Footloose stories from a free world

Last February I received an invite from a small community library in Lohit, a remote district in Arunachal Pradesh, to participate in their community book festival. I was also asked to conduct a training and help set up a sustainability knowledge centre. My initial reaction was: “Should I travel to another corner of the country for a purely outreach activity when critical sales planning and strategy presentations lay ahead of me? But when the organizer called back saying "Don't just give up on us because we are in the far North East...we are also a part of India", I changed my mind and started for Lohit. What a journey it was! I met some of the most diverse tribal  communities and experienced their warm-heartedness. Everywhere I went, children were eager to know about mainland India. I also got to travel on "Library on Wheels”, a mobile bus library run by the old but passionate and driven Uncle Musa, a local library promoter. Together we drove daily, through remote elephant-infested jungles and reached sleepy villages near the China border after climbing the misty hills for long hours. The wide-eyed children in the schools eagerly waited for my book-reading sessions. As the dusk descended, I returned with a sense of deep fulfillment to my  hillside forest department Dak Bungalow, whose solitude was interrupted only by the sounds of wild monkeys and a friendly cat, with no mobile signals or television. It slowly dawned on me what a life-transforming experience it had been, and that sometimes in the everyday rat race, we continue with our regular city jobs just to fill our resumes; but when we move beyond the familiar and reach out to people, and share our skills with the larger community, it fills our soul with new  experiences and  stories that inspire us for a lifetime.