Rising above Fear - It's okay to beat fear sometimes!

As a child I remember going on various holidays in the hills. No Bengali vacation is ever complete without a trip to Darjeeling or Gangtok. This was back in my childhood when I visited Darjeeling. The Mall Road in Darjeeling is quite famous for some great restaurants, scores of handloom shops and quite a big population of horses!  Going for a horse ride through the entire stretch of road there is the favorite past time of all tourists in Darjeeling. And I gave in to it and went for a horse ride. I must be some 6 or 7 year old that time.

This horse riding is nothing like a horse riding that we understand from the movies or anything. They simply strut and walk in the slowest pace possible and you get to enjoy the scenery of the lush green hills around you. Now these horses have this uncanny habit of walking on the extreme edge of the road. I don’t know if they are trained that way to give you a scare or something else. So every time I pushed it towards the road it came back walking on the earthen stretch that you have between the road and the deep gorges. And the sight of the depth of green scared the hell out of me. It was a scary horse ride of the life where any moment you could have fallen down the slopes.

When I came to Bangalore later with work we used to plan several weekend trips with friends. Bangalore is a lovely place with great connectivity to many tourist spots. We went rock climbing at one instance. The fear of height was like a latent force in my mind and I had forgotten almost about it. We trekked for a few hours and then climbed up this hillock. As we started climbing up – the first moment I saw down I felt the fear rising through my body. Can I do this? What if I fall? What if I broke my legs? Too many thoughts clouded my mind. But I held on to my nerves. It’s best to resist looking down or looking back. And without shifting my eye sight anywhere other than the top of the hillock I climbed up along with my friends.

Reaching the top gave a huge joy and boost to my morale. The light breeze the morning sun shine calmed us down. I dared to look down the depth from top and it definitely was scary. But now that we were on top the fear was little less. May be I had just risen above my fear. We sat there chatting on top for a long time and the trainer explained how many groups of youngsters came climbing there and how some of them always waited at the base and never muster the courage to climb up!

And guess what I have done. Much later when we were planning to buy our own apartment in Bangalore we picked up one on the 12^th floor!! So now I don’t mind looking down from my 12^th floor balcony and enjoy the awesome view.    

Check out this video by Mountain Dew on a very similar incident

Visit https://www.facebook.com/mountaindewindia for more awesome videos. 

This post of mine has been written for Indi Happy Hours in association with Mountain Dew India.

Let us clean our Neighborhood

So everyone is taking up the cleanliness drive these days – from celebrities to politicians to sports personalities and even corporate houses. That’s a good initiative. But is it okay to take a drive for 1 day and leave it at that? I was going through some celebrity photos of their cleanliness drive and the only dominant element in their large bins of garbage were dried leaves!!! Now the question is  - do you just see dried leaves on the streets?? I see a whole lot of things – old clothes, stale food, wrappers, vegetable peels, scrap metal, dead rats and just about everything. Definitely much more than just dried leaves.

Our apartment community had taken a cleanliness drive in our neighborhood in Bangalore once to free our streets (the then pot holed roads) of nails and metal parts. Many of our residents had participated in the drive and there was an incredible amount of metal junk collected from a stretch of 2 km road! Think about all the cars that have been plying on the busy road. We went up against the odds and started this drive early morning on a weekend so that commuters didn’t have a problem. We could do that because we stood up. The corporation, municipality turns deaf and blind in these situations. But should we stop at just that? Isn’t it our responsibility too to take up the responsibility of cleaning up. We don’t have a problem in cleaning our own house, terrace or balcony. We only use the roads – then why can’t we help in cleaning them?

When we travel abroad we take care not to throw a gum wrapper or a coffee cup on the roads, we take care to throw them in the designated bin, but as soon as we reach our own country we don’t think twice to throw a coffee cup on the roads, or spit on the roads. We learn to do what we see around. No one is throwing a single thing anywhere other than the bins so we don’t litter. We behave like a responsible citizen as we step into London, Paris or Singapore. And back here we don’t mind throwing the cigarette butt anywhere – because everyone around is doing the same. Wrong. We need to learn to a responsible citizen in our own country first. What legacy otherwise will you leave for your next generation – a country full of filth (pun intended)!

Let’s drive a campaign to clean our neighborhood. Let’s be responsible citizen. Strepsils India has come up with this campaign to encourage Indians to speak up against all the wrongs that we see around us. #AbMontuBolega. Join the campaign and lets stand up against all the wrongs – harassment of women, or littering roads. Lets strive to make the society a better place to live.  Visit their webpage, FaceBook Page orTwitterHandle 

http://www.abmontubolega.com/

This post of mine has been written as a part of Indi-Happy hours  on Indiblogger in association withStrepsilsIndia #AbMontuBolega