top of page

By:

Anandajit Goswami

15 April 2026 at 11:15:27 pm

Lessons from the Mountains

How much of the Himalayas must melt before we rediscover our humanity? I have carried this question for some time. Perhaps it came from the mountains, the rain and the silence. The Himalayas feed rivers, sustain communities and carry memories of centuries. Yet their changing landscape reminds us that nature has limits. We discuss melting glaciers, disappearing water sources and climate change, but too often these remain statistics. What happens when they become part of daily life? I imagine...

Lessons from the Mountains

How much of the Himalayas must melt before we rediscover our humanity? I have carried this question for some time. Perhaps it came from the mountains, the rain and the silence. The Himalayas feed rivers, sustain communities and carry memories of centuries. Yet their changing landscape reminds us that nature has limits. We discuss melting glaciers, disappearing water sources and climate change, but too often these remain statistics. What happens when they become part of daily life? I imagine sitting on those mountains on a rain soaked afternoon, watching clouds descend and the earth being washed clean. In that silence, love arrives. Not the dramatic love we celebrate, but a quieter love that simply sits beside us. And then I ask myself: have I learned to love another human being, or only the idea of humanity? Humanity as an idea is easy to love. The person before us is different. He has fears, weaknesses, anger and wounds. To love a human being requires patience. It requires us to stay. The question stays with me. We often imagine spirituality as a journey away from people, towards mountains, forests and solitude. But perhaps the journey into the mountains is only half the journey. The other half is returning to people. Perhaps we enter the forest not to escape humanity, but to understand it better, and then return to everyday life with a greater ability to see those around us. If spirituality creates distance between us and others, what have we gained? True spirituality should make that distance smaller. It should make us more compassionate, not more detached. We can speak to someone thousands of kilometres away in seconds, but may not know what the person next to us is going through. How much of Nepal do we really reach when we admire its mountains? Perhaps Nepal represents every distant place we admire without truly knowing, every landscape we photograph without understanding, and every suffering we discuss without allowing it to change us. We can cross mountains and borders without ever truly arriving. A journey is complete only when it brings us closer to another human being. Perhaps that is where a spiritual journey becomes meaningful. And then there is violence. A missile can cross the sky in seconds. A bullet can end a life in an instant. But fear travels much faster. It moves from one heart to another and changes the way people see each other. Grief becomes anger, anger becomes hatred, and hatred makes it easier to see another human being as an enemy rather than as a person. At such moments, our philosophies disappear. The mask falls. I imagine looking beside me. I expect to find a gun. But there is no gun. There is a guitar. I do not know who placed it there. Perhaps it was love. Perhaps it was music or another human being reminding me that there is a choice. The gun represents hatred, revenge, intolerance and the desire to silence another voice. The guitar represents conversation, empathy and creativity when the world is full of noise. We can decide what we add to the world. We can add to anger, or we can reduce it. We can answer hatred with hatred, or begin a conversation. Every choice shapes society. Perhaps that is where being human really begins. The Himalayas may continue to melt. Rivers may shrink. Fear may return, and guns may continue to speak. But we still have a choice. We can add another weapon to the noise, or pick up the guitar. We can continue speaking the language of fear, or learn the language of compassion. Perhaps spirituality is making that choice again and again. Humanity begins with the person standing next to us. It could be a stranger, neighbour, colleague, or someone we strongly disagree with. The moment we stop seeing that person as another human being and begin to see something of ourselves in him, the distance becomes smaller. The mountains may teach us silence. Rivers may teach us movement. Rain may teach us renewal. But their greatest lesson is simple: we are all standing on the same fragile earth. The world will continue to change, whether we are ready or not. The real question is what we will become while it changes. Where we expected a gun, perhaps there can be a guitar. Perhaps we should begin there. We may not control the future, but we can influence the human atmosphere we leave behind. (The writer is an author and musician. Views personal.)

Asha, the Hope, and Tai, the Elder Sister

Writer: Anandajit Goswami
Anandajit Goswami
Apr 15
3 min read

To me, the demise of Asha Bhosle signifies the "Hope of my Elder Sister." In this war-torn world, she spreads hope through her eternal longing for love in "Salona Sajan." Amid the darkness engulfing West Asia and the Middle East, Asha Tai evokes Macbeth's words: "Let not light see my dark desires." Through her melancholic and lustful "Tanha Tanha," she illuminates humanity's dark desires, while in A.R. Rahman's "Kahi Aag Lage," she cries out in fiery defiance.


To imitate human life in a futuristic world of robotics and humanoids, one must sing like Asha Bhosle, layering emotions as she did in her songs. As musicians and vocalists compete for coexistence with AI-generated voices and music, they must hum the Asha-R.D. Burman duets—manifestations of soul and blood that, like power, should not be concentrated but transcended and distributed.


Asha Tai is not merely a relic of the past; she embodies hope for a dystopian future, where lust, anger, hope, love, and desire might seem utopian amid a synthetic civilisation.


Her tenor, soprano, alap, meend, and operatic flourishes once echoed in our childhood imitations. Now, with her passage from mortality to immortality, she opens the doorway to "Asha and Hope" for generations to come. Her legacy and body of work will course through humanity like blood, imbuing it with vital power.


Therefore, for the vital power to sustain a future conscious state, Asha Tai and her music will blend Western Materialism and Eastern Spiritualism. For instance, the spiritual lineage of Raag Kamod in “Jaane Kya Baat Hai” from the film Sunny will mix with “Duniya Main Logo” ko to bring in two different dimensions of restlessness in a human soul. A soul that starts to cry out with “Jane Ja” from the backend notes of " Yeh Jawani Yeh Diwani", then questions a free-spirited soul and its longing through AR Rahman’s “Rangeela Re”. As an avid music fan of Asha Bhonsle, the same Rangeela Re was a delight of evolution of music from the “Rangeela Re Tere Man Main” of her own elder sister Lata Mangeshkar.


The two songs across two time frames clearly capture how our society moved from a spiritual, soulful society to a materialistic one. Both were contextual in their own times. While Lata’s Rangeela Re was about a “Brahmin” and “Kshatriya” society of Vivekananda where culture, consciousness, intellect flourished, Rahman’s Rangeela Re through Asha Tai brought the “Vaishya”, “Shudra” into the music. It became the music of trade, mass, people, commerce and equality.


The portrayal of the AR Rahman song on the film screen also depicted the people as in a free-spirited, equal, evolutionary society. Asha Tai brought it to us. In a world of discrimination, religion, she brought equality and light of the morning like her song - “Bheeni Bheeni Bhor” through the “Raga Mian Ki Todi” and “Adha Teental”.


The rhythm of the song, which is half-filled like a cup, only projects the essence of incompletion of life and suggests that Asha Tai only made us say - “Dil Padosi Hai (1987)”. This is because only when the heart is your known neighbour, you can make a discriminatory society as an equal one!


(The writer is a Professor, Director, Manav Rachna Centre For Peace and Sustainability, Research Lead, Ashoka Centre For People Centric Energy Transition. Views personal.)

Comments

bottom of page