I grew up in Pune, Maharashtra, India. It thinks it’s a city but to me it’s a village. The best feature of this let’s say town is its magnificent hills. It was in fact carved out of hills. To climb a hill is a normal every day exercise for Puneris. Few know this fact and so growing up while I used to climb the hill a lot, I also took it for granted. 

Now however going to the hill is something that I get excited about like a child. The best time to go is at dawn. I am not a morning person at all but the hill or tekdi (in Marathi) is the only thing that can motivate me to wake up and get into my exercise clothes. Of course my mother’s ginger and lemon grass chai is a brownie point. 

What makes Hanuman tekdi so special

That something so special and relatively untouched can exist in the middle of a crowded city provides for much needed solace and calm. At the crack of dawn, you see a few people, the tekdi aficionados, the people who created human chains to ward off greedy politicians. 

We have to use a torch to find our way through the trees along the path. The birds are beginning to wake up. We make our way, chatting intermittently, but mostly immersing in the consuming silence. We head out of the jungle and onto the path to the abandoned mine, which is slowly turning into a lake with a new population of ducks, seagulls and other birds. 

We keep walking further on to ‘Baba’s rock’- our own name for the rock that my father used to sit on before his illness. We sit there and watch the green vista and flocks or parakeets flying by and chirping frantically. It’s our spot to take it all in, the positive energy, the one spot of unspoilt nature, till we head back into traffic and pollution. 

Why nature is important

To me having some connection with nature is extremely important to keep me grounded. It could also be my terrace or plants inside the house or a small park close by. I have talked about watching birds in a previous post. You can do this from anywhere. 

At the risk of sounding crazy, I think that I have a connection with trees. They make me feel safe and calm. I have the hills in Pune, Lal Bagh in Bangalore and the river Charles in Boston. These are places I go to, (sometimes run to!) to be in nature, to keep my mind at peace and to practice shanti shakti sahansheelata sayyam.