My Trek In Uttarakhand: Epilogue

15 Jul 2013 As Uttarakhand and the country was trying to make sense of?assigning blame for the disaster, we had a pleasant stay at our guest house in Tehri. It was a beautiful place. Thanks to Lawyer's contacts, some of us were able to go inside (under?) the Tehri dam, where they keep the turbines and transformers. You need a security clearance for the place, so does the car you come in. We messed this up in a way so that only half of us got the security clearance. So Lawyer, Corporate2, the Marus, Scientist, Engineer and I went in. Paradox personally sacrificed his entry for me, because, he said, I was an engineer. He said this in a tone that indicating my visit to the dam would be the turning point in my engineering life, and the insights I stood to gain would aid me years later, when I save the world. With that burden of expectations, I went in. When I came out, I tried to recollect all that I had learned from my visit. The interior looked like a set from a James Bond movie set in Russia. I racked my brain to see if I had learned more. The transformers were huge, which was what I expected. I avoided Paradox that evening. Before leaving, we all made a pledge to actually do the Roopkund trek next year. To that effect, we created a WhatsApp group, that someone unfashionably named 'Nature Lovers'. We now use it to share things that used to be Fwd:Fwd:Fwd'ed till a few years ago. And that was that. The next day, as I was gorging on parathas in Delhi (from the famous street, although they were more puris than parathas), I realized that taking a year off and backpacking around India actually made sense. Cpt. Cool had told us that it could be done well within two lakh rupees. Now that has moved from an impossibility to something improbable for me. It's best done with a couple of people to come along with you, I think, but it makes sense. It's only as much a gamble as, say, doing an MBA.