Lydia Yanel
Toledo (EFE).- Telecommunications engineer Ana Peñalver Blanco traveled to India to take a yoga course and get to know the country, but when she returned to Spain she decided that she had to go back because she needed to get to know it more, and she requested a year’s leave of absence and half.
A decade has passed and now he publishes a book about that learning: “when you come back you need to digest it, it is a country that mobilizes you at all levels”.
Peñalver Blanco (Talavera de la Reina, 1982) has spoken with EFE about his book ‘Through the universe’, edited by Silex, of which he will sign copies at the Madrid Book Fair, the city where he lives, this coming Friday, the 9th of June.
From practicing yoga in Madrid, to Rishkesh (India)
After studying Telecommunications, he went to Peru for three months with Engineering without Borders, which was the first link in his specialty applied to the social.
She is currently the head of Red Social Innovation, a platform of the Spanish Red Cross and the French Red Cross that is dedicated to introducing creative methodologies to the different challenges of humanitarian organizations.
Ana started practicing yoga to find some relaxation and disconnection in a city like Madrid and at the Sivananda school she saw a poster for training in India, a country that had always attracted her.
He went to India, took the course, visited the capital of yoga, Rishkesh, and coincided with ‘Holi’, the festival of colors.
When he returned to Spain, he thought he was missing “many things”, so he took a leave of absence from work and left for a year and a half to visit India, Indonesia and Nepal.
“I had traveled a lot but always in stays of a month, or two at the most, I had not had the opportunity to immerse myself fully in the culture and I had the need to not simply be a passerby in a country or to go sightseeing, but to be able to live. It was a call to get to know him in depth, ”she explained.
The first chapter of his book is precisely titled ‘Holi’ and it starts with that first experience he had in India: “the moment I see that party is when that passion for India awakens in me”, he emphasizes.
Upon returning, in 2013, he needed time to assimilate what he had experienced: “when you return from a country like India you need to digest it, you physically land in Spain but on a personal level that country mobilizes you at all levels, from its structure, its culture”.
Adapt learning to daily life
The experience helped her to “reacquaint” herself and “reconnect”, but she also had to adapt that “intense” learning to her daily life, to her environment.
Two years later her son was born and she dedicated herself to raising Hugo, and despite the “impostor syndrome”, because she is from the field of engineering and had not allowed herself a more creative side -she admits-, in a conversation with the father of a schoolmate of her son’s told her that he had a publishing house and she told him about her book.
The publisher wanted to publish it and in the last year Peñalver Blanco has focused on refining the text and incorporating illustrations.
Some are by Óscar Altamirano (creative and clothing designer), who coincided with her on the trip, and others by Andrea Conde.
The photography is by Carlos Ehlert.
The book -in story format- is a story that takes place in different places, the same as the geographical journey that Peñalver Blanco took between 2012 and 2013, but incorporating the things that she experienced, conversations of people she was with and stories and myths they told you.
“I think it is a story that is very open to different profiles of people: for those who already know India and have contact with yoga and meditation, it will reconnect them because it is a lived experience, a personal encounter that will sound very close to them. ; Those who have visited India will be reminded of smells and colors, and perhaps the person who does not know it but is interested in travel literature or fantastic tales may like it”, the author has indicated.
It is not a book for children, but Peñalver Blanco is already working on a children’s book in the same context, he has made progress.
The Ganges and the Tagus
One of the aspects that Peñalver Blanco highlights from her stay in India is the symbiosis she found between the Ganges and Tagus rivers, because when she was there, with space to be alone and with writing as a “refuge”, I was able to channel many situations.
And this woman from Talavera, who has lived very close to the Tagus River, remembers that looking at the Ganges she felt a simile between the two rivers and the water that flows and that “links” people who are united even though they are in very far places.
The Beatles en India
The title of the book was the idea of the publisher, who found similarities between the trip she had made and the one made between 1967 and 1968 by the Liverpool group with their spiritual teacher, who instructed them in meditation in Rishkesh.
The “smells” and the “music” emanating from Peñalver Blanco’s book quickly led him to “Across the universe”, one of the Beatles’ symbolic themes, which was launched into space by NASA in 2008.
From there came “Through the universe”, the personal experience of a trip through parts of India, Indonesia and Nepal in 2012 and 2013. EFE