In 2012, a feature documentary called The Highest Pass introduced audiences in the United States to Anand Mehrotra, the Rishikesh-born founder of Sattva Yoga Academy, in an unusual setting: not a studio or ashram hall but the saddle of a Royal Enfield motorcycle, climbing toward some of the highest roads in the Himalayas. Eight years later, a documentary series, The Road to Dharma, returned to the same format with a new group of riders. Together, the two productions are a public record of how he teaches when the classroom is taken away.
The Highest Pass: A Journey with a Premise
The Highest Pass was directed by Jon Fitzgerald, a co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival. It opened in Los Angeles in April 2012, with screenings at Laemmle theatres that included question-and-answer sessions with Mehrotra. According to the film’s synopsis, the journey ran 21 days and climbed to as high as 18,000 feet. Cornell’s alumni magazine describes the film as award-winning, a description the Academy’s own biography of Mehrotra also uses, and reports that the expedition began as Mehrotra’s own idea: a motorcycle trip to the highest passes of Ladakh, a region whose name translates as “land of passes”. The group invited others to join and decided to document the trip.
The film’s central tension, as its synopsis describes it, comes from a prediction: that Mehrotra’s birth chart foretold his death in an accident at the age of 27, the age he was when the group set out. The ride becomes a way of confronting that fear, and the synopsis frames the underlying question as whether truly living is worth dying for. A line the film’s publicity attributes to Mehrotra captures the logic: “Only the one who dies, truly lives.” Whether or not a viewer accepts the idea of a Vedic prophecy, the story works on a simpler level: a teacher who talks about fear and aliveness chose to test those ideas where fear is not abstract.
Teaching Under Pressure
Cornell’s account and the film’s own description point to the conditions the group faced: low oxygen, altitude sickness, river-flooded roads, icy edges, loaded trucks, and snow and slush that blocked the road at 16,000 feet before the group reached its highest point, above 18,000 feet. In those conditions the film follows the riders’ conversations with Mehrotra about fear, risk and purpose, rather than a staged lesson. For a teacher whose Academy describes Sattva Yoga as “a profound journey of personal evolution”, the logic of the expedition is consistent: fear is easier to examine when it is real, and presence is easier to define when it is tested.
The Road to Dharma: A Second Journey
Where the first film followed a single push toward a high road, The Road to Dharma, released in 2020, unfolds as a ten-episode series, with episodes of roughly 28 to 33 minutes, according to its Prime Video listing. The listing describes a group of riders on a Himalayan adventure “confronting fears and discovering personal freedom”, travelling to four sacred Himalayan peaks and exploring personal transformation, relationships and spiritual wisdom, with Mehrotra as the teacher at the centre.
Adventure Motorcycle magazine’s review gave the series four stars out of five, describing a group of eight riders with varying levels of motorcycle experience and observing that it is about personal transformation more than motorcycling. Its takeaway was that the more people step out of their comfort zones, the more they are forced to face in life, which is also the premise Mehrotra’s own teaching sets out.
Peak Experiences, in His Own Framing
Mehrotra’s official biography describes the Himalayan motorcycle journeys he leads as “peak experiences” that invite participants to break the limitations of the mind and experience themselves as fully present, and says he enjoys leading people on them. His own website describes them as “sacred rites of passage, spiritual intensives that blend adventure, service, and inner transformation”, and attributes to him the line: “The ultimate pilgrimage is always inward.” The journeys sit alongside, rather than replace, the Academy’s classroom teaching; both ask the same question about what it means to be present when circumstances cannot be controlled.
What Viewers Should Know
Neither production is a documentary of the Sattva curriculum. Viewers looking for the structure of Sattva Yoga — kriya, pranayama and meditation within the Himalayan Yog-Vedantic tradition — will find it in the Academy’s courses, which Republic World’s look at the Academy’s teacher training describes in detail. What the films add is character: a teacher who put his own teaching to a physical test, in public, first in his late twenties and again, eight years later, with a new group of riders.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Highest Pass?
The Highest Pass is a 2012 documentary about a motorcycle journey through the Indian Himalayas to some of the highest roads in the world, led by Anand Mehrotra and directed by Jon Fitzgerald.
What is The Road to Dharma?
The Road to Dharma is a 2020 documentary series, in ten episodes, following a group of riders on a Himalayan motorcycle journey to four sacred peaks, led by Anand Mehrotra. It explores fear, personal freedom and transformation.
Where can I watch The Road to Dharma?
The series is listed on Prime Video, and Adventure Motorcycle’s review notes availability on iTunes, Vimeo, YouTube and Google Play. Availability varies by region and should be checked before viewing.
Does Anand Mehrotra still lead motorcycle journeys in the Himalayas?
His Academy biography describes him as enjoying leading people on motorcycle journeys into the Himalayas, which it calls peak experiences. Current dates and availability should be confirmed with Sattva Yoga Academy.
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