Hrishikesh is where Maa Ganga stops being a mountain river and embraces the plains — the terrain here is marked by clarity in its path and gentleness in its slope. She bends, slows, widens, and starts carrying everything downstream. She meets many streams, and many streams meet her.
Ganga is the embodiment of knowledge. And over the years, the quest for knowledge has defined me. My efforts to answer that quest have taken many forms. What I have learnt along the dusty paths of our cities has found expression in my writing as शहरगर्द — the dust of moving through too many cities. And there's HrishikeshGram, which tries to document just one city for anyone who hasn't been here. It is — I am trying to make it — an effort to document my city as a teacher to the rest of the world, because I feel the city has so much to teach, if only people had the temperament of a student.
Between the two, I think I was missing. Shahargard is what I have learnt from many cities. HrishikeshGram is what I try to hand back, from just one. So on one side, I express my identity through thoughts converted into writing. On the other, I am — or am trying to be — the person who loves his city and defines himself through that relationship.
My own relationship with myself was not anywhere in either. This big house of my mind needed an annex. I couldn't think of a better name than Hrishikeshi — one of the thousand names Maa Ganga carries: the one that can control your senses. It combines my love for my city, Hrishikesh, with the river I revere and grew up beside.
The same Ganga meets so many ideas, so many people, so many opposing thoughts — and bends, and moves, and keeps moving. She is not stagnant. Not everything in the mind is instinct either. This space is my garden, where I get to sit with हृषीकेशी and other things — fertile ideas from soil, fertile soil of ideas.
हृषीकेशी is the rest of it — whatever the current happens to pick up. A comic. A trivia question. A book someone put in my hands. A word I got stuck on and couldn't let go of. Not the poet. Not the guide to a city. Just the river where a lot of things happen to meet.
Ganga is often invoked as a metaphor for knowledge — Gyaan Ganga. She originates in the heavens, her touch purifies and removes ignorance, her flow never stops, and she eventually merges into the Supreme. Knowledge moves the same way — vast, restless, torrential. And here I keep circling back to a question I can't quite settle: does Hrishikesh tame the Ganga, or does the Ganga simply choose, at this bend, to tame herself? I think it has to be the latter. The city didn't slow her down — she arrives already carrying the discipline of every mile behind her, and this is just where that discipline becomes visible: white water giving way to a current you can finally read. That, and not the geography, is what yog actually means — not being controlled, but arriving at control. My mind moves the same way through the knowledge this city offers. Through हृषीकेशी, I'm not trying to dam that torrent or channel it elsewhere. I'm only giving it a bend where it can do, in me, what the river already knows how to do in herself.