Travel Diaries 6 - Nepal

***Disappointment of the decade***

Country: Nepal 

Destination: Mount Everest basecamp & Kala Patthar

2017 will remain very special for us for many reasons and we wanted to commemorate year in many ways. One being traveling to all 6 continents (except Antarctica), visiting the oldest world-wonder (Egyptian Pyramids), largest rainforest (Amazon), longest river (Nile), oldest inhabited cities (Athens - because we can't go to Damascus, Syria) and.......the highest peak in the world (Mt.Everest). While all others have been done (or will be done), we were left with heartbreaking disappointment at the mighty Everest area.

In our 2.5 month hectic holiday to India, we sneaked out on a 2 day trip to Nepal in our pursuit to tick off Mount Everest from our bucket list. Since we had a 5 year old with us, the idea was to fly from Kathmandu to the Everest base-camp and then to Kala Patthar which is supposed to be the best viewpoint of the summit. 

The day we reached Kathmandu, we were amazed at how different Nepal is from India despite such strong social, religious, cultural ties and not to mention physiognomy. Nepalese people also seemed to be fiercely proud of their heritage, culture and don't appreciate being called similar to Indians. The day went well with visit to one of the oldest temples, the unique and magnificent Pasupathinath Temple (by the way, till recently Nepal was the only official Hindu country in the world). It was an eerie experience watching dead bodies being mass cremated on the banks of the river along the temple.

The next day was big. The day we were supposed to see the mighty Mount Everest with a naked eye. Here's the conversation (verbatim)

_____________________________________________________

*At Kathmandu airport helipad, 6:30 am*

Operator: sir, the weather is bad, let's wait for 30 minutes

Me: OK sure.

*After 30 mins*

Operator: sir, it's cloudy and not conducive for our tour. 

Me: But wasn't weather supposed to be good and sunny today as per forecasts.

Operator: yes sir but things change every hour and will be highly unpredictable at the Everest area. Sometimes we would also get stranded for 5 days straight. Please return to hotel and I'll update you.

Me: OK but please keep us posted and we would want to do this even at the slightest chance.

*We returned to hotel*

*Operator on phone after 1.5 hours*

Operator: Sir, Everest is not visible today. Shall I take you to Swayambhu temple and local shopping market ?

We: We came for an experience of a lifetime so let's wait for clouds to clear up and fly to atleast one of the 3 places where we can view the Everest

*Operator on phone after an hour*

 Operator: Sir, please come to helipad again. Seemingly weather had cleared up. Air traffic controller confirmed that and pilot is all set.

*We rushed like there's no tomorrow and boarded the helicopter*

*Up in the air after flying an hour into Himalayas*

Pilot: the weather is getting worse and there's no way we can go closer to the Everest view points. Let's return.  

*steers the helicopter around*

**My heart broke into 1000 pieces**

*After landing at Kathmandu helipad*

Kid:*waking up from sleep*: "Pappa, did I miss Everest ?"

____________________________________________________

The only consolation in the escapade is that the pilot took pity on us and landed us at the mysterious Haleshi Mahadev temple (google it) somewhere hidden in a bat-cave near thick woods on the banks of Doodhkoshi river in the Everest area. That would be memorable but the scar of missing on Everest remains. Some other day, some other time, may be a trek to basecamp and Kaala Patthar and I read about altitude-sickness, zero amenities, parasite infested water, indigestion, yak-dung nausea etc. It's not easy but still....

Mount Everest - I accept your challenge !

Getting Rid of 'Self Importance'

Few days back we had a party with our close friends and family to celebrate our anniversary when I attempted to sing, play guitar and dance in a party though I'm extremely mediocre (to bad) at those fine arts. The main reason for my attempt was to surprise my wife but there was another reason which I haven't shared with any. Here I'm pouring my heart out about why was that important for me to perform before 170 people and publish it on Facebook where hundreds more could judge me.

I wanted to break the shackles of self-importance that clutched me, that compulsive need to appear good and correct at all times, I wanted to get rid of my fear of criticism or judgement by others. For once I wanted to be myself without getting hindered by how and what others thought of me if I fail...Eventually I failed in performing well but I won over my internal struggle with narcissism.

Thanks to my second season of academic experience in the last 2-3 years I have met over 500 people who were miles ahead of me in intelligence, success and talent in every way. They were enterprising, always thinking out of box, breaking cliched rules, working to set new paths throughout. But more fascinating was their attitude towards life and society. One common thread I witnessed among all those was the conspicuous lacking of an inflated sense of self importance or urge to look correct.

On the other hand I know scores of ordinary people considering themselves superstars with whatever mediocrity they achieved (or sometimes without any). I remember my uncle, a distant relative, who never worked in his life because he didn't like 'being managed by others'. Talk about self-respect and self-importance !

I just had to juxtapose these two sets of people of either ends of the spectrum to see where I wanted to be and I knew the answer.

Self-importance or ultra-egoism or in psychological terms called as 'narcissistic personality disorder' is a mental condition in which people have a deep need for admiration and extreme self respect. But behind that lies a low self esteem that even a slightest of criticism can hurt, they feel the need to defend against any criticism. Those suffering from this condition usually pollute their internal energies, strain relationships and hinder their own growth prospects

“Self-importance is man’s greatest enemy. What weakens him is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of his fellow men. Self-importance requires that one spend most of one’s life offended by something or someone.”~ Don Juan

Though it's a mental blockade, it has a very easy solution. And it is 'GETTING OUT OF THE COMFORT ZONE". If you ever feel shy, unduly self conscious, unnecessarily embarrassed or awkward about yourself, you must realize that your self-importance is at work. The mental block is not allowing you to try something new for the fear of failure and/or looking bad and your low self-esteem requires you to only look good before others. Dear friend, that is a perfect situation to REVOLT & REINVENT yourself. Just say 'hatt teri ki, jo hoga dekha jaayega' and make up your mind.

Nobody would hold you for your perceived failures forever. Nobody has time or patience to think about you as much as you do. Don't be a prisoner of your own ego. Let others judge, the same people will initially laugh at you, then mock at you, question you and will eventually follow you.

On the flip side, getting free of self-importance doesn't mean leading an ascetic or austere life. You must know how to celebrate life, dress well, travel, grow socially, occasionally collaborate, share your success stories to those who love you without seeking attention and admiration.

Stop loving yourself so much and start loving the world you are in. A lifetime is not sufficient to experience the world, cultures, arts, languages, places and people around you. Don't let yourself ruin it for you. Break the shackles.

PS: I admit my own Facebook updates are seemingly narcissistic though I always tried to use the medium only as a journal of my travel escapades, personal milestones and opinions in form of blog posts. However starting 2018, I'm considering curtailing of my Facebook activity and if possible deactivate the account too in order to walk the talk.

God Vs Religion: Why I can neither be an Atheist nor Religious !

As soon as we're born, we were assigned a label of religion, caste, sect and we live our entire life feeling great about, defending, fighting for that identity. While doing this, we believe we're defending God, rituals, way of life our God wanted us to live with. We follow our belief system and rituals because our parents inculcated those "values" into us. They inherited those beliefs from their parents and they got it from their parents and so on. But where did it all start ?

Why I can't be an atheist !

Let us back date certain events in history to the point when God presumably delivered a message to select human(s) whose teachings are being followed even today. Let me start with a brief history of our Universe.

13,700,000,000 years ago (that's 13.7 billion years ago), something mysterious happened and the space came into existence out of nothing. That event is, in scientific circles, called Big Bang. Three minutes after the occurrence of Big Bang, light elements were born and when they collided formed various elements (as we know in periodic table of chemistry) were born. Google Big Bang for more intricate details about how the numbers were derived, calculated. That would make your day for sure.

But it's out of even the finest of human minds to comprehend how the big bang occurred, what caused the sudden burst of particles, space and what was the status before Big Bang. So there could be something beyond the universe, which caused or triggered the cosmic events and that super-power which commands space, orbits, centripetal and centrifugal forces to balance the universe, theories of gravity, magnetism, electricity and other natural phenomena. That super-power can be called GOD, unless one has an alternate theory or explanation. But the GOD I'm referring to here is a formless phenomenon or nature as opposed to that benevolent entity responding to individuals' prayers. I firmly believe in my understanding of GOD and hence despite being a voracious reader of Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Richard Dawkins, I can't put myself into a category of atheists.

Now read ahead about what happened after the Big Bang.

• 8,900,000,000 (8.9 billion) years ago, Milky Way galaxy was born. 
• 4,600,000,000 (4.6 billion) years ago, Solar System was formed then. 
• 4,400,000,000 (4.4 billion) years ago, water was formed on Earth
• 4,100,000,000 (4.1 billion) years ago, earliest form of life was formed from non-living matter through a phenomenon called Abiogenesis. Google that.
• 3,500,000,000 (3.5 billion) years ago, traces of oxygen were formed but the oxygen as we see today was formed only 50 million years ago.
• 1,250,000.000 (1.25 billion) years ago, sexual reproduction of organisms began. Everything living existed only under water
• 400,000,000 (400 million) years ago, land life began with vegetation, flora and fauna
• 10,000,000 (10 million) years ago, first apes formed who would be ancestors to modern humans
• 4,000,000 (4 million) years ago, humans began walking on two legs
• 50,000 years ago, modern humans as we know began to live.

A bit of future: Earth will die in the next 1 billion years and Sun will die in the next 5 billion years. So the development of the universe, world, life went through and is going through multiple epochs, evolution, revolutions, changes very very slowly.

History of Religion

So as mentioned earlier, modern humans came into being 50,000 years ago and since then humans followed burials of dead and certain social ways of life. Sumerian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese civilizations introduced organized religions in their respective areas but those religions were long extinct.

Indus Valley Civilization began around 3300 BC (that's around 5000 years ago). The civilization is considered to be precursor to Dravidian civilization and Vedic religion which formed earlier form of Hinduism later around 1500 BC.That was the same period when Abraham, patriarch of Judaism, Christianity and Islam lived.

Vardhaman Mahavir founded Jainism and Gautama Buddha founded Buddhism in around 500-600 BC, Confucianism was founded around 500-600 BC, Zoroastrianism founded between 400-500 BC. Jesus Christ lived and founded Christianity between 4 BC and 30 AD. Prophet Mohammed lived and founded Islam between 570 AD to 700 AD. Guru Nanak ji founded Sikhism between 1450 to 1550 AD. 

Hinduism & Vedas

Me being a Hindu, would not and should not comment on other religions, their evolution and hence will back-date how exactly Hinduism came into existence and because it is the oldest religion being practiced today (along with Judaism, perhaps), other religions could have trodden a similar path.

To many devout Hindus, its astonishing to know that basic form of Hinduism began in Pakistan by ancestors of Dravidian (South Indian) folks in bronze age around 1500 BC. That's when the first religious text (still in use) was composed in the form of Rigveda, the cradle of Vedic religion and Hinduism. Rigveda is a collection of over 10,000 verses classified into 10 mandalas believed to be composed by 10 sages after whom the current gotra system is being practiced.

Though reading all vedas will take years, I have been skimming all 4 vedas for the last 10 months to understand the broad context and gist.

RigVeda is full of hymns and praises of Gods and the most revered gods were Indra (king of Gods) and Agni (Fire-God). Varuna (Rain-God) was revered too and was labeled as an asura the term which in later Hindu texts was demonized. To the surprise of many, Vishnu and Rudra (Shiva) who are pivotal Hindu Gods of the current era had very minor and marginal reference to in Rigveda on which entire Hinduism is based on. For example, Indra was the subject of Praise in 289 hymns whereas Vishnu was confined to 6 and Shiva to 5. Agni was treated as a messenger to all Gods (and hence carry prominence in hawans and poojas today). 

Another interesting fact is that the deities eulogized in Rigveda were extremely similar in traits and powers to Yamna Culture (of present day Ukraine), central Asian extinct religions like Bactria-Margiana (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan etc) and ancient Persian cultures (Indra, the most celebrated God in Rigveda is an uncanny replica of an older Persian deity called Verethragna) and the earliest inhabitants of Vedic age were also believed to be migrated from or via Central Asian regions.

Samaveda is a musical version and a subset of Rigveda. Yagurveda later built upon from the contents of Rigveda few centuries later comprises more about homam, hawan, poojas, vrathams, yagams and rituals. Most of the rituals followed by Hindus today are inherited from Yajurveda. Atharvaveda, a much later addition is also built upon extracts of Rigveda and comprises more about spells, charms and magical binds to counteract bad omen and diseases. Atharvaveda was not considered a major veda till many centuries.

Hinduism as we know today is not founded by any one person but is a result of multiple transformations since the last 4-5 millennia. In the bronze age of nomads, survivalists, few relatively intelligent human beings in flesh and blood envisaged / hallucinated / created ways to pacify, influence and turn the unknown Superpower to their benefit and composed hymns in their praise which formed Vedas. Fortunate to them, their fellow humans had unwavering faith in their divine connection enough to practice and transmit their teachings through generations. That was some feat worth commending.

The people who lived in vedic period were semi-nomadic folks who built and thrived on Indus valley Civilization (oldest along with Egyptian and Mesopotomian civilizations). While it's widely believed that Dravidian people who flourished in the Indus Valley Civilization could not withstand the drought, natural calamities and hence migrated southbound and later Aryan tribes inherited the vedic civilization, blended their own belief system to the preceding vedic culture to shape present-form Hinduism. Vedas were subsequently adapted and manipulated by their inheritors and descendants who have been transmitting their beliefs to their next generations and that is how we are today following those traditions because our forefathers and their forefathers believed what the sages spoke of God.

Much later other wise men born in the world had the vision and audacity to stand against the people around them to re-interpret the concept of God with a new way of life founded other religions. Religions thrive on people who are willing to follow and put their unflinching faith (sometimes faith enough to die or kill) in other person's vision of God.

Final Thoughts:

Now if you don't believe in the concepts like big-bang, theory of evolution, gravity, magnetism, cosmology, chemical reactions, periodic table etc, this article makes no sense to you. On the contrary, if you believe in all those and still believe what is being preached in religions, you must have a grand appetite to hold contradictory theories seamlessly. BTW God is the only common thread which can be possible in all science, history and theology (religions).

PS: Another interesting fact. If we compress the entire history of the universe into the last 24 hours, humans would enter this world only 4 seconds ago. Religions which claim to connect to the God would be formed only 2 seconds ago and here in this second, we are trying to prove superiority of our religion over others through debates, persecution, phobia and hatred. May God bless all of us.

Using Haters to Your Benefit

Without giving too much of gyaan, let me put it down simply that whatever you think or feel about yourself, there will always be swarms of haters all around. If you watched Quentin Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds", the Nazi colonel played by Christoph Waltz reminds that though rat and squirrel look alike except their tails and carry same kind of diseases, people loathe the very sight of the rat but not squirrel. So we are programmed to hate rats over squirrels without any fault of theirs.

So regardless what you do, act, behave or not, SOME PEOPLE LOVE TO HATE YOU. You can't do much about that but to take their hatred into your stride or ignore them or hate them back with more vigor, based on what are you made up of.

The problem usually won't be with those random chronic haters, but the other group who actually matter; those who loved us at certain point, were close to our lives, part of our journey and then turned into closet haters. The reasons for their hatred could be anything from vicious to ludicrous and could be because

• they don't like you not living as per their suggestions, guidelines and expectations
• they believe you don't deserve the love or success you experience
• they don't want to acknowledge your contribution to their well-being
• they can't accept you could do better than them in life
• they feel better about themselves by belittling you
• they can't tolerate you surpassing their predictions about you
• they simply can't stand your tastes or behavior or attitude or identity
• et al.

Some people hate and develop a grudge against you and some others stoop to slander, denigrate, manipulate, exploit, gossip, waiting for you to fail, pretend to help, humiliate to feel greater etc. 

When somebody indulges in negativity against you, that automatically generates negative energy, anger, outrage within. Now what to do with this energy decides what are you going to do with your life.

Anger Management:

You can find hundreds of articles in internet how to manage anger and how to use humor, self-control etc to ease out the anger in the best way possible but very few articles propose how to use the negative energy to your benefit. 

While retaliation sounds to be the most natural reaction, a moment of pause to know if that would impact your life in any way takes you miles ahead. If that does and if you can afford to invest that energy, time and mind to do so, go ahead and retaliate, react and respond. But if you want to react only to protect your ego, my friend, you are making a grave disservice to yourself.

Ego tussles often go in vain. Even if you win, you'll face another person doing that exact thing sooner or later. So life will be a series of retaliations and when you grow older, you'll only see yourself as that clueless gladiator indulging in imaginary fights.

Also when you react to every non-entity you are only giving credibility to their rant. You can instead rise two notches above and pretend they don't exist than getting into a dirty duel. Also you can save yourself from uttering some nonsense which can potentially haunt you in the future when you mend your fences with them.

So the simple solution is try to avoid them and cut them off from your close circles gradually without matching their vileness and channelize all the negative energy to do something more creative and knowledgeable. Though it sounds too much of a text-book strategy, it works. It worked for many. 

Take this as an example: What would you do when you haven't opened a book in the entire semester and you have an exam the next day ? The fear in you generates high pressure concentration resulting in extremely high efficiency and productivity. Same when you know you haven't maintained any accounting records and you get an out-of-the-blue audit notice, court notice etc.

Fear and anger work on your brain similarly. If you are angry, you can easily channelize all your negative energy, rage, temper and fury to thrust yourself with multi-fold momentum. This is the exact state of mind when you must take up learning a new language or say, a technology, enroll yourself into some sport, club, gym or start writing articles, blogs, books. The result will be of astonishingly superior quality.

Those who are financially stable can afford to buy a meal to the homeless every-time they are upset or sponsor an unfortunate kid learn something and then see the difference in their state of mind. If you are not easy on money, write something really nice to your loved one. Your unconditional, unexpected gesture of love will overturn the entire world around you upside down and will earn you more love. The best way to handle each hater is to express love to 5 people you adore. As cliche as it might sound, expression of love always trumps hatred and viciousness.

Though the article is more about how to handle hatred and negativity from others, proper care need to taken not to turn yourself into a hater of somebody else and especially of those who love you. In the world brimming with negative people, finding those who like you unconditionally and look forward to your friendship is rare. Hold them tight and winnow the rest like the chaff from wheat.

Ignoring unwanted people is an art. Be an artist !