Memories of being a bird

"Put your hands back, hands back"
"Relaaakks"
"Now pulll"
"Pull haaardd"
"Ok, release"
"Hand back hand back"
"Lean forward and run raaaaaan!!'

And I would launch off from the top of Shinde Hill like a paper plane.  Its been five days since I left Kamshet and still sometimes I remember these words and the time I spent there. I returned on Sunday night, and Monday morning I woke up with a terrible feeling of missing something. Even the next day I felt quite similar. That something was paragliding. No, not tandem paragliding like so many people do in Mukteshwar or Solang. Flying solo -- that's what we went to learn at FlyNirvana Paragliding School. It was a four-day course called the Elementary Pilot course where a person can learn to fly solo (but doesn't get his/her license to do so without an instructor nearby). The first day is terribly exhausting. You have to do something called ground handling -- you have to grab hold of the glider by its ropes and run, run like hell. The damn thing is heavy and the more it gets filled with air it drags you down. But you still run until the instructor asks you to brake and stop.

Worst part of the first day was that after returning from ground handling we had to sit through video sessions and simulator sessions. Our brains and bodies were barely functioning at that time. The next day we started bunny hops -- flying 10-15ft above the ground. For this we went up midway on the slope of Shinde Hill and got launched from there. It was fun. We also got to see what we would do the next day -- guys (and girls) who had come a day earlier were flying proper flights from the top of the hill, over our heads.

Third day onward it was heavenly. We just flew. A few of us flew only on the fourth day, but most started on the third day itself. I'll just give the videos here and stop. No more words are necessary to describe what it is that I was missing so badly: