Dilip Simeon's blog

A fascinating pictorial account of an iconic pilgrimage made 25 years ago. It was put together  by Deb Mukharji, a retired civil servant who embodies India's deepest ethical traditions and has never flinched from a call to action. Deb's abiding Hindu faith is in stark contrast to those who promote and espouse hatred and division in the name of Hindutva The Ultimate Pilgrimage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOsXfTS5o2c&feature=youtu.be In his professional career Deb Mukharji was a member of the Indian Foreign Service and retired as ambassador to Nepal in 2001.  Mukharji's interests include trekking and photography. He has visited the Kailash Manas region three times, in 1981 (when the route to Kailash across Lipu lekh was reopened after several decades), 1993 and 2002.  His book  Mount Kailash and Manasarovar: Visions of the Infinite ; (2009) is an archive of beautiful photographs and erudite commentary.  His other publications include:  Mag...

Iceland isn’t just a country — it’s a mood, a waking dream, an alternate realm of cliffs and moss, a place where you can still experience the sublime, that shiver of fear in the face of monumental nature. A field of flammable moss — gray-green, like the ocean on a stormy day, stretching away under a sky the color of ice. On the first morning I woke on this remote island, it was all I could see. About 315,000 people live here among eerie rock formations and shining glaciers, but the landscape is so austere and weird, you might think that you had woken in an outpost in an alien world. One imagines, at every turn, the darting movements of the hidden people (“Huldufolk”) among the crags. In “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” Jules Verne wrote that the entrance to a subterranean passage was on Iceland’s Snaefellsnes peninsula. It’s easy to see why he would have imagined this. To visit is to be enveloped in a physical landscape so extreme that visions of it invade even your sleep. Alon...

It sounded good in conversation: to walk for a week through the Mishimi Hills in eastern Arunachal Pradesh to the crash site of a China National Aviation Corporation plane, CNAC 58, a Dakota that went down flying 'the Hump' in World War II. Now I'm not so sure. At the end of day one, I'm shaking with exhaustion after bumbling through the undergrowth for eight hours. I've already got lost once in the gloom of the jungle, my right arm is lacerated from clutching at unfriendly plants—still better than falling off the hill. My Mishimi friends are bustling around with depressing energy, fetching water, lighting fires, shooting animals, while I'm listlessly plucking ripe leeches from my ankles. There's a monkey boiling in the pot for dinner and it smells really bad.  Adrak kya jaane bandar ka swaad , I quip. Then I taste the damn thing and completely lose my sense of humour. By the end of this trip, I will have retched my way through two monkeys, a bear, a mountai...