Change of Vision

Stunned! After days of trekking along the mountain, forests and valleys, we hit one shop almost hanging on the edge of a road. A small village shop selling every other stuff for daily requirement like soaps, masalas, vegetables, noodles among others. For the past seven days then, we had covered some 85-odd km that included trails where we negotiated 3ft deep snow at an altitude of 14000ft! While coming down, our feet were trembling like palm trees on a windy beach. Our job was getting all the more difficult as we had to keep our pace controlled in the thick mid-altitude pine forests amid drizzling. The shop at Wan was a perfect discovery at a perfect time.

Wait.... more surprises were in store for us there besides cakes and bananas that we gorged on. Noodles, biscuits and dry fruits were our means to survive in the higher camps. Fresh fruits — brought from district headquarters Uttar Kashi, no less than 80km from the shop — were cuisine royale in the sparsely populated village where one can get rice and squash curry at every other kitchen though. Incidentally, we enjoyed a pint of country liquor at the village on our way back to Loharjung, our base camp for Roopkund trek that summer.

As i was fiddling with my camera to look for Himalayan birds — enthused by several rare sightings — in and around the shop when my fellow trekkers were browsing food stuff, suddenly my five-point focus stopped on a face that i have never expected to find in the region. Maybe i forgot that i was in Garhwal, one of the few places in the country famous for beauty — both natural and human. Maybe i forgot the concept of rustic beauty... maybe i forgot to capture beautiful faces... maybe i was waiting for the moment to unfold before the high-zoom camera i was using then. Stupefied, i started taking her pictures but not fully satisfied.

This dissatisfaction led me to buy an SLR for taking better portraits. Later, i realised that i feel more comfortable in framing portraits than taking landscape pictures. A beauty at a Himalayan village shop changed the way i should look at the world with the viewfinder. And it was a new beginning: the search for human faces....