Prayaan: A journey to Ladakh and Within (Part 1)

The largest district in the country, in terms of land area. The highest motorable road in the world, Khardung La. Many ancient Buddhist monastries. The Magnetic Hill. All the lakes. Definitely one of the most exotic and slowly off-beat-becoming-happening tourist destinations in the country, if not the world-  Ladakh. Parked right at the top of the country, wrapped on all sides by the Karakoram and Zanskar ranges of mountains, the sky all clear and blue, the snow glistening on the Himalayan peaks, River Indus gracefully meandering through the valleys- it is a dream holiday. An exciting getaway from the hustle-bustle of hot and dry India of the summers. The second two weeks of May, when unbearable heat waves ride across the country, few of us had the chance to ride above it and wander into the cool climes of Ladakh. Not as tourists, as seekers, students and travellers earnest in a query to understand mountain communities and their issues. And what do you know, the ten days from May 6th to 16th showed us how much Ladakh was different and same as the rest of India, sometimes specifically rural India.

"Welcome to Kushok Bakula Rinnpoche airport, Leh. The outside temperature is 6 degrees celsius, we hope you enjoy your stay here." And a motley group of many honeymooners, few monks, large Bengali families and us, the Fellow Designates eagerly rubbed hands and nervously ventured out into the single most modest and spectacularairport in India. The hangar has space just enough for two planes and the hall for the luggage conveyor belt can maximum accommodate 200 standing passengers. So small was the airport. However, the hangar was surrounded by a glorious range of mountains, some of them inscribed with messages from the Border Roads Organisation or the Indian Defence forces. A huge "Don't drink and Drive" screamed in red across the slopes of a barren mountain, just as a billboard signalled that we were in the territory of "The Clue Finders" of the Indian Army. A little beyond, as we got out of the airport, we found "The mountain tamers", walking in files to their barracks. Ladakh, now broken into the two smaller districts of Leh and Kargil, is scarcely populated by its own people and has a denser population of the Indian Army. The Indian Army is one of the pillars of the Ladakhi economy, because it forms the biggest market segment in Ladakh. Most of the Ladakhi farmers, mechanics, merchants, etc have the defense forces as their clients. Throw a stone in Ladakh and you will probably be serving a sentence for hurting a soldier! This is also one of the reasons, why you should not be throwing stones for no good purpose. (Just Kidding) This is also a reason, why almost every household in a Ladakhi village has a member serving in the Army.

A Ladakhi village. I never thought about it really. Ladakh was always a tourist destination, and an ignorant me was quite oblivious to the fact that just like every other district and block in the country Ladakh could be having its own villages. What presumptions! Why it never struck, that there could be rural communities here too, famers, artisans and the whole lot of them going about their daily lives; not only the hotels, lodges, shops and cafes serving the steady stream of tourists who populate the Leh town. Well, I am not completely to be blamed, that was all that the media, advertisements, Government ever portrayed about Leh-Ladakh. All the tourist hot-spots, not once about its farmers or the soldiers or the students! Maybe because the tourism industry, after the army, is the strongest pillar of the economy. Not to say that in the coming days it will only grow stronger, even as the rest of Ladakh's socio-politico-cultural dynamics may take a downward slump, like how Shimla is today. Streets and streets of the Leh town cater to every need of, guess who, ONLY TOURISTS. Handicraft shops (obviously selling their wares at indignant prices!), cafes serving international cuisines, T-Shirt shops, bars, shops renting out Royal Enfields for all the biker-tourists, outlets selling Buddhist trinkets, and ALL the hotels! Throw a stone in Leh and you would probably smash the window of a Hotel. A reason why you shouldn't be throwing stones at buildings. (well, couldn't help this) Anyway, this is just the reason why the youth from almost all the villages that we visited and interacted with, steadily moved to more "favourable" destinations like Leh, Srinagar or even as far as Chandigarh and Delhi.

A Ladakhi village, Umla, tucked in a pocket miles away from the town. All alone in a barren and rocky lowland, amidst towering mountains, the rural communities go about their daily routines.

Again a Ladakhi village. Really do they exist? What do the obscure communities do there? What do the farmers cultivate? What do the artisans produce? How does the government function in these places? Finally, we were getting to the challenges of the mountain rural communities. Our first destination within Prayaan was SECMOL- Students Educaton and Cultural Movement Of Ladakh. It is an institution that now caters to providing residential education for class 10 drop-outs/failures to help them get back to mainstream education. Apart from these fully funded students, there is also a group of college going students who use SECMOL's hostel facilities. SECMOL is a school/gurukul like none another I have seen earlier. Classes are interspersed between "responsibilities" and leisure time. So a bunch of them have the responsibility to milk the cows at 4.30 in the morning, just as another bunch of them look after the solar heating and lighting facilities. So the food that comes from SECMOL's kitchen is chopped, ground, baked or stirred by the students. Why a few of them would have even planted and nurtured the vegetables, in SECMOL's own greenhouse! And then, there is folk music and dance and volleyball and soccer during the leisure hours. In between all of this, the students put in a little of their efforts to learn Math, Science, Urdu or develop their "Conversation" skills. At dinner, with no TV to distract, or no point of gossip, they all listen to the Ladakhi News to understand the current affairs. One student by schedule, stands up and delivers a short two-five minute talk on anything. On one of the nights that we stayed there, Sajad Hussain spoke of archery competitions in his village and about his family in Kargil. He had travelled across the district with the hope of getting into a college sometime in the future. Scarce in number, very poor in content, absent teachers and partly uninterested parents. The less I say about India's deteriorating government schools, the better. There is always private education, one could say. But the cost of it and the number of them in rural areas are inversely proportional. The villages, like in Leh, deserve way better.

'Becky' explaining to us, how SECMOL makes the best of nature's replensihable and free resources- solar cooker, as in this picture.

A student at SECMOL fixing a crack in the roof of the dining hall with mud plaster. Students know it and do-it-all, operating and maintaining SECMOL campus and fields.

SECMOL, the lifestyle, the curriculum, our interactions with the students and the volunteer-teachers there gave us a peek into what might be going on in Ladakh's villages. The building at SECMOL was passively solar heated, meaning that it was constructed with insulating mud, by indigenous methods that could keep the rooms warm even during the severe winters that drove the temperature down to a minus 35 degrees celsius! But, Rebecca Norman, the Chairperson at SECMOL, pointed out that the classrooms would be still warmer than the electrically heated living rooms in Delhi on a December night. These days, however, she said villages and towns are slowly giving up on these local methods and choosing to spend money and precious fuel by adopting "modern" methods of electric heaters and kerosene burners. Just like the toilets, we later noticed. Traditionally, Ladakhi homesteads, like at SECMOL, have dry compost toilets- without the use of water, using sand and dry degradable material to convert human excreta into manure. In the Leh town, where numerous hotels and lodges have mushroomed into being, toilets are the normal water-using types. The water to the toilets and the dirtied drainage water both come and go back into the same ground, hence polluting and depleting the water tables beneath! The cycle of nutrient regeneration is abruptly cut-off with the introduction of modern toilets and water enabled sewers. The students at SECMOL were aware of all of this, much to our surprise and recognised the importance of other traditional techniques like natural farming methods. During the course of our interactions, we got to know, that almost all of them had set their sights on moving to the town. Nobody wanted to continue with agriculture, something many many generations of their elders had been practicing. It was then that the hypocrisy of that judgement dawned upon me.

Kashmir is so geographically poised that winters are cruel and harsh. The only spot of green that we could see in the barren mountain desert of Ladakh were the poplar trees. And it was end-spring and early summer. If at time when everything should be blooming and bursting to life, the only shades of green were from the few poplar trees, maybe an apple tree here and there, what shade was the desert in winters? Absolute white, we were told. For months at an end, from October end to March, the Ladakhis hardly came out of their homes. There would be snow everywhere, the temperature unbearably cold and the soil most uncultivable. All their food rations come through flights, in crates and sacks, in tin and packs. For four months, Ladakh is closed. Roadways don't work, the glacier's all frozen. How do they irrigate their fields, even if they managed to clear the snow and dig the soil up?! Sunshine was the only assured part of the photosynthesis, so few houses have improved greenhouses. These support minimum cultivation of countable crops like potato, peas and lettuce. So all their cropping happens between May to September- a little bit of wheat apart from the earlier mentioned vegetables, apricots and apples. What hope did I see in agriculture? None. What hope did the youth see in agriculture? None.  Nobody in the city strictly follows what their family elders do for a living. Why is it then, that we expect the rural youth to continue farming?! Only an uncomfortable silence follows this question everywhere. Farming is strenuous, city lifestyles seem luxurious and one is not hypocrite less to pay that price.

A typical sight in Ladakh: snowcapped mountains peering down on scarce poplar plantations and villages. The normal clear, blue sky, sometimes, like on this day spotted with cotton-tuft like clouds. 

Well after the 72 hours at SECMOL, talking, working, laughing, eating and playing with all their students, gradually many troubling questions started popping in my head. What about their school was it that really fascinated me? Traditional methods? Shared responsibilities? Community living? A sensitivity towards local problems? Why did not, as is the majority, most urban schools offer such education- educating young minds and not manufacturing products, in the truest sense of the word?! Why did these youth, like rural youth everywhere else want to migrate to the cities? And more importantly, is the State doing something about it? Who should, who must? I was finding it exhilarating just to be in the vast desert of Leh. Such an eye-opener and provocation to think about these mountain communities was only a sign of things to come. A week left, I could still rub my hands, inhale the clear mountain air, look at the majestic snow-capped mountains beyond the poplar trees and think to myself, "Prayaan continues…"