The Man Who Moved the Mountain

I had once written about him...

A tribute to this man...he died last week.


Outlook Magazine wrote wrote about him:

"Every morning, for 22 long years, a frail, diminutive man, barefoot and clad in a loin cloth, would trudge two kilometres to a hillock of solid rock and chip away at it with a hammer and chisel. Bemused onlookers thought he had lost his mind, and he was an object of great fun for village urchins. But the women of the village, young and old, admired him, for his was a labour of love."

It took him 22 years - from 1962 to 1984 - to chisel through a massive 360 feet long, 25 feet high and 30 feet wide sheer rock, and to carve out the shortest possible route between his village Gelaur, and the nearest town, Wazirganj.

This was his memorial to his wife, who had died on her way to the Wazirganj hospital, because the road around the rock was 19km long, and took long time to traverse... a memorial

"...that won't ever find a place in hallowed global must-visit lists, but can well be passed down from this generation to the next as a monument of love. A poor man's Taj, literally. Not for its aesthetics, but for the way it symbolises the human spirit's capacity to endure, its indomitability..."

Dasrath Manjhi was the man who moved the mountain!