A letter to the mountains: Part 2

I never even thought I would come here, for the Tarsar Marsar trek. As much as I love you, you know how sometimes I get so insecure about my ability to trek and hike since those major health issues happened three years ago. But you just surprise me every time (though I should have been used to them by now). You make these stupid beliefs that I have about myself go away, just like that. Aren’t you just the perfect thing to love?

A letter to the mountains

Fast forward and we were leaving, everyone got ahead and I was too scared to even move. As the local guide called out to me, and I started moving, I took such little steps as if I was a 2-year-old. I was so scared, and I didn’t know what to do about it or who to tell. I had come with a big group of people, half of whom I had never met before, and the other half I didn’t know up-close. As I was trying really hard to move, keeping one step after another, the local guide called out on me and said ‘Aise kaise chalega, aise chaloge toh waapis hi nahi phchoge kabhi, hota nahi hai toh aate kyu ho’ (If you move at this speed, you will never reach back, if you can’t trek, then why do guys even come).

Traveling tips for girls: Why should boys have all the fun?

Remember the Hero Honda advertisement we grew up watching ‘Why should boys have all the fun’?

Well, most of my life I have asked myself the same question. Being born and brought up in Delhi, the city whose safety issues have been the front-page headline of every newspaper in India, having freedom and independence was never really an option. Whether it was to participate in extra-curricular outside school or to go out with friends and party, we all have grown up hearing ‘No, No, and No’. Even for those of us, whose parents weren’t as strict, looking around at the multitude of safety threats, we were ourselves not comfortable in taking any unwanted risks.

While fighting, struggling, conquering, and being independent in life are certainly some topics that I would like to discuss and talk about someday, today’s blog is about the questions/hurdles most females face while traveling and my guidelines/suggestions/experiences to deal with the same.

How Traveling Changed My Life

I was 19 and I had been deemed an overachiever all my life. Things were easy because I was always willing to fight for what I wanted, and when I did, I always got it – whether it was making a girls basketball team in a school that did not promote it at all or doing all the extra-curricular and still somehow finishing at the top of the class. I had a simple motto ‘I can do it because I think I can’, but somehow this motto turned a little reckless by the time college started. Staying awake for three days in a row by consuming red bulls just because ‘I am Kajal and I can do anything’ or procrastinating studying for tough exams like Actuarial Science on just the last 3-4 days and still cracking it, I was basically a show-off. The only difference was that I wasn’t showing off to the world, but just to myself, that I can do anything on which I set my mind. And even though on the outside, that sounds like a good thought, I always ended up taking it to the extreme.