A man, a bike and a mission

You can lose everything, but as long as you don’t lose yourself, you’re okay.

~ Dnyaneshwar Yewatkar  (translated/paraphrased)

We hear similar pithy sayings. We agree with similar pithy sayings. We decide to live by similar pithy sayings. And then, we move on to other things.

I wonder how many of us would have the strength to actually live this saying, in a foreign country, when all of our belongings are stolen (other than passport, visa and diaries kept on person). When all we have is a bicycle, no money, no idea how to leave the country of Laos* and reach the next destination, no idea where the next meal will come from and when, and a myriad other concerns.

Or in South Korea when officials shoo him away when he tries to spend the night on a park bench. He finds a hotel, does have money to pay for boarding, but in the middle of the night is asked to leave because he is colored.

Or a village in Kerala, India, when he is chased by dogs in the middle of the night and is beaten up by some villagers and left to die by a river.

Or in Thailand*, where dogs chase and bite him till his leg bleeds and is swollen. He goes to a hospital and is asked for travel insurance. He tells them he has none and is informed of the amount he will have to pay. When he tells them, he does not have the money, they tell him they are unable to help him.

(Not to malign any nations, these incidents could happen most anywhere.)

No. Dnyaneshwar Yewatkar does not lose himself. Instead, he keeps his faith in himself and others intact. Diehard optimism even in the face of adversity, he refuses to lose himself or his faith in human connection or the good in the world and that in the hearts of others.

These and other stories unfold last night and a bunch of us are fortunate and humbled to share his experiences and attitude at a friend’s place. 27 year old, Dnyaneshwar Yewatkar is from Maharashtra, India, and has been bicycling around the world since 2016 to spread the message of peace and friendship to mark Mahatma Gandi’s 150^th birth anniversary. He plans on returning to India in 2020 after having covered most of the world on his bike.

No. Dnyaneshwar Yewatkar does not lose himself or his faith in good. He sees it and believes in it and knows that good is always around the corner. His belief is strong and he encounters the good. He talks about the Muslims in Kashmir, who light lamps in Hindu temples, or the time he spends with Naxalites. “They were very kind to me”, he says with a smile. “People are all the same everywhere,” he continues. Agreed my friend. I know I have said and felt the same, but clearly don’t have his kind of extent of experience to back it up with.

The story I can’t get out of my head is when he comes face to face with a tiger in remote Myanmar one evening. He recounts how he stands there trembling, clutching his bike handles. The tiger is about 100 meters away* and stares at him. Dnyaneshwar stares back, but in a pool of sweat. After about 15 minutes, the tiger walks away into the bushes. Dnyaneshwar doesn’t budge and can see the tiger’s eyes glistening in the bushes. He waits there a while and when he can no longer see the tiger’s eyes, he gets on his bike, pedals hard and nonstop for six hours*, without turning back to look, for even an instance.

In this nonstop frenzy, he takes the wrong road and reaches a small and primitive tribal village in the middle of the forest. There is no electricity, or any means of communicating. The folks in the tribe surround and check him out. Clearly, they have never seen an outsider, who looks like him. He talks fondly of the few days he spends with them, of how they finally figure out he does not touch meat and bring him root vegetables. He joins their tribe for those few days, goes hunting with them, and tribe refuses to let him leave.  

Last night, someone asks him if he encounters more good, or more bad. Unhesitant, he replies, good. It is easily palpable that everyone in the room is aware of the bad, the scary, the pain, and the difficulties he encounters, and is humbled by the optimism and tenacity, and the sheer faith he has to find the good in every situation.

And he does. In Thailand, after the dog-bite and swollen leg, and denied medical care, he gets back on his bike and rides on. He visits a school and is talking to the children about his experiences, expedition and mission, when he passes out. The school officials rush him to the hospital, where he receives medical care. One of the teachers then takes him home and gives him a place to stay till he is stronger. He is vegetarian and vegetarianism is a hard thing for folks in that village to fathom. His face crinkles up with joy and gratitude when he recounts how he saw this teacher look up Indian and vegetarian food recipes on Youtube.

Good thankfully, does seem to be around the corner, for when he is beaten up and left to die in Kerala, some fishermen find him, take him home and care for him till he is back on his feet.

My page, or rather two pages are up and this is only a scattering of stories from last night. His experiences are fascinating and many, and I am sure will turn into a book, and possibly a movie. I can’t wait to read that book.

I remember pondering on the following quote some time back:

“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”

~ David W. Orr

Dynaneshwar may have never read this quote, but seems to be living it. 

*I did not take notes yesterday, and am operating on memory, so some details or places may be mixed up. I couldn’t wait to share the heart of the story, even if the journalist in me wanted to call him and fact check J Guess my heart won, over the head.

Dnyaneshwar will be in town till Sunday and I will be stopping by to give a cash donation to his cause this evening (didn’t have enough cash on me last night), if anyone else is interested.    


 

What is freedom? What does it mean to you?

Today is India’s 72^nd Independence Day. Many years ago, or rather, exactly 22 years ago, I was working on a newspaper story to commemorate India’s 50^th Independence Day. It contained interviews of people as they remembered that very day, 50 years before, in 1947. The mood, the festivities, their emotions, the pulse of the nation; what they did, how they felt, how they celebrated.

These were mostly folks in their late 60s, 70s and older, who had been youngsters on the eve of India’s independence. They talked about the excitement and optimism they felt and the belief they held that India would be unstoppable, once she was free.

They spoke of the freedom they had sought, for so long, as a nation, a movement that had mobilized them and the generation before them and the sweet success they felt and even perhaps a sense of disbelief, as one lady mentioned, that day in August 1947.

That story unfortunately never got written, for something more important came up, but every Independence Day, I am reminded of the interviews and the stories from August 1947, scribbled in my notebook.

There is small chance that I may ever recover that notebook, but the energy and the sentiment of that time remains with me, through the accounts I heard. One narrated of how they rode the Mumbai local trains all night long. All the local trains were full. Everybody was on the streets and celebrating. They didn’t quite know what to do and spent the night simply wandering about the city in groups and it sounded like everybody was doing the same. Some remembered the first PM, Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous speech, “tryst with destiny”.  

I talked to folks who as college students had been part of the freedom movement and even some subterfuge activities. My own aunt told me how she once crushed a piece of paper with some vital information and stuffed it in her mouth and was a subterfuge carrier. Others told me of how their entire college experience was on the backdrop of the freedom movement. I could feel the zeal and vitality in their voices. A strong sense of purpose and justice they sought and the freedom they yearned to move forward.

My father who was only a young lad, remembers how his mother, who seems to have been an activist, mobilized the women in the neighborhood and made a certain sweet, bundi ladoo, to be distributed to children in the city school. The government had given them a certain amount of money, which would be insufficient had they purchased sweets from a store. As a result, his childhood home was thronged with women rolling out laddoos, and the floors were completely covered with delicious golden balls. There were laddoos everywhere and it is his fond and evidently sweet memory. 

His childhood seems filled with memories that speak to the pulse of the moment and the movement. Of his sisters and mother who wore sarees they spun from the charkha, a loom made popular by Mahatma Gandhi, in the wake of the Quit India movement and swadeshi (self-reliance) movement, where the push was to not use products imported from the British. As a result, people spun and wore their own cloth. He remembers rows of charkha in their home and women spinning and also the opportunity he once had to gift Gandhiji, a shawl they had spun on the charkha.

My personal favorite is when he went on a satyagraha, just like Gandhiji would – sat on a mat, declared strike, refusing to eat or drink – an in-house civil disobedience movement, in protest when his mother refused to take in a stray cat or dog that he wanted.

Stories like these speak to the mood of the nation, how entwined even young children were with the movement. How cohesive the whole nation seemed to be. There seemed no room for apathy, everybody had one goal, one unified goal – that of freedom.

In our daily life, living in “free” nations, I wonder what freedom now means to us. Does it mean different things for different people? Every independence day, when I think of my unwritten story, the one thing that strikes me is the passion these seniors seemed to have for freedom, the sparkle in their eyes, the energy with which they spoke about freedom.

The collaboration, the unity, the common goal, the passion it invoked, for justice and human rights; the passion they spoke with, of generations coming together for a common goal, a common good, that of equality and justice and the deep sense of purpose it seemed to have ignited in them.

Sure there were factions and there were the cynics, and the traitors, but the cohesive movement had a strength and a life of its own. 

In our daily life, living in “free” nations, even if we don’t have an obvious goal to move towards, I wonder if apathy has leaked in. In being more focused on ourselves, if we may have lost a larger perspective on our world. For there remain, many other freedoms worth fighting even if we are “free”.

And there are those personal freedoms worth striving for. I know for sure, there are things I would love to free myself from, biases, and beliefs that do not good, the need to conform to certain things for no good reason, fears that I live with for no apparent reason.

In our daily life, living in “free” nations, there are still shackles we live in and create for ourselves – at the personal and larger level. May we learn to mobilize the courage and vitality that lies in the sentiments of the scribbles in my old notebook somewhere – to free ourselves from those too.