Living The Dead

When you see something big, it’s just a sight of something that consumes more space. But when you see something magnificent, you realise where you stand and what you really are. This is something magical that happened to me as well. There are mountains, there are big mountains and then, there are huge mountains. My expedition to the Mars of India led me to a very powerful realisation of how my existence is almost negligible in this vastness called the Universe. My camera was a shame for capturing such beautifully ruling landscape which, in all its mightiness, impresses its power upon you. In the little that I could really capture while bumping in the moving bus, the splendour of the trans- Himalayas becomes a bit evident. A small dot on those loopy roads, set amidst the wide mountainous landscape, is actually a huge truck. A truck, which is considered the biggest thing on the road in the cities, had no identity there in the hilly deserts. So, where did I stand? Who am I? What is the importance of my existence to the world? I was just a speck of dust, or may be even minuter than that for what stood in front of my eyes. There were fort-like formations created by nature on those gigantic mountains. Somehow, nature had its way to express that it is the most powerful of all on the earth. It was nature who created and destroyed those forts, decided whether a passer-by should be allowed into its wilderness or not and might as well, became the master of your destiny in that lonely, deserted, wickedly silent atmosphere. Now that I am back to the fast life of the cities, I realise how free I was there in the dry darkness of the open grounds which changed colour from morning till dusk. Pinks, blues, greens, browns, blacks, purples; there was nothing shady, nothing colour-filled, nothing at all, yet, there was every colour, alive, like it had never been before on the canvas. There was no life on that isolated planet, but everything seemed lively and happy in the deadness of the seclusion. From the deadliest routes, to the most beautifully unexpected roads on earth, I had tears in my eyes as I left that parched heaven. Tears of joy, accomplishment and separation; I got freedom in the breathless air; I got warmth of life in the cold desert.