|
A Climb To The Top, In Life
HPS Ahluwalia
| |
Major H.P.S. Ahluwalia has climbed Mount Everest. He was injured
in the 1965 Indo-Pak war and went on to open the Indian Spinal
Injuries Centre in Delhi. These are extracts from one of his
recent interviews wherein he talks about the role of religion in
his life, the value system, the sense of achievement and how he
engaged with a life-long disability. |
|
 I
do not have much of a spiritual nature. But if you say religious,
then yes, intensely so. Those are beliefs and values deeply
inculcated by my mother especially and I have lived with them since
childhood.
Every morning,
she would say her prayers in front of the Granth Sahib and at the
end, she would stand up, get us children inside the small temple and
tell God “if you gave me children, let them be worthy of it”.
So those things
got stuck in our minds. We had to lead honest lives, we had to
achieve.
I still don’t
know what the exact definition of spirituality is. How does it
relate to my daily life? I don’t know. I associate it with those old
gurus. Maybe being a disciple of theirs means being spiritual. But
somehow it doesn’t talk to me. I have a set of clear principles and
that’s it.
I never modified
or questioned those principles. They are very simple and have never
changed. For instance, it’s about having the right role models, and
I always insist on it when I talk to younger people. Not merely a
cricketer. But someone who can really teach you concrete values and
useful things for your daily life.
For me, it was
my mother and my grandfather. He was religious and in particular, he
was religious about punctuality. It really was something crucial for
him. It taught us the value of time. Because in fact, if you don’t
value time, you don’t value life.
God is about
values like honesty, not to lose temper or hurt anybody. I get angry
maybe once in three or four years. It’s also a presence, a guiding
force. For instance, while climbing the Everest, especially towards
the end, I felt there was somebody pushing me and helping me, step
by step.
Or when we
reached camp number 2, we left our gear and oxygen but didn’t stay
for the night, as there were risks of avalanche. We came back in the
morning, and sure enough, it was all plain white, everything had
been covered by feet and feet of snow. There was no way we could
have reached the summit without all the material buried under it.
Yet we could have spent days looking for it.
Instead, we
prayed before starting the search.
And believe it
or not, within a minute of digging, we found everything.
On how did it
feel to be at the top of the world:
It’s not as
great as you would imagine. When you reach the summit, you stay for
a few moments with the feeling of having accomplished your job. But
then a tinge of sadness sets in. Because you know you have to climb
down. You know you have to go back to lower plains and nothing
higher is there to be climbed. What other challenge could be there?
We had dreamt about it for so many years and now what?
While up there
though, when looking north, I could see Tibet and beyond, I could
imagine Central Asia. This gave me the idea of organizing an
expedition along the
Silk Road.
It took me seven years to organize it, but it was a memorable
experience.
I guess I have
felt this guiding force all along. The way we escaped Lahore at the
time of Partition was itself a miracle. We basically caught the last
train, and were hidden in order to ride it.
Another example
I can give you in this
Spinal
Injuries
Hospital. When I decided to start it, nobody believed it could
happen, they all thought it was an impossible dream. I was neither a
doctor nor a well-off person who could finance it. I just had this
idea, the conviction that it HAD to happen. I was very clear about
what I wanted to do. And the fact is, everything fell in place,
everything came through: money, land, people.
Question:
During the 1965 war, you were very seriously injured --- did this
protection fail you?
When it
happened, I did ask myself “why”, and I asked God, I asked my
mother. I had come extremely close to being killed. I could have so
easily gone. Yet instead, I was made to live and suffer. My mother
thought that God had some purpose in mind that only me, in such
conditions, could have fulfilled.
It could be
true…
For instance, I
would have most likely never set up this Spinal Injuries hospital
had this wound through the spine never happened.
I believe we
come with a finite and pre-written amount of time to be on earth.
And then it’s a combination of preordained facts and what we make
out of them, with our free will. Some people come to be an artist,
others to be an engineer, others to be a crook.
It is said that
to reach the Everest’s summit, you must have done some good deeds.
Yet four months later I was wounded. I have to mention though a
strange story. While climbing, we were trying to convince the deputy
leader of the expedition, a sherpa by the name of Phu Dorjie, to
come to the summit as well. He
 kept
throwing pebbles to ask if he should come or not. The answer was
always NO. Yet we forced him. He told us that it was completely
wrong and that it would backfire on us, we would all suffer the
consequences of it.
And indeed,
every member of the expedition subsequently suffered in some awful
way. I got very badly wounded shortly after, and then one after the
other, every member of the expedition went through some heavy
ordeal. Phu himself fell into a crevasse the next time he
accompanied an expedition to the summit and died. So had his
prediction come true?
If I can get up
in the morning without any problem and go on with my life, then I am
happy. So happiness is about genuinely asking reasonable things and
see them come through.
20
October 2009
|
Read Also