Last weekend I had been to Kemmannaugundi, company sponsored trip along with several of my colleagues.  Kemmannaugundi is about 6hrs drive from Bangalore.  It's a beautiful hill station in the midst of thousands of square miles tropical rain forests, mountains, coffee estates, water falls, dense forest, whole of the earth is carpeted with green grass, mild and chilling weather, beautiful view of sunset and sunrise.  It is indeed truly a heaven on earth.  It was a much required escape from city life.

I did half an hour truck to a place called as 'z-point', two mountain lines fuse together in the 'z' shape and hence the name.  From 'z-point' one could say huge landscape covered with greenery and clouds kissing the mountain peaks.  I was floated by the beauty of the nature.   Suddenly a thought crossed my mind and brought smile on face.  Being in densely populated and one of the fastest growing city Bangalore, life is so hectic, stressful.  Getting up in the morning, rushing to office work all day long and back to home to sleep and doing all this over next day and days to come for rest of my life.  In this city life, in between jungle of steel, concrete and glasses we often don't see sun set and sun rise for weeks.

Just as to refresh, relieve stress and recharge our biological batteries for next week of work we often escape to places like Kemmannaugundi to breath fresh air, to see sun set and rise, to enjoy the beauty of nature, two days later we are back again where we escaped from.   In the conquest of building luxury and comfortable life we have built big cities and urbanizing the whole world.  In my opinion things are good when they are kept simple.  So is life.  Are we not messing it up and making it more complicated?  The kind of life we want to escape into, like Kemmannaugundi, was the entire life style years ago.  With all those comforts of modern life we have lost the touch with beautiful and simple life, which we try to re-discover by escaping for two days to the places like Kemmannaugundi.

I am so used to the luxury city life, I couldn't walk barefoot for few meters, I couldn't sleep on mat.  There is a part in me that want to go back in time and live life like our age old ancestors lived, living off the land, mountains, trees, waters, eating, laughing, playing.  It was so simple.  I always wonder, what is there in human heart and mind that always pushes us to reach greater height, travel greater distances, to see invisible, to conquer the unconquerable, to do undoable.  In doing all these, life is becoming complicated.

This was the though that crossed my and brought smile on my face.  Few minutes later I got up, looked over the mountain rages, clouds and trees and filled my heart with joy and started walking toward the base camp with this thought still puzzling me.   Eventually, those two days of fun was over, we are back where we came from.  Next morning I am sitting in my office in front of my computer, writing complicated software to solve complex life problems only to make it more complicated!

There I am using computer to write this article and post it on the internet...  Funny isn't it?  Then again the same smile on my face on the very same thought that bought smile on my face in Kemmannaugundi.  Only this time I am in my office, in the real world, the world I choose to live in.   If I really want I could go into live any kind of life I want to.  But I choose to live in the city of Bangalore and I am loving it.  At least, I think I am loving it.  I really don't know whether I am loving it or not...  Life continues...