"The basis of morality is the application to human life of the principles governing the universe, and the great principle of the universe is beauty."
Shri Aurobindo
My blog generally avoid topics related to my (modest) practice of and thoughts on religion. This is probably because I come from a family where my elders, particularly my (late) grandfather, are extremely well-versed in many aspects of religion and are far more disciplined and faithful practitioners than me, so I feel rather unqualified to hold forth on it.
In June 2022, I had been to Kedarnath and Badrinath in Uttarakhand for a darshan of Lord Shiva at Kedarnath and Shri Narayana at Badrinath. This wasn't my first time visiting this part of the Himalayas. I had visited Badrinath in 2007 with my family and there was a part of me deep inside that always wanted to return - something about the air and the majestic natural beauty there. At Dev Prayag, the rivers Bhagirathi and Alakananda flow into each other to be known as river Ganga. It is believed that the lands and mountains further upstream from Dev Prayag are no longer part of the earthly domain. Instead, they are inhabited by the Devas themselves.
I remember travelling along the winding mountain roads, the river Alakananda flowing far-away in the valley with an other-worldly blue hue. I remember marvelling at the mountains all around, their peaks seeming to penetrate the blue sky. There is something magnetic about these mountains that makes you want to keep returning there, to breathe the same air once again.
Before departing from Bengaluru to Badrinath back then, we had read about the boulders which frequently get dislodged from the mountain-side on to the road, often triggering landslides that sometimes hit vehicles. One report said that an entire bus was knocked off the road into the river below, claiming tens of lives. This was just a few days before we made our journey.
Perhaps it was this memory that was fresh in my mind at that time, but at some point a thought entered my head - if I die here, it's alright. What a beautiful place to die. I still wonder from where this thought came to me. I was only 12 years old. I was not a fatalistic person as a child, nor am I one now. I had never grappled with such ideas. I had not yet really seen seen the death of anyone close or well-known to me.
My experience was not the same during last year's visit. There was construction debris and dust everywhere along the road from the plains to the Dhams. Relentless construction work and massive crowds made it look like the land of the BBMP rather than the Devas. It must be said that once you actually reach your destination, you leave behind what you felt during the journey and only feel happy that you have reached.
A while after returning home, I quickly penned down some of my thoughts and feelings regarding what I saw. I had forgotten about this write-up in my mobile notes. The recent news on the danger of the town of Joshimath sinking entirely reminded me about the note and I felt it's worth reproducing.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dharma is an ultimate order of the universe - the laws that have to be followed and maintained, not because some person prefers them that way or deemed it to be the best way, but because the universe is that way. Any questions on why it is so can be taken up with the creator of the universe.
Every object, animate or inanimate, has a Dharma, a certain nature and a certain way that it has to be. Again, the reason is that it was so ordained. Not to minimise evil or "for the good", but because the creator manifests in the universe in this form. He is in every pebble and grain of sand, in His entirety.
When we interact with nature, we are interacting with the divine. When we interact with other people and animals, we are still interacting with the divine. And deep inside us, lives the divine, hoping to be realised. And when you realise It, you will become It, unshackled from this petty world of attachments and desires, anger and jealousy, hubris and illusions.
The order of the universe is balance. The order of nature is balance. We may take away from Her and plunder today, but we will fail in our Dharma.
When I visited Badrinath in 2007, I was still a very young boy, but it left a fairly deep impression on me. It was a sleepy, inaccessible town, deep in the mountains, bitterly cold with very few people visiting there and even fewer living. It was nature unspoiled.
I wouldn't call it divinity unspoiled, because divinity is always pristine, and can never be spoiled or soiled. The rose and the thorn are still expressions of the divine. The difference is in our accessibility to the divine.
Why do we worship a particular stone and not another one when both have within them the divine? - Because in one stone, the divine presents Himself more easily to us. The truly learned man, who has attained ultimate wisdom, cannot see this difference. Mere mortals still chained to the endless cycle of birth and death are forced to reckon with this difference.
But why do I speak here about nature, Dharma, balance, divinity and Badrinath?
I visited Kedarnath and Badrinath earlier this year, in the height of summer. While the plains were still sweltering in the searing sun, Kedarnath was still cold and almost hostile. Thunder and freezing rain welcomed us as we were weary from walking for over 12 hrs, around 20 km and a vertical ascent of one mile. And let us say one thing for sure - when you catch a sight of the temple, when you are standing there while the aarti is played on the loudspeaker, while every breath fogs in the air and you can longer feel your naked feet in the puddles of freezing rainwater as you wait to enter the temple, you understand that you are in the vicinity of divinity, accessible to everyone. A force that drives the universe through cycles of creation, preservation and destruction. Srushti, sthithi, gathi.
But the climb was very different. We witnessed a path completely covered with the excrement of horses, extreme crowds. It felt more like a marketplace on the eve of Ganesh Chaturthi or Sankranti than a walk up to a small town deep in the mountains. And the horses, oh the horses. The poor animals could hardly carry themselves up and down the arduous path, let alone the human atop them. They were battered and beaten by their caretakers, a cruelly ironic way to describe those young men who brutalised and terrorised scores of animals to take them to Kedarnath.
A few incidents remain etched in my memory. A man taking charge of more than one horse had one horse that was "misbehaving" by refusing to walk uphill and constantly slipping and falling in the slurry of dung, mud and rainwater. He had to go back and get this horse to behave. He handed his stick to his client atop the horse and said "Beat the bastard if he won't move."
The client recoiled. How can I, he asked earnestly, beat an animal, that too at a sacred site? He was a decent man who probably had no prior idea about how the horses were treated. He had already paid for the transport up the hill. He was clearly filled with guilt, but he also wished to glimpse the Lord at the end of the climb. He didn't wish to turn back after coming so far and he was physically incapable of climbing.
The trouble is that Kedarnath is MEANT to be a sleepy little, inaccessible town deep in the mountains. A few sturdy, locally bred horses that are sure-footed in the mountains could perhaps take a few devotees up to Kedarnath. They would be fed well, not suffer in the cold, be well-treated and allowed plenty of rest.
But if Kedarnath becomes a cool place to click a selfie for Instagram, if shopkeepers are eager for people to throng the site for the good business and the authorities too have a vested interest in keeping this economy alive, if we want development and 4-Lane highways, we must understand that we are destroying a carefully crafted, harmonious balance of nature. And it is we who pay the price, we who carry the sin of beating and overworking innocent animals to death. We who will look down to enjoy the flow of the surging Mandakini deep in the gorge only to be met by the site of plastic bottles swirling in her waters. Yes, we may have acted responsibly and thrown our used bottles in the garbage bin, but little did we know that the shopkeepers might not share our divine concern for the Earth and will simply overturn the filled bin straight into the river.
Yet, she roars on. She will roar forever, plastic or no plastic. We are around for a few days, is this what we want to leave behind? When we take more than what is meant for us, we also leave behind more. Upsetting the balance leads to the performance of Adharma. Adharma takes us further from salvation, tying us closer to rebirth, again and again. The Adharma of beating horses, destroying forests and desecrating divine lands.
Plastic high in the mountains, dust from construction, dammed rivers in seismically active areas, mistreated animals, but we get our 4-lane highways.
Jai Badri Vishal