I didn’t need to understand the magic of Rishikesh. I just needed to feel it.
I’d been in Rishikesh for about a year. The mornings had started to slow me down, the forest trails had begun to feel like old friends, and the Gangaji—well, she had a way of showing up whether or not you believed in her powers.
One morning near the banks, I found myself in conversation with two Swamis—gentle, twinkly-eyed men who seemed to smile at you even when they weren’t. One of them asked me, almost playfully,
“Ashish, why do you think the Gangaji feels the way she does?”
Now, I’ll be honest—I was still very much a logic-driven man. Not a full-blown atheist anymore, but definitely still carrying remnants of skepticism in my backpack. I’d heard the Gangaji had magical powers. I just wasn’t sure if I could…absorb that fully.
But I listened.
The Swami continued,
“You must walk up near Kiyarki village, just beyond the waterfalls. There, you’ll see how the Gangaji curves through the mountains like a serpent. From above, she draws the shape of the sacred OM.”
I laughed gently. “That sounds poetic,” I said.
He grinned. “That is Rishikesh.”
They went on to explain that the shape of the river, the flow, the collision of water and rock, produces what science calls negative ions—those wonderful little things that lift your mood and clear your head. You’ll find them near waterfalls, in pine forests, or by the sea. And here, by the Gangaji.
And then came the deeper layer:
Thousands of sages have meditated in these mountains. Their energy, if you believe in such things, still echoes in the land.
As one of the Swamis put it, “If people can carry anxiety from one room to another, why can’t love and prayer carry, too?”
I nodded. That, even the skeptic in me couldn’t deny.
They talked of Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine, how many of the most potent herbs used in both traditions grow in these very Himalayan folds. When tiny rivulets carrying these herbs merge to become the Gangaji, they carry not just water, but trace minerals, memory, and maybe…medicine.
“And you know,” one of them added, “Gangaji water doesn’t spoil.”
There’s no city here, they reminded me.
Rishikesh is still a town.
And Tapovan, where we now live and work and dream, is still a whisper tucked into the hills.
That moment stayed with me.
And while I didn’t go home and throw out my logic, something shifted. I didn’t need to understand the magic of Rishikesh. I just needed to feel it.
Maybe that’s the point.
And maybe, just maybe, Aavya—the little place we built here in Tapovan—is touched by a sliver of that same energy. I hope it carries even a flicker of that prayerful silence, of those rock-brushed ions, and of the memory of all who’ve walked and danced and wept along the Gangaji before us.