An American intern in India rises into the Himalayas to the strains of “Dil Kalla”.
If I had to pick the perfect occasion in which to listen to K S Makhan’s song, “Dil Kalla”, it would be this: at night, in a car with four other silent people, all of us exhausted after having driven 17 hours through much of Punjab and the twisting mountain roads of Himachal Pradesh.
The strange music would begin to peal over the car stereo just as we reached the final road that would, at last, deliver us to the destination that we had intended to reach many hours before, had it not been for landslides and downpours. The car would be pushing gently forward, its interior pregnant with the strains of the song that we, at the time, only knew as “the sad song”, and the road would then finally reach its end, delivering us to a campsite in Tirthan Valley, near the Great Himalayan National Park.
It is dark, so it is difficult to make out exactly where we are and what we are seeing, but we know we are amidst something special because clouds hug the distant mountains. In front of us stands a man with a long moustache, streaks of grey hair, and glasses. “Welcome to the Himalayas” are the first words out of his mouth.
Meet Sumit Tyagi, a friend of my friend’s brother (standard fare when it comes to networking in India), is a former American Express employee, a motorcyclist with a yen for discovering his entire country on his beloved Royal Enfield, and a devotee of the beauty of Tirthan Valley in Kullu district, Himachal Pradesh. He is a man whose vision is far more expansive than plain pragmatism would permit. With his wife Jasmine, Tyagi has built Camp Himalayan, a set of cottages nestled in the mountains 67 km from Mandi.
I am an American business school student, and I spent two months this summer on an internship in Mumbai, after which I travelled with some friends in north India. As part of our travels, we stayed at Tyagi’s cottages.
On our first morning there, Tyagi pointed out the apple orchards, walnut trees, and sunflowers that surrounded the camp. We hiked to a 450-year-old temple situated in a tiny village. We picnicked on thalis laden with food made of locally grown vegetables. In the evening, we threw ourselves into a freezing river and then from a farm nearby we bought fresh trout that, later that night, we ate with our hands, the meat coming off so softly from the bones.
Tyagi loves this valley, and he is staking out land to prevent it from becoming over-commercialised. His vision is to build extensions of Camp Himalayan, each authentically local and in harmony with the natural environment, catering to “like-minded people” — motorcyclists, backpackers, tourists who are satisfied with the simple pleasure of waking up in the mountains. There is no business plan, only a dream of what can be many, many years from now.
Tyagi’s dramatically idealistic approach to business reminded me of some of the visionary business leaders whom I had met or learned about during my time in Mumbai, when I worked with the Tata Group. In the last week of the internship programme, the interns met B Muthuraman, MD of Tata Steel. He began his conversation with us by talking about the influence of the 3,000-year-old Vedas on Indians’ mindset toward business. And when the group’s founder Jamsetji Tata charted plans for the construction of Mumbai's first hydropower facility, he could find only two textile mill owners who were willing to lift electricity from this new power supply. The Tatas built it anyway.
In business school we’re trained to devise business plans that maximise value for financial backers with a payback period that is as short as possible. What lay behind Tyagi’s entrepreneurial vision, and which resonated with ideas articulated by Muthuraman and by the Tata founder long ago, is a belief that it is possible to measure a businessman’s contribution in metrics beyond immediate profitability, and to think of business in the time horizons of the Sanskrit scriptures.
I guess that when you live in a country where the dominant religion marks its calendar by the life of Brahma — for whom one divine day corresponds to 4.3 billion earthly years — payback periods of five years seem quaint, even negligible.
I thought about negligibility on that first night in Himachal Pradesh. The mountains are big, and you, despite your American backpack and outsize ambitions, are small. I looked at the sunflowers that surrounded us and thought about the physicist Paul Dirac who, trying to explain the sweeping implications of gravity, noted, “Pick a flower and move the farthest star.”
The notion of picking flowers directed my thoughts back to the memorable signboard in Kamala Nehru Park in Mumbai: “Any type of play games i.e. cricket, football, flying kite… straineous exercises, jogging, sleeping, plucking flowers… are not allowed” [sic]. My mind was swimming. Tyagi’s imaginative venture. Brahma’s long life. The melancholy of “Dil Kalla”. Plucked flowers. I tilted my head back up towards the sky.
I had never seen so many stars in my life.
