Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

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.

…from yet another memorable trip to Ladakh. I am sure the mountains will haunt me in my dreams for days to come.

Quite literally.

What would become of our civilization if suddenly, electricity, gunpowder, gasoline and steam engines stopped working? Dies The Fire imagines such a world and forces you to think about how dependent we are today on things that were unimaginable just a few hundred years ago.

Sadly the book runs out of things to say around the half way mark. You are thus forced to endure such minutiae as what sort of food the American protagonists fantasize about in a world where farming the old-fashioned way is the only way to put bread on your table. Then there are detailed descriptions of the Celtic Wiccan rituals; and yes, the food consumed there. Repetitive battle scenes where finer points of using longbows, broadswords, bucklers, targes and other medieval weaponry are illuminated all while explaining how difficult it is to fight when operating under the medieval gear of chain mails, hauberks, visors, vambraces and other assorted wearables.

This seems to be a standard strategy of American fantasy authors for beefing up their works to the level of thickness that is deemed respectable for books of this genre. Take notes from history books and encyclopedias and somehow weave the details into the story. I wouldn’t mind it so much if the story kept moving or if I were living on Venus – for a day of mine there would last 200 Earth days. I am probably being harsh here. But then what do you expect from someone who is ploughing through the 10th book of the Jordan’s Wheel of Time series?

I’ll leave you to reflect on this gem here:

Quite often there was something useful in places like that. Not food, of course, but aspirin, sterile bandages, condoms, toilet paper – newspaper left stains, they’d discovered, and twists of grass could leave you itching for days.

Frankly, in a post apocalyptic world, I would have taken to washing (or since we are talking high fantasy here – laving) by now.

This passage I came across recently in Yeats Is Dead, struck a chord:

“I think books are wonderful”, the woman said, evidently bent on conversation. “If they had never been invented and somebody thought of them now, they would be the greatest thing ever. I can’t think of anything that has given so much happiness to humanity. Or could do, except maybe a pill to make us live longer. Books are so simple. No batteries, no wires, no earphones. Absolutely silent, don’t interfere with anything else, you can take them anywhere with you, into bed, into the bath. And they can’t be broken. You can lie on them, sit on them, prop the door or the window sash open with them and you still can’t damage them.”

Add the ability to buy them second hand, and this is precisely why I think books will win. Nothing comes remotely close to the simplicity of a book.