What Am I Building?

As the sun climbed over the horizon at 8:50 AM, I felt something shift - not just in the light, but in me. Standing at the shadowed feet of Raigad Fort, I was not simply looking at stone and stair. I was looking at the throne of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, a sky-piercing citadel where eagles once shadowed Maratha banners. The air felt charged with something older than any of us. I took a breath, and we began.Guiding our ascent was Pundalikji - a man I would quickly come to think of as a sage of stories. He had brought his family along, and with them came the spark that would define the entire day: his sons Purandar and Yog, fleet-footed and grinning, who wasted no time throwing down the gauntlet. "Race me to the top." I did not need to think about it. The answer was already in my legs. Amidst the erupting cries - Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj ki Jai! - voices thundering up the stairs, 2,300 stones of ancient valour beneath our feet, I began the trek, or rather the run up the hill.Purandar and Yog bolted like hill-born hares, and I matched them stride for stride. The first two hundred steps were pure adrenaline - chants booming war-drum loud, boots finding rhythm on the worn stone. By three hundred, the heat began to claw in and sweat beaded at my temples, but I felt no urge to slow. If anything, I leaned in. I spotted Purandar twenty steps ahead around the five hundred mark, and something in me sharpened. "Har Har Mahadev!" ripped from my throat as I pushed over, thighs igniting, lungs working hard - and gaining. The vistas at each bend kept pulling my eyes outward: emerald valleys yawning below, mountain ridges layering into the distance like waves. Beautiful, but I was not stopping to admire them for long.Our halts were brief but rich. At each stop, Pundalik ji drew us in with Shivaji's saga - born in 1630 at Shivneri, a teenage raider forging the idea of Hindavi Swarajya from sheer will, and finally coronated in 1674 right here on this plateau, in a ceremony that announced to the world that a new power had risen. I stood listening, water bottle in hand, still catching my breath, and felt the stories settle into me differently than they ever had from a page.It was on these lower stretches that we first encountered Raigad's most industrious commuters - donkeys. Not one or two, but whole convoys of them, moving steadily up and down the trail at regular intervals, loaded with supplies for the vendors and workers at the top. They carried themselves with a calm, unhurried authority that frankly put the rest of us to shame. Every time a line of them appeared around a bend - bells clinking, hooves sure-footed on the ancient stone - I stepped aside along with everyone else, pressing against the hillside without question. There was something almost ceremonial about it. The donkeys never broke stride, never acknowledged our existence, and carried on as though they had been doing this long before any of us were born. Watching them, even mid-race, I could not help but smile. Purandar was ahead of me, and I was being humbled by a donkey. The mountain has its own hierarchy..The fort's stray dogs were a warmer kind of interruption. They appeared along the lower path with tails wagging and a complete lack of interest in our ambitions, trotting alongside us as though they had been included in the plan all along. I stopped briefly to pet one - a scrappy, amber-coloured creature who seemed genuinely delighted to have found someone moving at pace - before the trail widened and I was back in stride.At the Hanuman temple nestled into the hillside, we paused to offer our respects. I noticed a pair of cows grazing nearby, entirely unbothered by the world passing around them. I spent a few quiet minutes with them - a hand resting on a warm flank, the smell of grass and old stone in the air - and felt something settle inside me that I had not realised was unsettled. It was Pundalikji who put words to it. He observed, almost offhandedly, that the ability to be still in the middle of motion is one of the rarest and most necessary things a person can learn. Standing there, fresh from a sprint and about to resume one, I felt the full weight of that.His wisdom never stayed in one register for long. At the summit, he led us through Raigad's resurrected heart - the Jagadishwar Temple commanding windswept expanses where Shivaji once dreamed of empires, the Maha Darwaza, the royal court, the Takmak Tok from where enemies of the state were once cast down. Each site was a chapter in a story that refuses to be past tense. Yet the grief was equally present. The scars of Mughal raids and British destruction are written plainly across the fort - broken ramparts, incomplete restorations, stone that was clearly once something magnificent and is now only partially itself. Some things survive despite everything done to erase them. Raigad is one of them..Between the history, Pundalikji shifted into something more personal - introspective reflections on life itself. On the difference between information and understanding. On what it truly means to know something. I walked beside him through those stretches and said little, because there was little to add. Some conversations ask only to be received.As for Purandar - the race never quite produced a clean verdict, which is probably the most honest outcome it could have had. But it gave the entire climb a pulse. Every uphill stretch had urgency, and the summit, when it came, meant something more than arrival because of it.When I finally stood at the top, the Sahyadris stretched out in every direction- ancient, vast, and completely indifferent to whatever I had been worrying about before that morning. The sky was enormous. Somewhere below, the donkeys were still making their rounds.Shivaji Maharaj was coronated on this very ground in 1674. He looked out over these same mountains and chose to build something that would outlast him by centuries. I stood there and felt, briefly but clearly, that I understood why.I came for a trek. I left with something harder to name - a question, unknowingly planted, that I suspect will keep climbing long after my legs have rested: What am I building, and will it last?Jai Bhavani. Jai Shivaji.

What Am I Building?

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