'I felt like I was home even when I had never been there earlier'

Contributor: Ritu Konsam

With a heart bigger than you could ever imagine, with a head full of thoughts, with a mind always wondering, reflecting and analyzing but I did speak less. Didn’t I? Did my silence bother you? Did the space that my silence had created made you breathe ignorance or indifference? I sincerely hope not. But I heard you all. Unseeingly, yet attentively I listened to you all whether we spoke to each other or not. Shashank spoke to me about listening with your whole body; I couldn’t quite understand what it meant while that was what I was doing all that while. Thank you for this Shashank, I feel I have communicated more with everyone by listening to them. While I sit alone in my room at the moment, my room seems to echo the voices of those people with whom I didn’t speak to but listened to. 

Ria, I feel we would have been perfect girl-friends playing dolls together or tearing each other’s hair apart have I met you in childhood. I am still glad that I met you now. When Prakhar Bhaiya told me I was brave, I wondered, “Am I?” But I am willing to believe what he saw in me just to help myself take a bigger leap in life. I did not get anything from the Padh-Yatra, yet by the end of it, I feel so rich!

While we were cooking food, Gaurav in his thoughtful moment sniggered these words to himself, "what do we need more than this? We have got fire to cook food, a roof to take shelter." At that moment, I did think …. yeah the place is making us think this way, once we reach Delhi such questions would not be dared to ask. But this question seems to be playing around till now in my head. I came to the Padh- Yatra just with a question only to come back with thousand more yet to be answered. I don’t know if I will be able to find answers to each question, but nevertheless I shall try. Gaurav, thank you for taking us back to our roots. In our chase of “little more”, we have forgotten the fact that our beautiful planet earth isn’t a gift from our ancestors but a debt that we owe to our future children. If we do not protect, who will? After all, it’s not an option but a responsibility! I never took the mountains, the river or the clear sky seriously enough to consider each one to be a part of me. For all I cared, they were elements of beauty one must see once in a while! What a startling revelation! Twenty -one years of living have never taught me a greater lesson than what I learnt in the past few days!

Those huge rocks made me believe in God and humbled me down. The enthralling beauty of the mountains made me shed a tear to myself out of sheer happiness. I have seen beauty but those mountains made me feel it. It’s a feeling I won’t trade for anything! I want to share this feeling to the generations yet to come not through stories of “how our earth was” but as a state of existence that they can see to believe.

The thing about nature is that it’s not just crazily captivating but also comforting. I felt like I was home even if I have never been there earlier! The silence it radiates is so eloquent yet you don’t hear it with your ears but with your soul. It spoke of the time when man didn’t know how to hate, spoke of the lost thyself, recalled the lost friend, drove those worries away and brought back the lost child, which once I had in me. What more can I say? My words won’t do justice to what we all felt individually….

And you shouldn’t be surprised when I say I fell in love with you, with her, with him and the mountains or the birds or the flowing river, after all, we all met in a place where only love seems to exist!

Last but not the least, thank you Isha for forwarding the mail about the Padh Yatra. Now you don’t owe me anything, you evened it out :p

Thank you one and all for this awakening. Youth Alliance, thank you for existing with this zeal :)