High Places

I spent some time this week at the Garudmaachi campus of High Places (www.highplaces.co.in), a company that offers outdoors based management development programs.

High Places is run by Vasant Limaye

Garudmaachi is breath-taking. This 19 acre spread nestles at one end against a camel’s back shaped peak of the Sahayadris and at the other end a peak that Vasant likes to call the Phantom Head.

Vasant has taken care not to disturb the natural habitat.

Accommodation within Garudmaachi consist of dormitory tents which while proving all creature comforts blend in unobtrusively ( for the “senior boss” types from the corporate teams that frequent Garudmaachi want more ‘conventional’ accommodation, High Places has ‘four-star’ kind of facilities just across the road from Garudmaachi).

Even the rappelling tower and the Burma bridge seem camouflaged so as not to offend the animals.

The quietitude of the place goes beyond a lack of noise to the silence of fulfillment.

Vasant was at IIT Bombay with me. I always knew him as the outdoorsy type and the original conservationist decades before the whole green hullabaloo started.

He missed scaling Kanchenjunga by a few hundred feet and his concern for preservation of nature reflects in every inch of Garudmaachi.

To my pleasant surprise however, on this visit, another facet of Vasant was revealed to me.Vasant the writer.

Vasant, I now gather, is a published writer with a compilation of his columns for a Marathi newspaper in its third edition, as also a couple of highly appreciated short stories.

And his fondest future project now is a book he is contemplating writing over the next year or so.

Vasant adding to the quietitude of fulfillment a note of mystery, narrating a story of his as we sat around the burning embers of a stove on a chilly night, is a memory that will stay with me for a long time.