Preserving Them All – One Keystroke At A Time

When I drew the curtains off our ground-floor room’s windows I saw a sea of white. My first reaction was that I had been struck by the opposite of blindness; though once I put on my glasses it became evident that I was merely looking at what was left from last night’s heavy snowfall. We swaddled ourselves in whatever clothes lay at hand, grabbed our cameras and scrambled out of our room. Having never been exposed to such vast quantities of snow, we were worried that it would all vanish before we had had our fun.

Snow-covered mountainous landscapes evoke images of regal, grand beasts such as snow foxes, polar bears and snow leopards in one’s mind. A confused cow is all we had to be content with.

Everyone at our guest house was busy scraping and shoveling the snow away. In fact, practically every household in Leh had someone on their house’s roof clearing the snow away. It was almost like Sakranti in Gujarat or Independece Day in Delhi minus the kites.

The snowfall had caused the weather to clear up. The harsh Leh sun felt very welcome. Stray dogs had by now overcome their surprise at the sudden change in their landscape and had found themselves warm, dry, sunny patches of road to sleep on.

We had our brunch at a café near our guesthouse while looking at tiny streams of water from the melting snow dripping down the café’s ledge. We spent most of the day wandering purposelessly in the market.

Sidewalks that were shaded, had patches of snow that were now turning into slippery ice. In other places snow and dirt’s unholy matrimony was already begetting mud. By the time we were back (late in the afternoon), the cows had trundled back home and the landscape had drunk all the snow and turned ochre again.

As much as we had enjoyed the snow, we slept with a silent prayer for better weather the next day.

38ºC. At 10:30 PM. The arrival terminal is always overcrowded at night. The conveyor belts are too close to each other and the space between them always cramped with big trolleys that were definitely not meant for this airport. You must travel lock, stock and barrel to this city must be the unwritten diktat somewhere. The luggage always arrives on one of the two conveyor belts adjacent to the one that the airlines actually announces. One out of 3 taps in the loo don’t work. The queue for taxi at the private taxi counter moves at a glacial pace. Poor souls looking to commute to the satellite towns don’t have any other choice. The pre-paid taxi queues at the government provided counters move fast but once you are outside with your receipt, the cabs don’t come. If they do, they refuse to board you; numbered bays not withstanding. Of course, it’s all supposed to give an impression of order without actually being orderly. I am completely in awe of flying. That we can cover distances that took months to traverse in mere hours is indeed fantastic. It is the ordeal that I must go through every time I get down the plane at this city is what gets my entire goat pen.

Within minutes of driving from Leh you find yourself alone. Initially you encounter a lot of army bases of varying sizes but soon the only reminder of the army’s presence is the near-perfect road that you are driving on. Shortly we were moving along the Indus river:

A visit to Alchi was the only thing on our itinerary. That gave us a lot of time to enjoy our journey. We drove down to the bank of a river on the way and collected colorful round pebbles. Some of them had been soaking the morning sun and were pleasantly warm to hold in our frigid hands while those that had languished in the shade were hail-cold.

The moment we passed the ruins of the 11th century Basgo monastery we found ourselves stuck in a traffic jam. Traffic jams in the mountains are not as much traffic jams as they are stalemates that can linger from 30 minutes to 3 hours. We almost look forward to them because they allow us to step out of the car, stretch our legs, and even go for a short stroll. This time our car happened to stop at a small village courtyard that had a cluster of apricot trees in full bloom. Between admiring and clicking those delicate flowers we forgot that we were on moments borrowed from our main journey and had to run to our car as the traffic started moving.

We were visiting Alchi on a friend’s recommendation who had mentioned the spectacular Apricot blossoms at the monastery complex. We were about two weeks too late. Most trees there had shed their flowers. But it took hardly any imagination to deduce how beautiful it must have have been.

While looking for our way out of the monastery, we ran into an old monk who insisted that we were going around the monastery in an anti-clockwise direction. He took us under his wing and made us do three clockwise rounds of the monastery.

On emerging out of the monastery, we were eager to walk in a straight line and told our driver to pick us down the road after a few minutes. It was 1 in the afternoon and the local school had just finished. Kids returning from school were enthusiastic about having their pictures taken. The brother in this brother-sister duo posed for me while the sister posed for the wife:

By this time, breakfast was already a distant memory. None of the restaurants we had seen during our visit last year had opened yet. We decided to continue our journey back to Leh and keep our eyes peeled for restaurants on the way. As we got closer to Leh the weather had turned a little ominous. Eerie light illuminated distant mountains. Barely-existent flakes of snow occasionally swirled down from fat grey clouds overhead.

On reaching Leh we bolstered oursleves with hot food and a short nap. In the evening I went to our hotel’s roof-top restaurant for a cup of hot ginger-honey tea. The mountains of the Stok range visible from here, were cloaked in clouds and mist. But what I’ll always remember this evening by, is this picture of a small monastery atop a hill aglow in the dying sunset against a dark, grey sky.

While I knew that Japan was driven to such desperation during World War II that they resorted to Kamikaze, I had no idea that a similar suicide unit existed for navy as well. The unit was called ‘Kai Ten’ and basically used torpedos modified to accomodate human ‘drivers’ who would ram them into the enemy ship.

I came across a fictional autobiographical account of a Kai Ten ‘driver’ in David Mitchell’s Number 9 Dream. Each paragraph of that account sent a chill down my spine. And to think that someone lived through it…

Wikipedia has more if you have the stomach for it.

As an aside, the Kanji for Kai Ten (the phrase roughly means ‘the turn toward heaven’) is 回天. While I am not sure I can explain 回, it’s quite easy to logically explain the origin of 天. The Kanji for big (huge, enormous) is 大. It is simplification of drawing of a man with his arms outstretched. (How big? This “大” Big). Add a bar or ‘roof’ on top of it and you get Kanji for ‘big-roof’ or (figuratively speaking) sky though it’s used more in the sense of ‘heaven’.

I don’t know where I am with my phone’s camera. It’s 5 MP – which is a good deal more than my first point and shoot (and I used to be *quite* happy with that once). But now I am too used to a real view-finder and a real (satisfying) shutter release sound to be able to compose properly with this one. We’ll see how it goes in the coming days.

I imagine a mirror between two posters that turns reflections into sketches.

Stick no bills.

I recently got an Android phone. One of the apps that I enjoy playing with on it is ‘Google Goggles’. You take a photo with the phone’s camera and then Google Goggles fires a search to get you more information about the thing you just clicked. It’s often eerily accurate.

Facebook allows your photos to be tagged by others. It’s only a matter of time that they plug in face recognition. iPhoto does it, Picassa does it, I see no reason why Facebook won’t (if it doesn’t already).

So you take a photo, use something like Google Goggles for Facebook, and voilá you have (depending on the user’s privacy settings) details of the person you clicked!

It isn’t called Facebook for nothing.

The ICC T20 Women’s World Cup officially kicks off tomorrow. The problem is – and I risk sounding politically incorrect here – no one cares. I’ve not met a single woman who knows or cares about the women’s cricket teams. It might be flimsy to base my assumption on that small anecdotal sample, but given that I don’t see the media scamper for rights to women’s cricket, surely there cannot be much interest? I am not saying that cricket should be a male bastion but simply pointing out that a separate tournament with just gender as the differentiator cannot be sustained. What we probably need then is tennis’ equivalent of mixed-doubles?

We woke up early, feeling remarkably fresh and rested. Our breakfast on arriving at Leh had been at the guest house owner’s cozy little drawing room. This morning we decided to give those legs a little exercise and ventured out looking for a breakfast place. We settled for a small restaurant called Gesmo that had begun operating just 2 weeks ago. Their menu had practically every major cuisine, and; quite remarkably for a setup their size, they even ran a small bakery that churned out delicious cookies, cakes, rolls and croissants.

Somehow during our visit to Ladakh last year, we had missed out Shanti Stupa (longish story involving tired lungs and closed food shops during a ‘bandh day’ so we’ll leave that out for now) and thats where we immediately trooped to after breakfast. After walking through lanes surrounded with closed shops and deserted neighborhoods we found ourselves staring at the face of the hill atop which the Shanti Stupa is. You can either take – as wikipedia informs me – “a series of 500 steep steps” or take a road that snakes around the hill and drops you within a few yards of an uphill walk to the Stupa. Gesmo must’ve put somthing in our breakfast, because against our usually sound judgement, we decided to go up the steps.

After what seemed like an eternity, the Shanti Stupa began to loom before our eyes. While the pristine, white stupa impresses you, the surroundings of the stupa leave you spellbound. The snow-covered mountains all around the stupa, the low-hanging clouds playing with sun to create an everchanging patchwork of shade and light far in the valley below, make you wonder if you are standing at the portal of Heaven.

On our way back we chose the easy walk down the road over a shorter but a little more strenous climb down the stairs; though at this stage we would have ideally preferred to turn into a ball and simply tumble down the hill. The afternoon was cold and cloudy and streets as deserted as they had been during our walk to the Stupa.

Hot food and a short nap are the best cures for cold, weary bodies. Though your snug blanket seems like the best place in the world to be in, a sense of guilt at frittering away your time in your room while you could be out gawking at mountains, draws you out again. This time we hit the main market to buy a few knick-knacks and somehow found ourselves chatting with this old man selling all things Apricot.

We purchased a packet of dried Apricots from him and tried bargaining with him in English.

100 Rs
That’s too much – 80 Rs?

Kya? Kitna? Urdu main boliye.
What? How much? Say that in Urdu please

Assi Rupay
Eighty Rs

Assi? Bahut kam hai.
Eighty? That’s too little

Phir Nabbe?
Ninty then?

Chailye Nabbe de dijiye
Alright, ninty will do then!

It then occured to me that what was Hindi to me, was Urdu to him. The two languages are not as far apart as sometimes their scripts and the tensions between India and Pakistan make them out to be. I was reminded of this essay that a friend had forwarded a long time ago. Or perhaps it was this essay shaping my thoughts here.

Also, notice that we suck at this bargaining thingy – not that we wanted to drive a hard bargain with an old man trying to make ends meet.

We had remembered a small café from our last visit that sells ‘proper’ coffee. Coffee in Leh usually comes in two varieties – bad and very bad. The main recipe in both cases involves powdered Nescafé dunked in fat-rich milk saturated with sugar. The best you can do is ask for sugar to be excluded, but they’d still insist on calling it a cappuccino. This little café offers no cappuccinos, lattes or espressos, but it does serve very good (and fresh) French press coffee. With very little looking around we found it again (its name eludes me now, but i’ll try and find out. Update: It’s called ‘Cafeteria’. Doh!) The terrace of the café offers a beautiful, panoramic view of the Leh Palace and the mountains surrounding it. It was still too cold for people to be sipping their French press coffee at the terrace so we settled for the next best thing – the second floor with windows wide enough for me to stick my camera out and take some pictures in the fast fading light.

Within days of returning from our last visit to Ladakh, I had started keeping an eye on the temperatures there. The moment the maximum temperatures in Leh began to touch double digits, we decided to pack our bags for a quick vacation. The tourist season in Ladakh begins with the opening of the roads from Manali to Leh – which usually happens around the 3rd week of May. The weather in April is too cold; and as we discovered, too mercurial, to visit Ladakh. On the other hand, the town is a lot less crowded. And although only a handful of shops are open, it’s easy to find restaurants serving good, multi-cuisine food.

We flew to Leh from Delhi after spending a day there. Now Delhi at this time of the year is nothing short of a blast furnace. While flying from Delhi airport during summers I had seen travelers to Jammu holding thick jackets, pullovers, mittens and mufflers, and shuddered at the thought of having to even touch all the winter wear in the sweltering Delhi heat. This time I wasn’t a distant spectator but an active hoarder of all wintery clothes. Ironically, for someone visiting Leh in non-peak season, we couldn’t get window seats – thanks to a large contingent of tourists on our flight. As we flew closer to Leh, from the furtive glances at the window from my aisle seat I could vaguley make out tall snow covered mountains. When we landed, the temperature outside was 4ºC. The mountains surrounding the runway, the azure sky with patches of drifting clouds and an ineffective but bright sun made for a mesmerizing view. We stood there soaking in the scenery while buses after buses loaded the passengers and took them to the terminal barely a few meters away from the runway. The bus ride is a security measure (the airport is used by the Indian Air Force so you wouldn’t want passengers straggling away) and a convenience (walking uphill to the terminal after landing in the thin, oxygen deficient altitude of 11,000+ ft can take a herculian effort).

We were at the same guesthouse as our last visit. The garden where I’d spent considerable time clicking flowers during our last visit, was nothing but a bare, barren patch. It had been readied and seeded for summers but at the moment nothing grew here. The only exception was a lone, young, apricot tree at the entrance which was decked with delicate, pinkish-white flowers.

The rooftop restaurant at the guesthouse was closed. The loos upstairs hadn’t been assigned a gender yet.

The calendar outside the restaurant kitchen was stuck on October’09 – even time freezes in Ladakh once it starts snowing. In my mind this restaurant’s utility lies more in the views of the Stok range that it offers than the food. The former was still being served fresh. Though again, it was a very different view from our last visit. The range was covered in snow, and menacing clouds obscured the tallest of peaks.

Even people born and brought up in Ladakh take it easy when they return from the plains. Half a day of rest is mandatory while anything between 24-36 hrs is recommended for occasional visitors. Consequences of hurrying things up could be anywhere from headache, nausea, fever to even loss of consciousness. That said, we knew from our trip in August that even after those hours spent resting, you never quite acclimitize. It takes much longer than the 5 nights we were to spend here for the body to fully get used to such high altitudes. We slept through most of our first day.

Temperatures in Leh dip quite sharply after sunset. Not even two layers of heavy blankets would stop us from shivering. Since electricity supply in these parts is not very reliable, the guest house didn’t provide any electrical heating. Though they readily made available this LPG powered, industrial-strength room heater (aptly called Superheat).

And on cue there was a power cut. As we sat huddled in the ruddy glow of this somewhat noisey and very picturesque heater, it was not hard to wonder if we had done the right thing by visiting Leh in April.

p.s. The heater was turned off after a mere 20 minutes of usage. The huge LPG cylinder that powered this contraption scared us a little. And given the general oxygen deficiency we didn’t want something else competing with us in the same room.