Our times with Darjeeling..

The post is about our journey to Darjeeling and back.. Hope you guys have as much fun reading it as much as it was for me recreating all the excitement of our 12 days escapade in black n white once again over here ;-)

IIT has always had its ways of driving the flow of time stagnant.. before you know it you realize you are just swimming around in loops of lectures, reading rooms, mess foods n finally a big crash on the bed at night! But then again we also always have our own ways to break away and this time on 27th February we packed our bags, bunked classes of that day (and of the 2 next days!) and walked out of the IIT Gate; Our destination: The beautiful city of Darjeeling safely nested at an altitude of 2050 m above sea level at the lesser Himalayas in Bengal... little did we know that this little city had so much more in store for us! ;-)

So we were 4.. Claire, Charles and Antoine.. they are all exchange students at IIT and are really good friends of mine. Claire is a Canadian and she is in two of my lectures and Charles and Antoine are French. I know Charles from our Graph Theory class (awesome topic, may be some other post! :P). And Antoine, well we met in parties before: ).
Our group was pretty awesome. On the way in the train I tried to learn French but well,err.. lets just say I didn't turn out to be a Nepoleon while conquering French but they definitely had their own shares of brilliant Hindi lessons!!Ahem.. ;-)
It was a long ride, 27 hours in sleeper but we played cards, chess, pulled each others' legs, talked to strangers and eventually hours counted themselves out! We did make great friends along the way. There was a Darjeeling primary school teacher and another guy from Shiliguri who helped us out in Shiliguri. We stayed there for the night. The dinner there was real awesome, Bong prawns after such a long time... yummmmmmm! :D
Okay so next day we took a jeep and headed towards Darjeeling... The roads curling around the mountains and the beautiful breeze of the hills all around almost blew away all the stuffed-in-the-back feeling of the 3 hours jeep ride... eventually we reached Darjeeling....

We booked a big room in the hotel Trinity, okay, best things about the place.....
The manager was real nice,(even the guide book said that the place had a nice manager!!:D ) He gave good directions n stuff n even sent us hot bags while we were about to set our sails for the dream world in the chilly weather of Darjeeling.... ;-)
and secondly.. the hotel had such a sexy roof.. wow!!.. at night I went up, switched on John Mayer's Gravity and smoked insignias... the big dark mountainss\with the beautiful town of Darjeeling nested within it with lights of the city slowly dimming by and the stars up there complimenting them along with a finishing touch by the beautiful breeze... hmmm.. Darjeeling definitely had made it's first impression ;-)

That evening at Darjeeling we drank tea (Darjeeling tea is real good!) even though I stuck to coffee n came to get it later!:D We made a couple of small purchases coz the day after was big!!
We were finally about to head out to our 5 day Trek!! : )

The 5 Day Trek.....

One word... 'Amazing'.. 
It was beautiful, we were out there in Singalila National Park, at about an altitude of 3500 kms with parts of it in Nepal and some in India, we walked about 83 kms in 5 days;from Man bhanjang through sandakphu and Phalut to Rimbique. (almost had my ass on fire on 1st day but I eventually got used to it!:P, what? it was my 1st trek, for god's sake!!(-_-)

We came across some fantastic views of mountains and valleys on our 1st three days.. even saw the Sleeping Buddha.. (its a series of some of the highest peaks of the world (including kunchanjunga!) that looks like a sleeping man!)
We stopped by in the villages on the way to get dinner and shelter and along the way met some incredible people too who were trekking like us; we met a really nice German couple, a Brit Psychologist and his wife (Brits have a stunning sense of humour!:D) and a French guy called Pierre.. (Dude used to smoke before me just to tease me coz I wasn't smoking during the trek!:D)
We walked through the mountains, through the snow, the fog and the clouds (well, up there its hard to say!)... we saw real big yaks! Interacted with the locals and made new friends...
all in all it was a lovely journey away from the civilization out in the wild... makes you realize that just as much depressing the ugly social reality is of this world is how beautiful the natural reality of our world... that there is always a brighter side to anything and the world had safely kept its own for those who love to explore... 
The trek would be staying with me for a long time to come....

 

Oh! I also got to throw snowballs at Claire like hell, disturbed Charles' by my sleep talks or rather as he put it.. 'Screamed like mad in my sleep to wake him up!'.. all of us had a huge over doze of tea, biscuits, card games and fun!
On our fourth day we started coming downhill through the forests. We stopped by at this beautiful village of Gorkhe, sarrounded by mountains and the village had developed beside this beautiful fountain; We had lunch over there and reached Raman. At night we drank 'Roxy' and got drunk(its a local drink made from the national flower of Nepal). We lied under the stars that night.. with the lights from the village in the mountain, it was as if  stars up there and stars down here, all at the same time.... has to be one of the best nights of the trek for me...: )

 

Returning Back To The City...

We returned back to Darjeeling with great memories, explored the city for 3 more days and roamed around a lot. There was this place called Glennary which was our favorite spot for food and drinks. Away from the mess we almost made it a point to consume everything up in the food chain, starting from pork to chicken to mutton to beef to fish!(And of course the red wine;-) 
We also hit in the Darjeeling Zoo... saw beautiful animals like the great Asiatic beer, the snow leopard, the black panther and the red panda... it was truly incredible. Before that we also visited the Tibetian Refugee camp where the Tibetian artists had their arts showcased... it was beautiful. I got myself a dragon ashtray made from strong clay!!:D We also learned a lot about the Tibetian freedom struggle and I sure hope Tibet one day stands up as a free country away from the Chinese Tyranny of Communism and Irrational Atheism (A true atheist understands the need of religion for his fellow humans)...
On the same lines I made a nice friend at the zoo. Being the guard over there he helped me charge my phone and we discussed a lot on how the people of Darjeeling are fighting hard to get their own state Gorkheland. I wished him good luck and we took off from the zoo leaving behind the amazing wild life that we got a chance to see. (even though they were all in captivity, but it still was always easy to connect to the wildness of all those beautiful animals, its like you can just keep staring at them and say that they have it in them still very 'wild': ) 

GoodBye Darjeeling...

But then I guess good times don't last forever and the day to leave the hills had finally come.
We said bye to Darjeeling and everything else that it had to offer, caught our train from NJP and returned back to Delhi.

And even though we are caught again in the eternal loops of the IIT routine, all four of us are really happy to have had a great time, to have the beautiful Darjeeling days to always look back at, at least I am..... ;-)  

Lives, Lines, Worlds and Back

Few cups of coffee down, few more hours of the night left; me and my lonely set of inconsistent equations were trying hard to come to a realizable agreement...A few more pages of my useless scribbling could have convinced him but I guess at times its just fun to be a rude junky rather than a passionate nerd so i just left him hanging right there in the middle of the night......

And everytime i decide to ditch my studies in the middle of something in the reading room there's always two choices left; either go out and smoke (but my stack died an hour ago) or talk to a new stranger!

But this time, I decided to break this pattern and talk about it instead! 
And you see thats how you and I meet, just that there's a lonely little page that separates yours' world from mine but how does that matter, right? 
But the interesting part played by this page is that it beautifully adds up to the context. Just like you, a beautiful stranger (I sure hope, you are beautiful!) are reading me, there might be many others too and talking to strangers, making new friends (or may be making friendlier strangers) has been there with me for a very long time. Its like each time you meet a new person, you get to open up to a new world, a new set of ideas, newer ways of living and looking at life and I have always found it amazing. I may not of course remember my most interesting encounters with the most interesting strangers but that hardly matters because we aren't really trying to keep records here, are we? Its just a way of communication, more of making a better afferd of colouring the moments passing by....

I have always felt that our lives are like these wiggly, ever dancing, ever wandering lines that keep drawing themselves forward as time keeps flowing by. And as we meet new people my lonely old line and theirs' (not sure if theirs' lonely) interwine for a while, get tangled a bit and eventually part again... but the feeling truly is amazing.

I have always felt that all of us live in two different worlds, 'a world around us' which we share ;where we live and stay and do and run and then the second world; 'the world within us' which belongs to only us.. that contains our dreams, our hopes, our wishes, likes, dislikes and our perception. And everytime I meet new people and talk to them I get to know a li'l about their inner worlds and they get to know about mine. Its like two different inner worlds that come closer,  coalesce for a while and hence our individual lines dont just stay confined in a limited 2D space like before but they get to breathe free into a couple of newer dimensions....

Besides you guys have no clue of how many interesting strangers i have met throughout my life in reading rooms, bus stops, flights, air ports.... now I can obviously tell you stories about them but i guess its the anonymity of theirs and the confinement within their moments that makes the concept a lot more beautiful... and may be all of them will someday walk away into the fog of my distorted memories and some new ones will walk by to give me company but that doesnt mean that the ones walked away werent special in their own ways... 

Untill next time, i guess this lonely line of mine will take your leave now but i sure hope our lines will cross again on a random day on two opposite sides of  a random table of the IIT reading room! ;-)

-By a physics student who is struggling with diverging world lines ;-)

PS: I sure hope it wasnt way too weirdly philosophical but then again, I am a physics undergrad, i have my right to be philosophical and at times a little weird!! :D

Just a part may be..

At times i wonder if the incompleteness of my world was always meant to be...
May be i am a part of someone else's dream and my work is just to express his emptyness, loneliness, sadness and all the other fucking negativity of his life. May be that individual isn't really as fucked up as I am, may be all these dark shades and depressions are just a slight bit of his life because my existance is just contained in his dreams and I am just an expression of a certain side of his subconscious that stands for the sadness of his world. May be he is happy and complete, doing what he wants to do, living the way he wants to live, with friends, a beautiful girl friend, pursuing his passion with not so over protective parents who actually 'believe in him'.

May be i am just here to keep a balance between the two opposite shades of his life and at night when he is alone or when he is alienated from the world for the time being (i am sure everyone goes through that) that his subconscious finds elements to create me in his dreams....