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Journalism of Courage
When he was in Class 7, Vijay Rajvaidya, 72, came across a lesson on Adi Shankaracharya in a school textbook. The eighth-century Indian philosopher had walked throughout the country to intellectually unite the people and Rajvaidya thought “he was a superman.” Today, he has completed 2,000 km of Adi Shankaracharya’s 9,000-km journey and aims to visit all 12 Shiva temples in India, like the philosopher saint.
On the evening that Donald Trump returned to the White House with a stunning election victory, Rajvaidya sat among the books, photographs and pictures in his California study and reflected on his own quest. He had just returned from India, after walking continuously from October 6-21 and covering 620 km. Rajvaidya’s objective was not just to visit the temples but also, in trying to replicate Adi Shankaracharya’s purpose, to achieve a kind of intellectual integration of India.
“Our first and easily understandable objective is to highlight health. Walking is the simplest and easiest way to stay healthy. India is a young country right now, but 25-30 years down the road, we will be an older country. Given the condition of our living standards, lifestyle diseases are going to explode into a significant health problem. We want to adopt a culture of walking and health-related movement. My journey is, thus, a prototype that is tried and tested,” says Rajvaidya.
Among the other primary objectives is to find resources to fund academia across the world on Indian culture, arts, heritage, sciences and thinking, among others. “These are subjects we have excelled in the past. We have forgotten who we are,” he adds. His third aim is to reach out to “the person down there who cannot read and write”. Rajvaidya is a member of an international social service organisation with an active literacy programme.
Ujjain used to be the intellectual capital of India. Kalidas lived there, and emperor Ashoka started his life as a regent there. It was in this city of Madhya Pradesh that Rajvaidya “transitioned from infancy to childhood”. Over the years, the idea of replicating the journey of Adi Shankaracharya was active in Rajvaidya’s mind, but it would take 20 years before, on May 5, 2022, at 2 am, he started his walk from the Mahakaleshwar Jyotirling temple in Ujjain, 150 km south to Omkareshwar Jyotirling.
Nothing had prepared him for the hardship. “I would walk in the heat during the daytime. I don’t know why I didn’t even use an umbrella. Now I do. But after a few days of difficult walking, I was not able to wake up in the morning. My feet were swollen, blistered and painful,” he said. His route took him through forests, where he was alone against possible attacks by wild animals. “It was the first time I felt fear of animals. That is when I learnt not to walk in forests alone in the dark. Even daytime is not safe if I am in a place like the Gir lion sanctuary,” he says. In Gujarat, he encountered hyenas and in the Rann of Kutch, he got lost at 3 am.
Now he ensures that his car, packed with every kind of essential, follows him close behind.
“Whenever I am invited to speak, it is the first thing I say—physical challenges are not the real challenges. Limitations lie in your head, not in the body. If you can overcome the limitations of the mind, the body can do everything. The doctor who checked my aching feet told me, ‘All that is wrong is that the tissues are torn because of walking, and they are forming again, stronger than before’,” he says.
Rajvaidya no longer suffers the kind of pain he used to when he started. He has become stronger, and people are joining him from multiple places. “Some have high sugar, and within two days, the levels are down. It is not magic,” says Rajvaidya, who usually has 10-15 people walking with him.
Rajvaidya, a Silicon Valley veteran and chief financial officer of San Jose-based India Currents, a publication for the Indian-American diaspora, comes to India twice a year to carry out parts of his padyatra. His walk has taken him from Mahakaleshwar to Omkareshwar in Madhya Pradesh and to Somnath, and Nagnath in Gujarat, near Dwarka.
In Octoberc, he reached the Haryana border and plans to continue from there in March 2025, aiming to reach Kedarnath. “It’s more than a 500-km walk from where I stopped near the Haryana border to Kedarnath. There is a gradual climb for about 200 km once I enter Uttarakhand. Although the temple will be closed until May, I will visit the temple when I return in October 2025. I will then travel from Kedarnath to Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi,” he says.
He started this walk alone in 2022, but since then, people have begun to join him for a couple of days each time. Still, most of the time, he walks alone. Wherever he finds a motel or hotel, he checks in to sleep; otherwise, he sleeps at temples and, at one time, even at a petrol pump. The most interesting part of this walk is the interaction with people in the villages and towns he traverses.
During each visit, Rajvaidya stops by Pune. “The first person to join me was my former colleague from Silicon Valley, who now lives in Pune after retirement,” he says. Several other Punekars have participated in this journey. The city is now set to be the headquarters of a non-profit, Walk of Life, which is in the process of getting registered and will focus on health and establishing Indian knowledge systems in universities across India.
