Step Into My Shoes..

(Disclaimer: It's a long ass article) October 27th, 2018 4:00 am - excitement The morning was dark and freezing. And the six companions had decided, "we have seen the same mountains from much closer for far too long already" so there was just the two of us. I left my room with much apprehension and I was actually holding my breath when I made my way to the stairs. I took the first step down, only to find out - hey it isn't so hard after all. So with a pep on my steps, I made it downstairs and out the hotel. The time was 4:25 am. We had a torch with us but my friend is an owl - he doesn't need anything but the moon to light his way. We were told the Poon Hill tower was an hour long uphill climb and sunrise was forecasted (by me) to be at around 6:15, so it still doesn't make sense why we woke up so damn early. But turned out, there were people who must've gotten earlier than us since we passed so many of them on our way up. The trail is well o...

"Mountains have a way of dealing with overconfidence." - Hermann Buhl October 25th, 2018 16:09 - Pode, Chauri Goth. [scared] As I sat there under the rock, the speed with which snow was gathering on the ground was no match with the thoughts that were running inside my head.  What if there was a blizzard? What if someone with bad intentions came to get me? What if a snow leopard came? What if my friends did n't come back?  And at the same time, I was wondering if it was such a good idea to leave the place. What if my friends came back and didn't find me there? What would they go through? Would they waste any more of their time trying to find me? Those were very intense two minutes, because my head hadn't finished processing these questions when I heard my friend come running - shouting my name. I had never felt such relief in my life. My legs had almost started to feel gelatinous. Apparently they were forced to retreat immediately as the snowfall ...

Continued.. The instructions weren't very clear but we were in a great hurry to go somewhere, do something, climb a mountain! For about an hour, all we did was walk either downhill or straight with zero difficulty and remember, we were travelling light. At the end of the first hour, we reached a place which was like the base of the mountain that we were going to have to climb. We had only just reached there that it kinda started snowing. At first, we weren't sure what was happening. We had seen cloud forming at the tip of the mountain but we were definitely not expecting it to snow this far down. But lives don't work alongside our expectations. Some of us hesitated but the rest wanted to carry on. So majority won and up we went.  It wasn't the first time for some of us to witness snowfall, but immediately after we started walking, we sighted a danphe - the national bird of Nepal, definitely a first time for all of us. It felt like a good sig...

For the umpteenth time in my life, I have cheated death, again. Okay, may be I am being a little too dramatic. I am an adventurous person but I don't go and seek to partake in risky activities like jumping off a cliff, climbing a steep mountain, walking into the unknown in a failing daylight when it's snowing - but in retrospect, I have done all that in the past week. Let me elaborate. A week ago, I left Kathmandu with four people with the intention to trek to Khopra Ridge and come back with some good instagrammable pictures. I did come back with many great pictures but also I am glad to have come back with greater stories to tell. Normally, when I travel, I am on the driving seat. I decide where we go, when we go, how we go and every such things. I like being in control and knowing what's coming. Many a times, plans have succeeded and I have come back content. This time, however, I had been designated the passenger seat from where I couldn't even see where we...

I had a friend over.  We sat there swinging on the swing in my balcony; her smelling a little like the cigarette she must have smoked before coming in to see me. Me smelling like someone who had done nothing but lie on her bed reading all day. It was a hot day. I wouldn't have liked the way I smelled if I was her. The smell of failure.  She knew I had a lot on my plate and yet she couldn't stop talking about her problems. I didn't mind, of course. I was more than happy to get my mind off the troubles that were bursting from the seams of a sorry life that I was unfortunate to call mine.  We talked everyday. But you don't really talk well over the phone or in texts or in memes, for that matter. You have to see their faces, see how their shoulders slumped or their eyes lit to really know. It's quite easy to dodge questions when you're not face to face.  And yet, there I was dancing away from talking about the storm brewing in my life whilst liste...

About 3 and a half years ago, I had posted a blog piece called, "Are you friends with me? I think I know your type." It referred to being friends with me in Facebook. 3 and a half years later, I no longer am a user. I have moved to being a compulsive and abusive user of another application - Instagram, and I feel the need to diagnose the types of people I am connected to here.  **Disclaimer - I mean no offence. Broadly, there are 7 types of people for me on Instagram, 1) The ones I follow and the ones that follow me back (doesn't matter who followed who first, it's like which came first, the chicken or the egg) eg. close friends and family 2) The ones that only I follow and ones that don't and will not follow me back, but the ones I will keep on following regardless. eg. Liverpool Football Club 3) The ones that follow me but ones I won't follow back, either because a) their profiles are private (don't know why people expect...