Humans have always wanted to trade, risk their life.
On the Nepal–Tibet tragedy, the ancient roads we still travel, and my experience from last year! what is Kailash?
Perhaps long before someone looked towards Kailash seeking Shiva, someone else looked across those same impossible mountains and thought:
There is salt on that side. We have grain on this side. There must be a way across.
And we found one.
Across the Himalayas, geography shaped commerce. In western Nepal, for example, communities carried grain northwards towards Tibet and brought Tibetan rock salt south. The Karnali watershed became part of a centuries-old trading system connecting Nepal and northern India with the Tibetan plateau. (HimalDoc)
That explains something important about the Himalayas.
People are not spread evenly across these enormous mountains. They couldn’t be.
They gathered where geography permitted human life and movement: beside rivers, inside valleys and near the few passes through which people, animals and goods could move. Research on Nepal’s highland communities shows just how economically important being located on one of these natural trans-Himalayan corridors could be. (HimalDoc)
First came the path.
Then the trader.
Then the settlement.
Then the market.
And centuries later, the road.
Which is why, when disaster comes to one of these narrow corridors, so much of human life can suddenly find itself in the same place.
Then came another traveller
The pilgrim.
For Hindus, Kailash was not simply another destination on the other side of the Himalayas.
It was Shiva’s abode.
For Buddhists, Jains and followers of Bon too, this extraordinary mountain acquired profound spiritual meaning.
And so people began travelling towards it for a completely different reason.
Not to bring something back.
Perhaps to leave something behind.
The old Kailash pilgrim did not have an itinerary that said:
Day 16: Return to Kathmandu.
A pilgrimage into Tibet could take months. Himalayan travel depended on weather, snow, rivers, animals, political conditions and the physical ability of the traveller to keep moving.
There was another reality that we rarely contemplate when we use the word yatra today.
When someone left home for a pilgrimage into the Himalayas, the family knew that there was a possibility that person would never return.
There would be no WhatsApp message from Saga.
No photograph from Manasarovar.
No reassuring update from the tour operator.
No blue tick.
No Google Maps location.
Someone walked out of the house towards the Himalayas.
And then the family waited.
Perhaps that knowledge was itself part of the pilgrimage.
Because before asking,
When will I return?
the pilgrim had already confronted a more difficult question:
What if I don’t?
We changed the road
Human beings don’t particularly like accepting geography.
So eventually we engineered our way around it.
Paths became tracks.
Tracks became roads.
Bridges crossed rivers.
Immigration posts appeared at ancient crossings.
Trucks replaced caravans.
And one of those old Himalayan corridors became the Rasuwa–Gyirong route.
Gyirong is important to this story because it sits at the intersection of almost everything this tragedy represents:
geography, trade, infrastructure, pilgrimage and human ambition.
After the 2015 Nepal earthquake severely disrupted the older Tatopani-Zhangmu route, Rasuwagadhi-Gyirong became increasingly important for Nepal-China movement and trade.
Eventually Gyirong wasn’t merely a mountain crossing.
It was a port.
A highway.
An immigration centre.
A commercial gateway between Nepal and Tibet.
Ancient Himalayan trade had entered the age of container trucks.
The instinct, however, hadn’t changed much.
Centuries ago:
They have salt. We have grain.
Today:
They manufacture it. We can sell it.
Same humans.
Better logistics.
And then we changed the Yatra
Technology did something equally extraordinary to pilgrimage.
It compressed it.
A journey once measured in uncertainty, seasons and sometimes months can now be sold as an organised itinerary measured in days.
Kathmandu.
Gyirong.
Saga.
Manasarovar.
Yamadwar.
Dirapuk.
Kailash.
Back.
Approximately sixteen days.
The sixteen-day yatra is obviously not literally replacing some standard sixteen-year pilgrimage. There never was one.
But metaphorically, that is exactly what it sometimes feels like we have done.
We converted the sixteen-year state of mind into the sixteen-day itinerary.
I know because I travelled that road.
I wrote about it earlier in “Kailash Manasarovar Yatra of Bhaskar Thakur a.k.a. Shankaran Pillion.”
And reading that piece today feels different.
I had written it as the story of a fumbling pilgrim.
Sadhguru had made his journey towards Kailash look heroic.
I arrived in Kathmandu with, as I wrote then, “two backpacks, one Google Pixel, and a confusion level so high even Google Maps was buffering.”
I went through the group-visa circus at the Tibet border.
Thirty names.
One piece of paper.
Everyone required to stand in exactly the correct sequence.
I managed, naturally, to stand in the wrong place.
At Saga my oxygen saturation remained fine while my blood pressure decided to conduct its own pilgrimage.
At Manasarovar I received my two buckets of freezing Kak Snan and wondered why nobody had thought of installing a geyser.
At Yamadwar I couldn’t decide whether salvation required walking through the gate or around it.
And at Dirapuk, finally, I saw Kailash.
Then I did perhaps the most twenty-first-century thing imaginable.
I reached for my Google Pixel.
First photograph: my ear.
Second: the sky.
Third: a yak.
And by the time I managed to compose the perfect photograph—
the clouds had covered Kailash.
That became the central line of that old blog:
Kailash doesn’t need my Pixel. Kailash doesn’t need my captions. Kailash doesn’t even need me. I needed Kailash.
It was funny when I wrote it.
Today it doesn’t feel funny at all.
Because on August 26, the mountain reminded us who controls the itinerary
A massive collapse of glacier ice, rock and sediment high in the Himalayas crashed roughly 1,200 metres into the valley below and generated a devastating torrent through the river system along the Nepal-Tibet border.
The flood travelled through precisely the geography humans have depended upon for centuries.
The river.
The valley.
The road.
The trading corridor.
Gyirong.
The same corridor through which trucks carried goods and buses carried pilgrims became the path through which water, ice, rock and mud travelled downhill.
Roads disappeared.
Bridges disappeared.
Buildings disappeared.
Communication disappeared.
And suddenly families across Nepal, India and other countries were once again waiting for news of people somewhere beyond the Himalayas.
The confirmed numbers are still changing as I write this, and I don’t want this essay to turn human beings into a casualty counter. Hundreds have already died and more than a thousand have at various points been reported missing across Nepal and Tibet. Rescue teams are still searching enormous debris fields, while unstable lakes and blocked rivers are creating fears of further flooding. (Reuters)
Among the missing and affected were pilgrims travelling to or returning from Kailash.
People travelling a road I know.
That changes how I look at my old photographs.
Why were so many people there?
It is tempting to answer:
Because of the flood.
But go backwards.
Why were hundreds of people travelling through one narrow Himalayan corridor?
Because that is where the road is.
Why is the road there?
Because that is where geography allows passage.
Why did settlements and markets develop there?
Because traders used the passage.
Why did traders use it?
Because Tibet had something people south of the Himalayas wanted, and the south had something Tibet wanted.
Salt.
Grain.
Wool.
Rice.
Trade created routes.
Routes created settlements.
Settlements created infrastructure.
Infrastructure created greater trade.
Roads made tourism possible.
Tourism made pilgrimage accessible.
And accessibility brought more of us into a landscape that had never become less dangerous.
We had simply become better at entering it.
We confused accessibility with safety
That may be the uncomfortable lesson.
The Himalayas did not become easier.
Getting there became easier.
There is an enormous difference.
Our bus has suspension.
The mountain still moves.
Our road has asphalt.
The river still chooses its course.
Our immigration centre has computers.
The glacier has never heard of immigration.
Our phones have satellite connectivity.
Gravity remains stubbornly analogue.
And our itinerary may say:
Day 16 – Kathmandu.
The mountain has never signed the itinerary.
Scientists studying this disaster believe the immediate trigger was a massive ice-rock avalanche. Researchers are examining the contribution of warming, rapid snow and glacier melt and the increasing instability of high mountain terrain. Nepal has lost almost a third of its glacial ice over roughly three decades, although scientists rightly caution against reducing a complex individual disaster to one cause. (Reuters)
There is a climate question here.
There is an infrastructure question.
There will be questions about where we build roads, bridges, hydropower projects, immigration centres and settlements.
But perhaps there is also a human question.
Why are we going to Kailash?
That is the question I keep returning to.
If I can book Kailash online, pay digitally, fly to Kathmandu, cross immigration, sit in a bus, have someone monitor my oxygen saturation, carry my bags and bring me back home in sixteen days—
has the journey become easier, or have I simply removed the circumstances that once forced me to confront why I was making it?
I don’t romanticise the old pilgrimage.
People died.
People suffered.
Accessibility is a wonderful thing.
Roads save lives.
Doctors save lives.
Oxygen saves lives.
Communication saves lives.
I would happily take every one of them again.
Spirituality does not require bad logistics.
But convenience creates a subtle danger.
It can turn pilgrimage into consumption.
Kailash Darshan: Done.
Photograph: Done.
Parikrama: Done.
Manasarovar: Done.
Instagram: Done.
Return flight: Confirmed.
And perhaps that is precisely where something is lost.
Because Kailash was never waiting to be completed.
We were.
When I finally saw Kailash, my biggest revelation was embarrassingly simple.
I had spent the journey trying to photograph the mountain.
Eventually I understood that the mountain didn’t need to be captured.
I did.
That line means something different to me tonight.
Hundreds of families are waiting for news.
Rescuers are entering extraordinarily dangerous terrain looking for people they have never met.
Pilgrims who started their journeys expecting to return home within days have suddenly encountered the ancient uncertainty of the Himalayas.
And perhaps that is why I don’t want to end this piece with a lesson.
It feels inappropriate.
Only with questions.
Why have human beings spent thousands of years squeezing themselves into these narrow valleys?
Why do we keep building beside rivers that created those valleys?
Why did traders cross these mountains?
Why did seekers follow them?
Why did we build roads where the traders once walked?
Why did I travel thousands of kilometres to stand before a mountain?
And when I finally stood there—
what exactly was I looking for?
I thought my Kailash Yatra ended when I returned home.
Perhaps some yatras take much longer than sixteen days to understand.
For the families waiting tonight, may there still be a road home.
Om Namah Shivaya.
References
ICIMOD’s research on Himalayan communities documents the centuries-old grain-for-Tibetan-salt trading networks that connected northern Nepal and India with western Tibet, as well as the importance of natural travel corridors to Himalayan settlement and commerce. (HimalDoc)
ICIMOD also documents the historical significance of transborder trade within the wider Kailash Sacred Landscape and the enormous disruption to traditional Himalayan trading communities after the Sino-Indian border closure of 1962. (ICIMOD)
Reuters’ reporting of August 26–27, 2026 documents the ice-rock/glacier collapse, destruction along the Nepal-Tibet river corridor, casualties and missing persons, damage around Gyirong, continuing rescue operations and scientific investigation into the disaster and the possible influence of a warming Himalayan environment. (Reuters)
