It isn't.

I wake up from a dream in which a lot of children ran around the house, muddying everything, my room, my books, everything. I wake up and find that I have an urgent need to pee. I turn around and find myself inside a sleeping bag. While crawling out and flashing the light, I also find that there is a minor snow invasion in the tent.

( ... )

The moment I met Bhatkande, the retired army man, at the Youth Hostels national trek, I absolutely positively knew I wanted to have a portrait like this. He came with the big Mumbai gang, and even at the age of sixty-five, put the youngsters to shame while rappelling and sliding through the snow with the agility of a teenager, not to talk of the nonchalance of a veteran.



As we were rounding up to depart together from the Seobagh base camp, I was playing with Sujo's Kodak 6490 digital camera, taking pictures of the smiling and oblivious faces. I gladly found that the telephoto end of this camera dupes as a very fine portrait lens. Talk about serendipity! (One problem with the camera is its clumsy dial based control on its back, but that is not relevant here.) I excitedly clicked through.

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