just turned 30 and is navigating the treacherous waters of arranged marriages); a very wise computer science engineer Nikhil who will start a new venture next month; and finally Nimisha, who is all of 49 and whose fitness inspired me to stay healthy and improve my own fitness levels.

An incident which struck me was when sitting on the mountainside, slightly breathless after a short ascent, I overheard a fellow trekker ask Pervez bhai, our trek guide, how far were we from Pakistan. When Parvez bhai told her we were only 60 km away, she asked him his views on the ever-sensitive topic of Kashmir’s allegiance – being a Muslim, did he wish things were different? Pervez bhai replied – “I am too insignificant to have an opinion; all I know is that there are equally beautiful lakes, forests, trails and peaks on the other side of an artificially created boundary, and as a man of the mountains I wish that someday I am able to explore them, just as I wish that people on the other side can witness the beauty of our lands as well.” A somber reminder on people just wanting peace, when there is so much noise around us.

Descending from the Gadsar pass towards the Gadsar lake, we encountered a shepherd on the trail. He greeted us politely before asking if we had any pain killers to spare. His knee had been giving him a lot of trouble. Since there was no facility to disburse medicines, he would seek out trekkers and army men for medicines. Because of covid, he had not come across anyone for a few months. Our trek leader dispensed with a few tablets of Ibuprofen, and I realized that something which is available so easily in cities becomes very hard in the mountains. While our best brains figure out how to solve logistics so that we can access a meaningless online order on the same day instead of waiting for some time, there are people who wait out months on the look out of necessities. And they do it with the most charming smile, while we sulk despite having much more than we need.

Throughout the course of trek, I had several debates with Siddharth, ranging from the more routine ones on how to manage money (to invest or not to invest in crypto!) and the purpose of marriage to more existential ones around the ultimate truth (is choice/freedom a bigger truth than survival?). While the debates themselves were interesting, we were more fascinated by our ability to have long conversations – something that is nearly impossible in our daily existence due to ever increasing distractions. This is one of the main reasons it has become hard to discover friends – the moment we are even remotely bored we switch to our smartphones; while in the mountains we don’t give up on conversations so easily.

I am not sure how many professions are in store for me, what sort of businesses I will indulge in, or how many more poker tournaments I will play. The one thing I know is that I have known beauty on this trek, and my life will be poorer if I don’t return to it some day.