A road, a hill and a little tea

6.15 pm, National Highway no. 3

54 kilometres from Dharamsala

I sit in the car speeding through the hilly road with treacherous terrains on either side. The speed does not really bother me; neither do the deep pits besides the road. Some pits are so deep that you cannot see the bottom of them; they are filled with dark vivid darkness; it sometimes makes me wonder if I would find hell on the other side of that darkness but my curiosity is not strong enough to make me jump into it to find out. Night was falling over the cold deserted hills slowly. There was still some light of the day left but it was as if it had already surrendered itself to the dark with a barely audible, determined and constant mutter which sounded like, “I shall see you tomorrow.”

We stop at a roadside tea vendor to refresh ourselves; there is this thing about the tea you have in these small roadside shops in hills; it has a way of reaching out to your soul. As soon as I take the first sip of the steamy brown liquid, a chilly gust of winter air sweeps upon me like a cold blanket. It was as if the winds were complimenting the tea. The colder it got, the more wonderful the tea felt. Some wild bushes line the road in front of me and as I sit there sipping my tea the bushes sway in the wind, making ruffled noises which added to the whole atmosphere of the hills somehow. There is no real inhabitation barring an empty house a little to the right of the tea vendor.

Sitting there in dim daylight with cold wind all over you and not even a hint of humanly sound does something to you, you go into a trance and for some wildly incomprehensible reason you get nostalgic about old times. As I sat there, still and calm two small kids walk through right in front of me, a boy and a much smaller girl. The boy holds a small steel container in his hand and he walks swinging the container wildly in his hands making a clanky voice with it. Milk spills down from the sides of the container slowly but the boy, unmindful of that fact or of the fact that there was someone sitting there sipping his tea while appreciating the calm and peace of the surroundings; went on in his own world. A small girl walks behind him. She walks with a spur in her step; the kind kids generally have when they have just discovered this wonder ability of human legs known as walking, she is probably singing a song in a dialect I barely decipher. Her mother probably sang her this song when she used to cry as a baby and she just won’t shut up whatever her mother may try.

I should have had been angered, disturbed, irritated and frustrated at the sudden entry of these sources of noise into my tranquil world. But I am not. For some reason they just delight me even more. An emotion sweeps over me as I watch them go. Sadly I cannot describe the emotion; I don’t think I will ever be able to but it was something divine shining upon me through the innocent beauty of the children and the angelic brilliance of the hills. Those two kids of the hills were a part of the scene, they belonged there. They were a part of nature.

With the innocence, truth, carefree-ness and simplicity of the children the human race is as close to nature as it will ever be.

Ishaan Kumbkarni

Its Okay; I Guess.

Its not everyday that you wake up and realise that the time has finally come to take a decision in your life. My life up untill now was all about going with the flow. As a young boy growing up in two enormously different regions of North India namely the still and cool hills of Kangra in Himachal Pradesh for the first 10 years of my life and then the polluted and congested plains of Ludhiana in Punjab for the rest 10 of my 20 till now, I was constantly surrounded by my caring parents and my loving friends. All this time; though I loved the support from all those who cared about me; I never really got a chance to be alone and a situation never arose where in I had to decide on something. Things were decided for me and I went with the flow and I did not mind actually. My mind grew up to be a little different from the kids who were growing up with me. I would have attributed that to the switch of habitats when I was 10 but for some strange reason I seemed to have failed to imbibe the composure and simplicity of the people living in the hills or for that matter, the charm and style of the people of the plains. But as I had always done, I tell myself, “Its Okay; I guess” and move onto the next ladder.


School was a piece of cake; it always is unless you really want to screw up but then here in India when you clear 10th standard and you have barely celebrated your 16th you are suddenly laden with the enormous responsibility of choosing from a few given options as to what you want to do for the rest of your life. Suddenly you have to take a decision and the small problem when that situation arose for me was – I hadn’t been taught how to. And then you eventually take the easy way out; you play safe or atleast I did; I chose what I saw around the most; I chose what, over the years had become sort of a family business. It is logical after all; isn’t it?  If your Dad was a doctor, all your dad’s brothers and sisters are doctors, if nobody has chosen anything except Medical for the past couple of generations in your family its only natural that it would work for you. So end of this story. I take Medical; I tell myself;  “Its Okay; I Guess”.

Everything was thought out in detail, the logical explanations, the practical viability; everything; absolutely everything. But I would realize some years down the road that there was a flaw in the plan, there was a loop hole in the script, something had been left out, something had not been paid any heed to and that something was – the unpredictablility of human genes. Yes; my parents were into Medical, Yes; my grandparents were into medical but what was also true was that the DNA does not necessarily give a shit about that.

Yes people would argue that considering the easy going thing I sometimes am; its probably a case where I am trying to run away from the hard work and dedication that comes in with choosing medical. Honestly; I dont know. Maybe,  just maybe those people can be right. Actually I so badly hope that those people are right and that I have not wasted almost 5 years of my life barking up the wrong tree but then how will those people explain the fact that I stuck it out for 5 years here; not 1, not 2, not 3 but 5 full years and as a matter of fact I still am somewhat fighting but one thing is so spectacularly clear in my head now and that is the fact that I do not belong here and honestly; I dont think that anything or anyone will be able to change that now.

But it is okay I guess. Life goes on as it always has.

Ishaan Kumbakrni