Touch The Sky With Glory is not a tagline we workshopped. It is the motto of the Indian Air Force, and it is older than that by a very long way.
The line is taken from the eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, the discourse given by Lord Krishna to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra during the great war of the Mahabharata. Krishna is showing Arjuna his supreme divine form, and that form reaches the sky with glory, overwhelming Arjuna and emptying him of self-control.
नभ:स्पृशं दीप्तमनेकवर्णं व्यात्ताननं दीप्तविशालनेत्रम् ।
दृष्ट्वा हि त्वां प्रव्यथितान्तरात्मा धृतिं न विन्दामि शमं च विष्णो ।।
Lord, seeing your form touching the sky with glory, effulgent, multi-coloured, its mouth wide open and possessing large flaming eyes, I, with my innermost self frightened, have lost self-control and find no peace.
The Indian Air Force took the phrase to describe overwhelming an adversary through the application of air power. We took it for a quieter reason, and we want to be clear that we claim no affiliation with them.
Anyone who has climbed out of a valley in strong lift and looked down at the ground falling away knows the feeling the verse is describing. Not triumph. Something closer to being frightened and unable to look away. Paragliding is one of the few things left that puts an ordinary person in that position, with nothing between them and the sky but a wing they packed themselves.
That is what the name is for. Not conquering anything. Being small in a very large place, on purpose, and coming home changed by it.
Two things, and they hold each other up.
A record of the sport in the words of the people making it. Ninety three conversations with designers, test pilots, instructors, record holders and the people who write the rules, published in full with transcripts so anyone can read them, search them and quote them accurately. Free, without a paywall, and without a login.
Trips for pilots who want to fly somewhere that asks something of them. Small groups, flown by people who know the sites, with the difficult parts described honestly before anyone books rather than discovered on arrival.
Paragliding kills people. Not often, and not randomly, but it does, and a media brand that talks only about the good days is lying by omission. So we publish the uncomfortable conversations too: the accident analyses, the arguments about certification, the people saying the sport is getting less safe and explaining why they think so.
If you want to know what we actually believe, it is this. Better information makes better pilots, better pilots come home, and that matters more than whether an episode is comfortable to listen to.
Email aninder@paraglidingatlas.com, or start with the episode library. Ninety three conversations is a lot of ground; the knowledge base sorts them by subject.