Road to Leh
Stories of the people and places along India’s northwestern route from New Delhi to the mountain city of Leh.
Written by
tim
October 7, 2008
This post has been a long time coming. I’m not quite sure why it has been so hard to get out. Maybe it’s been that I’ve been talking to so many people about the trip that when I’ve been sitting down to write lately, it’s been the last thing on my mind. Today, though, marks the end of my last physical link to the trip, so I figured that it would be a good day to also end this blog. As of this morning, I’ve finished off the malaria pills that I needed to take for an extra five weeks after I got back (not because I have malaria - it’s just what you have ot do to make sure it isn’t still floating around with you).
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tim
September 22, 2008
Three weeks in from the trip, and there is still a lot on my mind. Being away for just a month meant that the culture shock of returning to Montreal hasn’t been as intense as many of the other people I’ve spoken to who have gone longer. And while my first week back felt difficult - jet lag, the emptiness of Montreal’s streets compared to Delhi, getting back to a thinking more about work than simply where I would like to go today - since I’ve settled back in it seems as if things have gotten easier…
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tim
September 17, 2008
This is a fairly long post, but one I have been working on for a while. It’s based on a two hour discussion Roddy and I had with Lozeng (his name is changed to protect his and his family’s identity in case of Chinese reprisal), a Tibetan exile and activist in McLeod Ganj.
We met up with Lozeng at the offices of the International Campaign for Tibet, where he spends his days monitoring media coverage of Tibet, communicating with Tibetans and sending stories to the Western media in the hopes of greater coverage. The ICT’s office is modest, located down a flight a stairs leading off of Jogibara road in the small town of McLeod Ganj. We introduced ourselves, and then made a quick change of location – the office doubles as an internet café and we needed somewhere a bit quieter to speak. Once settled in at the Mount View restaurant, Lozeng sat and talked with us for two hours about how he ended up in McLeod after growing up in Tibet and what the campaign for the region’s autonomy and perhaps eventual independence meant for him and for his fellow Tibetans.
Lozeng has worked at the ICT for over five years now, following media coverage of Tibet, sending media advisories to Western outlets and verifying stories coming out of China-occupied Tibet – whether from Tibetans themselves or from the Chinese government. The last few months had been particularly difficult. On March 10th, 2008, protests erupted in Lhasa, marking the day when China invaded, forced the Dalai Lama into exile and essentially banned Buddhism – no religion was meant to come before the individual’s belief in the state and the Communist Party. Lozeng, and the rest of the Tibetan community in McLeod, were following the situation around the clock.
“People were up 24 hours. No one slept,” he says.
It was particularly difficult for those like Lozeng who still had family living in Tibet; for the 30-year-old Lozeng, it’s his parents who are still in China. He’s only seen his mother once in the ten years since he left Tibet.
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tim
September 10, 2008
Journalist Edward Luce is tough to pin down. A writer for the venerable bastion of business news, the Financial Times, the economy is never far from the tip of his pen. But it is often couched among his clear and obviously heartfelt concern over improving living conditions for the economically disadvantaged and fighting against government corruption. If he were in Canada and I were a betting man, I’d put down twenty dollars that he would have voted for Joe Clark twice and would probably be holding his nose over voting for Harper - the type of conservative who proudly put the progressive in front of his name.
Admittedly I’ve garnered this opinion off of one book and a few news paper articles, but “In Spite of the Gods”, Luce’s excellent look at contemporary India, tells nearly as much about how he sees Indian society as it does about Indian society itself. Which isn’t a negative - getting a feeling for where a writer is coming from and understanding his or her own beliefs in the process of reading their words, to me at least, is an incredibly satisfying endeavour.
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tim
September 8, 2008
Ask anyone who knows me, and they’ll tell you I don’t really read books. I’m a news junkie, always with a magazine or newspaper on hand, and while I’ll usually have a book on the go, it’s usually the same book for quite a few months.
That’s why I amazed myself getting through three-and-a-half-books while on our trip. I think part of it was the free time (especially on rainy days), but also the fact that they spoke to what I was seeing around me.
The first two I want to write about both happen to be fiction (the other one-and-a-half are non-fiction, and I’ll leave for another post). I picked up both based more on reputation than knowing what either was about, but in the end they dealt with very similar themes.
One is Aravind Adiga’s excellent 2008 debut novel, “The White Tiger”; the other, Arundhati Roy’s incredible and haunting 1997 work “The God of Small Things”. (Coincidentally, both are also linked by the Man Booker Prize, the latter having won in 1997, the other making it to this year’s long-list, with the short-list set to be announced tomorrow).
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tim
September 6, 2008
One of my favourite stops on our trip was the Jantar Mantar in Jaipur, Rajasthan. One of five located across North-Western India, the Jantar Mantars were constructed by Maharaja Jai Singh II, the ruler of Amber (modern Jaipur) in the mid-1700s.
Jantar means instrument and mantar (from mantra) means formula, or calculation. Jantar Mantar, then, literally means instruments of calculation. What did these installations calculate? As much about the stars, sun and time as they could. Jai Singh had a deep love for both science and astrology, and set about designing instruments that could measure longitude and latitude, track constellations and the time of day (down to the minute), and mark off both the ascending and ascending of the astrological calendar throughout the year.
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tim
September 4, 2008
A Kashmiri man injured by police at a protest in Srinagar, in Kashmir. Photo by Kazu Ahmed (via Flickr)
Getting to Leh is finally getting a little easier again. As we were leaving it seemed like the road from Manali, which had only been open intermittently throughout the month, was about to be re-opened permanently. Now, it seems that the political crisis in Jammu & Kashmir may be nearing an end as well, which would re-open the route through the sate’s summer capital of Srinangar (in the northern, Kashmiri part of the state).
A quick recap: Every summer, thousands of Hindu pilgrims visit the holy caves of Amarnath. To accommodate the pilgrims, makeshift lodgings and other facilities are established for their use. This year, the J&K state government allotted land near the caves to the Shri Amarnath Sangharsh Samiti (the Amarnath Shrine Board - SASS), which sparked protests among Kashmir’s Muslim majority, fearing the temporary pilgrims would become permanent residents, thereby shifting the area’s demographics. After a month of protests, on July 1 the state government rescinded the allotment of land.
Not surprisingly this led to major Hindu protests (not just in Hindu-majority Jammu, but across the country) calling for the land to be returned. These protests, led in large part by Hindu nationalists, including India’s second largest political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), contained a large amount of anti-Kashmiri Muslim invective and included an economic blockade of the area, meaning the Kashmiri farmers’s crops destined to market began to rot.
The result was renewed Muslim protests, and not just about the land at Amarnath. The Hindu nationalist response rekindled the Kashmir secessionist movement, which saw in the BJP and other groups’ responses as a complete disregard for the Kashmiri population. So for the past two months, the entire state has seen both sides protesting, becoming much more vitriolic in the last few weeks. The result has been 35 civilian deaths (at the hands of government law enforcement) and a state-wide curfew. Most recently, the government began arresting ‘azbadi’ (litteraly, “free”) movement leaders.
So where do things stand now?
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tim
September 2, 2008
In an earlier post, I mentioned that half of all televisions in India tuned into the national parliamentary cable station when it seemed that the government was about to lose a confidence vote, leading to new elections and the scrapping of a nuclear fuel deal with the United States. That’s as if half of Canadians tuned into C-PAC the last time the Canadian government was about to fall. It’s pretty clear that people in India pay attention to their new and politics. Which seems to be good for their newspapers.
While India is still battling against a 39% illiteracy rate, the country’s print news industry seems to be thriving, with newspaper circulation growing by 11.22% in 2007. There are over 1,800 daily publications in the country, which leads the world in number of dailies published. This includes the single largest circulating English-language daily in the world, the Times of India. Even with a circulation of 2.4 million (in 2005) and a readership of 6,781,000 (as of 2007), it still doesn’t break into the top 10 dailies in the country, which are all Hindi language publications (number one is Dainik Jagran with a readership of 17,100,000).
This of course put us at a disadvantage when it came to the news, but luckily there were still at least five, national-scope English language dailies we could choose from.
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tim
August 29, 2008
…began in Manali, drove for 16 hours to Delhi, flew 7 hours to Helsinki, waited in the Helsinki airport for 8 hrs, flew 8 hrs to New York, and took a 9 hour bus ride back to Montreal.
We’re now back in home sweet Montreal, but with lots of last thoughts flowing through our heads. The 72 hours straight of transit meant I haven’t been able to post the last few days, but more is on the way, including an interview on Tibetan activism, thoughts on Indian media, and a few other fleeting thoughts and inner speculations.
Between our 16 hour bus ride from Manali and our flight out of Delhi, we had a day to kill (got into town at 8am and only had a flight a 1am that night…). We decided to take advantage of our time and visit the Indian Parliament buildings.
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tim
August 24, 2008
Tonight is our last in Manali, a town in the Kullu Valley in the northwestern province of Himachal Pradesh. In the end we have covered the entire route we would have, minus actually making it to Leh. Manali is an interesting place in it’s own right, though.
Throughout the trip I’ve been able to pick up bits and pieces of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs. One of the most intriguing things has been how often myths and stories cross over with Christianity and other religions. The story of Manali is a good example:
The name Manali means ‘abode of Manu’, a fabled lawgiver. As the story goes, Manu was warned by a fish that a great flood was coming. He was instructed to build an ark, and on it place two of every animal and the seeds of every plant. When the flood came, the Earth was submerged, and the fish led Manu to a mountain in the Himalayas, where he was able to safely disembark. Manu was the only human left though and became lonely. After offering up a scrifice to the gods, they created a wife for him, and from the Kullu valley they re-populated the planet. A temple dedicated to Manu still stands in Old Manali.
It isn’t clear how many people who visit know of these ancient roots, though.
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