KOCHI: ‘Only dead fish go with the flow’ is a rather intelligent saying that describes rebels who tend to find their true selves away from the hustle of the world. For 31-year-old Sreesha Ravindran, her love for travel that formed when she was a child, became her biggest teacher and motivator. This Palakkad-based finance professional, classical dancer and mother of a seven-year-old boy transformed from being stressed-out all the time to someone who willingly challenges the mountains of life with grace.
She has travelled to Chadar trek, Goecha la, and great lakes of Kashmir and trekked the Pin Parvati expedition, Stok kangri expedition, and Khalindi khal expedition. Her son accompanies her too sometimes, like to Spiti Valley, where they trekked up to Komic village which has the highest post office in the world.
Sreesha visited the Himalayas when she was in Class IX, with her father who is also a travel enthusiast. Through school and college, she visited the place many times, while also trekking through the Western Ghats and other states in India. She was also pursuing classical dance, her other passion. But soon, she was working and married, and it was time to “get serious”.
“After I got married, I took a break from all this for over three years. It felt like I was in a constant battle with my true self, suffocating inside the ‘homely’ facade I was forced to keep up. A working mother is considered a privileged title by itself,” she says. Though she tried rejoining dance classes, she suffered with time management. Postpartum depression coupled with the 35kg she gained, made Sreesha feel that her life was crumbling.
But then came the silver lining. Her first trip to Leh with her four-year-old son. She explored Leh in winter -- every biker’s dream -- but that came with a lesson. “We got stuck in Tso Moriri village due to a snowstorm. I remember removing snow and throwing dirt on the road with my bare hands, being unsure if I will get out of there alive,” she says. Rescued by the kind Indo-Tibetan Border Police, their team spent a night in the nearby village, treating frost bites. “At that moment, I thought I made a bad decision, that I just want to go back home and never do something like this again.
But once I was back, and the whole incident sunk in, I realised that nothing in life would be nearly as challenging. And everything I stressed about -- job, society, opinions -- none of that mattered. It changed my life. I had to face a lot of negativity once. For most of the treks, I am the only female participant. This raised many eyebrows, and people would say that I am a bad mother. But eventually, it stopped mattering,” she says. That is her message to every man and woman out there - never be too scared to find your own happiness. She was planning to travel to Lobuche and Island peak in Nepal, but the pandemic delayed that. Sreesha is also writing a book about her experiences and lessons she found along the way.