There are a lot of people in India who work labor and are stuck with difficult and physically exhausting jobs. Their reponsibilities to the people in their families is immense, the ability to innovate and change jobs for a better standard of living is difficult to even hope for because they don't have much scope for change. So even if a rickshaw guy wanted to change his profession he couldn't because he has to support his family. This is probably one of the smaller issues of our emergent economy and stunted growth.A friend of mine describes his own plight as a predestined move, one that is dictated by time and need. He sometimes says if perhaps the days were 30 hours longer....

The white peaked Mountains

We walked up today to Char Dukan and bumped into Stefan Eicher, he and Preeti grew up together and he may be American but he looks and sounds like anyone of us Indians its very warm. We talked for a while, it was great to connect. Had Chai and me and Preeti spoke at length about the activist cafe.

Met the girls and walked up to sister's Bazaar which is quite empty, a beautiful street with the tallest trees and the bluest skies (I'm convinced that the skies in the hills are clearer and brighter and have more colour). Although Sister's bazaar may be called so but in all actuality there is no bazaar, one of the girls pointed out that just because it has a name that says "bazaar" doesn't mean it has a bazaar...... interesting.

and then I saw them, or we all a group of us saw them at the same time... the white peaked Himalayas, like snow cones, sturdy, distant, a vision of ice and frozen mountain, beautiful tall and cold. History and vivid television shots of the mountains rang in my head, every book about the people of the mountains, the Tibetians, the soft and insightful prose of Heirich Harrer all echoed in my mind's Halls. But I'd seen them before, as that child in an infants baby blue bodysuit socks, pants and top all connected as one clothe. These eyes had seen them before but perhaps in an incomprehendible context, in a vision that failed to recognize the magnitude of what was seen.

22odd years later. In a whole new context, a different person, older and perhaps a bit too comprehensive, i see the himalayas for real. they enrapture me. I beheld them. or perhaps the power of the hills held me. the geographic splendor. the splendor.