Photo story: Mountain Gods

This is part of a series in which I intend to bring out the little stories behind some of the many hundred photos I clicked on my travels around the country. 


This picture below is a view of the mountain range behind the Kedarnath Shrine, Kedarnath, Uttarakhand. This is part of the Mighty Himalayas in the Gangotri Range. Kedarnath sits at an elevation of about 11,800ft.
Mountains have always fascinated me. I can't attribute it to any particular reason, but the inexplicable feeling they evoke in me is like no other.

It was my second visit to Kedar. While I was lost in admiration of the sheer beauty of these geological formations, one of the guys that accompanied said with great reverance, "That is the Lord Himself!"
"Excuse me!" I said.
"Look at the mountains, don't you see Him in a lying posture?" he asked. The mountain range looked like a side view of the Lord lying in supine position.
"Oh, yeah! Dear me! I didn't notice that!" I exclaimed. But I wondered - For God's sake (please excuse the pun), it could have been any man.
He bowed down in prostration. I aimed another shot at Him. And I bowed down too more as a ritual than with devotion.
While we were trekking back to Gowrikund, we encountered another intriguing geological artefact.

"Doesn't it look like the face of Shirdi Saibaba?" said my companion in excitement.
"Sure, it does." I replied. Bowed again ritualistically to conform to the norms of the group.
This was in September 2009.
Five weeks later I was back among the Himalayas again. Eastern Himalayas, this time.

Shot from Sandakfu, the highest point (about 12,500ft) on West Bengal. Sandakfu, literally cold air in Nepali, sits right on the Indo-Nepal border. Yeah, incidentally, this is also my first visit to a foreign nation :p
The above picture gives a panaromic view of the Kangchenjunga range situated at an air distance of 40km from Sandakfu. Kangchenjunga is the third highest eight-thousander. After savouring the moment of being with them, we started to trek back to our basecamp. On the way back we stopped over for the day at an inn called Hotel Green Hill in a village named Rimbik. From here on, there is motorable road available back to Darjeeling.
In the dining hall, there lay on the landlady's desk, a wide, framed photo of the Kangchenjunga range shot sometime in the 1970's. It was only better shot, very wide angled, more panaromic, the sky was almost cloud-free, brilliant stuff in short. It doesn't take long for me to get lost with the mountains or some breathtaking photography. I stood there with plate in hand, mouth agape marvelling at the prized frame on the desk.
"The Sleeping Buddha," announced the landlady abruptly.
"Excuse me!"
"The Sleeping Buddha, it's the side view of Buddha lying on his back," she explained.
"Oh, yeah! I didn't notice that!"
"This is a very rare photo, you don't get any more of this now," she added.
My thoughts raced back to Kedarnath. I wondered what would they have called it, if the Buddhists landed at Kedarnath first.
If only people saw what is what, saw the mountains as mountains and admired them, preserved them, protected them for what they are, the world would have been a better place.


msr