"We live in the world when we love it. "
~ Rabindranath Tagore

A steep rise from Dehradun, overlooking the Dun valley from the heights of the Shivalik Himalayas and existing quietly away from the maddening crowds, discovered by the British as a repose during the hot northern summers, made home by the author Ruskin Bond, lies the two-century old Mussorie. Disruption of the ozone layer has not disrupted her winter snow and despite what people say, I would prefer to visit her in this chilled refrigeration... any day!

Nothing is a better experience than reaching Mussorie on a cold February night, when the snow has just thawed from it's roads but still lies thick on both sides of the mall. And you walk down this thin road from the bus-stand end to the library end, where in one of the coffee houses, Ruskin would be sipping Nescafe and watching the people on the road to find a character for his next book.

Hung, as if in a dark patch of void is the Dun valley, and the biggest constellation of stars that you see is the town of Dehradun where you had been some hours ago, waiting for the bus to start it's winding journey.

The little Mall is very short lived. Walking down this road, you would reach the end within fifteen minutes. But I took another dayto discover that. For now, it is important that you take the lane going steeply down to your right just after the point where the mutinational ice-creamers Baskin Robbins have decided to magnanimously treat tourists to their thirty-one flavours of frozen delights. For it is here that you smell nice, crisp, buttered "parathas" with the frosted air of eight p.m. Mussoorie. You cannot miss that after the strenuous, back-breaking journey on the bus with hair-pin curves every half a minute.

It is the people like the "Chache" that you meet at every corner in Mussoorie... simple, sturdy people... only too glad to tell you which road to take to a 'cheap and best' hotel which your unemployed bachelorhood in the boarding college allows. You feel a sense of guilt seeing the pure-hearted people. Do we treat them in the same way when they come to the plains? You feel like you felt when you last read "The Fall" by Camus.

But spend a night wrapped in three blankets and wake up to pull the cheap curtains and look out of your window. There you see what you came for: the glorious, the blazing white, the erect, the strong - the Himalayas. Your guilt vanishes! Your past is irrelevant! Your future does not matter! Your existence apart from the self in the present is of no concern! This is where the rivers spend their childhood, this is what the Edmond Hillarys and Tensing Norge's live for.

Howsoever materialistic you thought you were, you are destined to melt. Melt into worship, melt with awe and melt with wonder! And suddenly you will shiver and something will rush to your cheeks and something will surge and rise through the back of your head. You will feel proud! Idon't know why I felt that. Surely, I don't own the Himalayas!

Now you cannot wait to run out onto the terrace. Reach there and look down. The chill in your spine returns. Opening its mammoth mouth, a huge crevice, the bottom of which is only a mist, separates you from your object of worship. And now you get the full view of the glaring whiteness that emerges out of that still mist somewhere and keeps rising without stopping. You stand there, vegetating, when the waiter touches you on your shoulders, gives you hot steaming tea and, politely, asks you to put on something warm. It is then you realise that you have come out in your nightwear.

After breakfast, you go down to see the Kemptee falls, on the Garhwal Tourist Bus, along with several honeymooners. The couples are standing near the fall asking other couples they have instantly made friends with on the way, to take photographs of them. The fall tumbles down great heights to land on the rocks below that have almost disintegrated to sand. You bend down and touch the clear, cold water, and raise a cupped palm full of it to your lips. Which mineral water had you said was the best?

You have to return by the afternoon bus if you want to be in college for the Monday nine o' clock class. So, you walk with heavy steps and a heavier heart towards the eastern end of the Mall where the bus stand is. Time and again, you turn back to see the glimpses of the mighty Himalayas. Time and again you shiver, something tingles your cheeks and something surges through the back of your head. Time and again, Keats sings in the distance--- "A thing of beauty is a...".