First day of my life.

by Surender Yadav (India)

A leap into the unknown India

Every time I saw a photograph or a painting of the snow-covered mountains of Himalayas, I felt a little pang in my heart. It was early December when my college's winter vacation was there. I and my two friends who are together after a very long interval decided to do something adventurous on this holidays. I had taken the whole responsibility of leading the plan and we decided to visit kasol and Graham trek. We had not too much expectations from our Trek in begin but this trek as i mentioned in the title of story just enlightened me with the new approach of life. We are living in the society full of competition, responsibilities and academics . Now-a-days, these are the benchmarks to judge or analyse the person that whether he is successful or not. We all have created a hypothetical environment which runs according to the result oriented system. We stopped at a place Bhuntar which is 40-45km away from Kasol,had breakfast and then we taken a bus for Kasol. First we had decided to take a trek for Graham village,we planned to stay there for a night and the we decided to visit Tosh valley on the very next day. When i had my first step on the path towards Graham village, from that moment a stream of positive vibes started emerging through me. My friends are bit slower than me as they are not much active in the sports and I used to play football on regular basis. So, i decided to leave them behind and continued my trek all alone. This sounds bit mean but at that time, I was going through some personal issues and wanted to spend some time alone. Whole trek is followed by the river going downstream through the mountains. From my childhood, i was always like the arrogant and egoistic type of guy( as per my friends). That was the day when i came to realise that i am nothing. The vastness and variety of mother nature leave me stunned. My whole ego had been vanished. There was a tree fallen on the riverside by which i crossed the river. I take a pause at the spot from which i can see the huge mountain range of Himalayas and the river beneath me. I was all alone there and wished that, time must stops here. All my worries and my self esteem had been vanished. It was like i am the part of this nature and my status or identity is nothing infront of this beauty. Till that day i used to think that i know everything and i posses the answer of like every question. But after so much self realisation,i found that i am learning something new about life and all i getting is from this mother nature. Then my friends catches me after about 2 hours at that spot. Till evening, we were at Graham and everywhere there is snow.This is the first time in my life that i have seen snow and without any specific precautions we jumped into the ice and started fighting each other. After a few moments the i e had entered in our shoes and clothes and started melting. It's like Stings piercing through our skin. We suddenly came aside and started shivering. I am a very big fan of national geographic or discovery channel. I told my friends,let me handle this, i am going to collect some woods and grass, and they i made you guys dry with fire. My friend had put his newly purchased reebok shoes onto the fire and to dry it up and then he was like, ' bro what's this smell'. The fabric of his shoes carried a fire and upper part of shoe is half burnt. We are laughing like a hell and this was the first time for all of us so we also not had much idea that what and how to deal with the things in mountain. This is the reason why it is going to be memorable. This trek helps me to see the universe with new fresh perspective of life and i count it as my new Life from that specific day.