This movie Lost Horizon was shown in Sibu years ago and gave many young girls hopes and dreams of Shangri La. And I wasn't different from them for I have since then harbour that romantic notion of a mystical land where everything would be just perfect.
We were given this book as part of our class reading programme.
Our own Shangri La - The Mulu - beauty through the eyes of a good photographer -(Flickr Photo from MacLoo)
This morning as I was cleaning out one of my bookshelves I caught sight of a very old school reader "Lost Horizon" by British author James Hilton and I was immediately reminded of my dreams of "Shangri-La" which might not be a common metaphor for young people today. But to people of my age Shangri La is a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains.
Nope. I am not throwing out this torn and tattered book. It will have to stay on the shelf.
In the last forty years my journeys have indeed been in search of this mythical Shangri-La . Have I ever found it?
With China opening up and with Tibet becoming a really nice tourist destination we may now visit it after a wait of more than 40 years! May be that" mythical Himalayan utopia—a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world" could be a reachable destination for me. In the novel Lost Horizon, the people who live at Shangri-La are "almost immortal, living years beyond the normal lifespan and only very slowly aging in appearance. The word also evokes the imagery of exoticism of the Orient. The story of Shangri-La is based on the concept of Shambhala, a mystical city in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition".
(Wikipedia)
Now what is your thought today?
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