c u on top - satyabrata dam

Often hailed as the world’s most popular and most recognizable puzzle game and also the most perplexing, I doubt if there are many on this planet who haven’t heard of Rubik’s Cube. And I am sure most such people have always harvested the desire to solve one, if one could be solved. With 43 quintillion permutations (43,252,003,274,489,856,000 to be precise) this cube has long puzzled mankind leaving only very few cube crazies to be able to do it. When we look at a scrambled cube and start to unscramble using whatever little brain or logic we have, very soon we realize that we are not reaching anywhere. And after few hours we are ready to throw it out of the window out of sheer frustration. Yet when we watch a master turn and twist the abominable cubies or cubelets (the tiny cubes that make up the entire cube) and place before us a perfectly solved cube in seconds then we can only gasp and wonder at the magic of it all.

I am motionless as a spider spying upon its prey. I am stuck on a sheer column of ice, no thicker than few inches with visible ground far beyond my eyes dare to travel. I feel like a spider but wonder (the most irrelevant notion at that moment) if ever a spider has ventured across icy terrains of such smoothness and vertical travesty. Even as my eyes, though still, look for places where I could place my ice pick, my four limbs glued to the element begins to grow weary. Precious seconds are ticking away and all I can do is gasp, breathe, and pray for a miracle. With mother Earth nearly 100 m below I am venturing upon a new ice route in the cold frigid mountains of Colorado’s Telluride town deep end of box canyon on one of the most treacherous and iconic winter routes of all, the dreaded ‘Bridal Veil’ graded WI 5-6 under normal conditions. It is a tottering column of such jumbled ice sculpture that from the bottom you cannot see even 1/4 th of the way up.

I like to believe that I am a happy and content human being even if I aspire for more. And this self-belief has only been heightened by hundreds of my friends who seek my advice and guidance in matters of happiness at moments of perplexity. So I figured I must be doing something right to be in this constant state of flux, always changing, transforming, yet smiling and happy and joyful – most of the time. Few religious beliefs and schools of philosophy has led us to accept that ‘life is suffering’, also most of us find life too difficult or complex and complicated. But not once do we see that the key to happiness is with us, within us. Happiness and sorrow are simultaneously present no matter who we are, where we are, what we do or how we live. The difference is in our vision, in our attitude, in our way of life. I must explain the title to this post before we proceed further, lest some of you may be offended: a short guide since your guide here is short (I am only 170 cm in my he...

I just got back after climbing a big mountain, really big, really high though may not be really difficult. This story is not about this mountain or about the climb but about a vivid dream that I dreamt one night in one of the high camps and then on waking up, remained so clear that I jotted it down in my diary (which incidentally has not even one line about the climb). So here is the dream verbatim as the way I remembered and recorded in my diary. This is what I saw… A wise man from a fair skinned nation once traveled to the great East, into the Himalaya and chanced upon a naked sage, who, it was reported, had remained stationary at one place beneath a towering peak for as long as one could remember. The wise man, full of wisdom and himself, drew level with the naked sage and asked, ‘why are you stationary, so seeped into stillness when everything within this cosmos is in motion?’ The naked sage smiled through his dense beard and muttered, ‘my honorable friend from far,...

Recently I climbed a big mountain; big both in girth and loftiness, very big. Much happened during this climb and much that should not have happened, but today’s story is not about this mountain or about the climb, it’s about something else entirely. Something that is intriguingly significant to me and even though I do see its rationale in afterthought I am still puzzling over the incident. Lord Shiva is one of the primary Hindu Gods, in fact the most supreme of the trinity. He is on one hand the destroyer and on another the procreator since without annihilation there can’t be creation or so we believe. Shiva certainly is someone’s figment of imagination on high testosterone and the legend is an extraordinary saga. Of all the facts about Shiva that we are led to believe, the one I hold closest to my heart is that He resides in the Himalaya and his five abodes are spread across the length of the icy peaks. Therefore with that belief, he is my only god since Himalaya is my hom...