Rumi said, if words come from the heart, they will enter the heart. Last year, I spent 145 days walking across the land I call home. I started at the edge of the sea and walked through heat, dust and rain until I reached the soft snow of my beloved Kashmir. I wanted to know precisely what it was that I loved. Was it this land? Was it a people? Was it a set of ideas? Almost immediately after I began walking, my knees started to pain. Like a hungry wolf, it would follow me everywhere I went. Waiting for me to stop. And then I started to notice something. Every time I would think about stopping, every time I considered giving up, someone would come and gift me the energy to continue. Once it was a lovely little girl with a beautiful letter, another time an old lady, then a man who suddenly ran up to me and hugged me. It was as if a silent energy kept helping me. There was always a din in the space where we walked, with loud slogans, clicking cameras and people pushing in shabby. Then one day I felt a silence I had never felt before. I could hear nothing but the voice of the person holding my hand and talking to me. He was a farmer and he spoke about his crop. He was crying as he showed me the strands of rotten cotton. There was nothing I could say. So I stopped walking and hugged him. It happened with children, with mothers, with students. It happened with shopkeepers, carpenters and labourers. It happened with soldiers. Now I would almost never hear myself for the crop. My attention would not move from the person who spoke into my ear. The object of my love had suddenly revealed herself. My beloved Bharatmata was not a land. It wasn't a set of ideas. It wasn't a particular culture, history or religion. It was the voice of every single Indian. No matter how weak or strong India was the happiness, the fear and the pain hidden deep inside all the voices. To hear India, my own voice, my desires, my ambitions had to fall silent. India would speak to one of her own, but only if one was humble and completely silent. How simple it had turned out to be. I had been looking in the river for that which could only be found in the sea.