After I had devoured a plateful of chicken caesar salad (I still have daydreams about the croutons), a bunch of prawns wrapped in strips of bacon, a sinfully lathered cappuccino, and a couple of warm chocolate truffles, I began feeling mildly guilty about my appetite.
A group of teens had already started gawking at me from the neighboring table. “What is she? Grendel’s mom?” I heard one of them whispering. Irrepressible giggles followed.
What I failed to explain to these guys was that I was hungry and bored. Hungry because I had missed my lunch due to a completely useless meeting at work. Bored because I was waiting for a friend who had promised to turn up at the café at 7.30. It was 9 already and quite obviously past teatime.
However, to stop myself from eating further and to stop public ridicule from affecting me, I decided to make a trip to the adjoining bookstore. This is where I chanced upon Sirish Rao’s amazing travelogue…Real Men Don’t Pick Primroses.
Call it my affinity towards fiction, or my ignorance of travel writing, I have never really appreciated any major travel writers…apart from Bill Bryson, with his The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America and A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. Sirish Rao has made me do a volte-face.
The book talks about a trek to the Himalayas…to Jong-li, precisely. Vikram Karanth, a young adult, tired of formal academics, gives up studies and sets out to answer his true calling. He is a smart climber, specialized at ice-climbing, and at observing eccentricity in people…we discover the latter trait in Vikram, as we go along with him, on his trek across the rough Himalayan terrain.
Packed off to Jong-li with a motley crew, Vikram faces an initial people problem. We have Sen, a Bengali poet, who quotes Byron and Wordsworth at completely wrong situations, Lal, an ex-soldier, nostalgic about his stint at Siachen, Singh who is no better, Harry, who suffers from diarrhea throughout the book, Pasang a passionate Sherpa with his own share of weirdness, and Dorjee, the craziest cook in the world, with his version of mushroom and onion curry quite beyond tree line. Vikram is exasperated… “Both Lal and Singh snored generously. Singh like an old fridge, and Lal like a saw being sharpened. Added to this, Tosh bawled encouragement to imaginary football teams in his sleep. One month with these guys in tiny tents.”
However, our young mountaineer soon realizes that at an altitude where you do not see signs of life for days together, differences within a motley crew can be flattened out with ease. So the group sets out on Shaktiman (a bus…very Indian approach by Rao) towards their trail, almost comfortable with each other’s oddity.
The trek begins from Gangotri…and Rao weaves magic…“We kept to the Bhagirathi river for a while. Pine and spruce forests waved by softly, breaking sometimes into small grassy meadows. Further down the road, the Dolpi river joined the Bhagirathi…” The trek is breathtaking, with the glaciers, the snow storms, a lama in a lone monastery and nature at its unalloyed best.
There are crew members who fight, crew members who fall sick, and crew members who go on throughout the course of the book. Vikram goes on. It’s sheer macho camaraderie at the top, with bear hugs, back thumping, peeing on the fingers to avoid a frost bite…Rao even focuses on the manly obsession with bowel movement, and Vikram at a point says, good food, good view and a good shit in the morning takes him close to nirvana.
After much toil, the crew reaches the summit, overcomes crazy hurdles, lauds their ice axes for pulling them through difficult times and realizes that at the summit, where life is calm, and silence seems startling, petty details of life and living lose relevance. Jong-li humbles the crew, and as readers you gradually wake up to the Himalayas being a great leveler.
For those of you, who haven’t read Sirish Rao, grab a copy today.
A group of teens had already started gawking at me from the neighboring table. “What is she? Grendel’s mom?” I heard one of them whispering. Irrepressible giggles followed.
What I failed to explain to these guys was that I was hungry and bored. Hungry because I had missed my lunch due to a completely useless meeting at work. Bored because I was waiting for a friend who had promised to turn up at the café at 7.30. It was 9 already and quite obviously past teatime.
However, to stop myself from eating further and to stop public ridicule from affecting me, I decided to make a trip to the adjoining bookstore. This is where I chanced upon Sirish Rao’s amazing travelogue…Real Men Don’t Pick Primroses.
Call it my affinity towards fiction, or my ignorance of travel writing, I have never really appreciated any major travel writers…apart from Bill Bryson, with his The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America and A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. Sirish Rao has made me do a volte-face.
The book talks about a trek to the Himalayas…to Jong-li, precisely. Vikram Karanth, a young adult, tired of formal academics, gives up studies and sets out to answer his true calling. He is a smart climber, specialized at ice-climbing, and at observing eccentricity in people…we discover the latter trait in Vikram, as we go along with him, on his trek across the rough Himalayan terrain.
Packed off to Jong-li with a motley crew, Vikram faces an initial people problem. We have Sen, a Bengali poet, who quotes Byron and Wordsworth at completely wrong situations, Lal, an ex-soldier, nostalgic about his stint at Siachen, Singh who is no better, Harry, who suffers from diarrhea throughout the book, Pasang a passionate Sherpa with his own share of weirdness, and Dorjee, the craziest cook in the world, with his version of mushroom and onion curry quite beyond tree line. Vikram is exasperated… “Both Lal and Singh snored generously. Singh like an old fridge, and Lal like a saw being sharpened. Added to this, Tosh bawled encouragement to imaginary football teams in his sleep. One month with these guys in tiny tents.”
However, our young mountaineer soon realizes that at an altitude where you do not see signs of life for days together, differences within a motley crew can be flattened out with ease. So the group sets out on Shaktiman (a bus…very Indian approach by Rao) towards their trail, almost comfortable with each other’s oddity.
The trek begins from Gangotri…and Rao weaves magic…“We kept to the Bhagirathi river for a while. Pine and spruce forests waved by softly, breaking sometimes into small grassy meadows. Further down the road, the Dolpi river joined the Bhagirathi…” The trek is breathtaking, with the glaciers, the snow storms, a lama in a lone monastery and nature at its unalloyed best.
There are crew members who fight, crew members who fall sick, and crew members who go on throughout the course of the book. Vikram goes on. It’s sheer macho camaraderie at the top, with bear hugs, back thumping, peeing on the fingers to avoid a frost bite…Rao even focuses on the manly obsession with bowel movement, and Vikram at a point says, good food, good view and a good shit in the morning takes him close to nirvana.
After much toil, the crew reaches the summit, overcomes crazy hurdles, lauds their ice axes for pulling them through difficult times and realizes that at the summit, where life is calm, and silence seems startling, petty details of life and living lose relevance. Jong-li humbles the crew, and as readers you gradually wake up to the Himalayas being a great leveler.
For those of you, who haven’t read Sirish Rao, grab a copy today.
