Campaign on Ice: A working trip to Ladakh

Welcome to Kushok Bakula Rimpoche Airport, Leh. The temperature outside is

-12 degrees Celsius. I had arrived in Ladakh, but a Ladakhi welcome had
already been bestowed on me the previous day at New Delhi airport, where I
was met by a smiling Stanzin Norbu from the 17000ft Foundation (17000ft.org).
I was here at the invitation of Sujata and Sandeep Sahu, founders of 17K, to
help them provide a training-orientation to Heads of some 100 Government
Primary Schools, where they had set up their School Libraries as part of their
programme with rural Ladakhi schools.
It seemed at first sight that there were just two things in Ladakh: ice, and
space. From my bedroom window, on the ground floor, I could gaze upon the
sunlit spires of mountains on the far shore of the Indus. I had been given a list
of clothing material to buy and I got it all from Decathlon here in Bangalore, the
most important part being a Goose-Down-Jacket-with-a-hood. I had thermals
and skiing-gloves and fleece sweaters and fleece caps and a balaclava and
skiing-clothing ( form-fit trousers and shirt ) and a baggy waterproof pair of
trousers. I had been asked to take Diamox tablets for altitude sickness and I felt
no ill effects whatsoever.
I spent the first day
getting used to all the
clothing I was wearing
and took a walk into
Leh. All that rustling of
clothing made me turn
around more than once,
but I was alone. Never
have I seen snow-swept,
sunlit
streets
so
desolate: there was not
a person in sight, it
could have been a ghost
town. I did trudge up
into the market street to
finally see some cars
and people. Breathing was not easy that first day, and it was not just the cold.
The words thin air took a new, precise meaning for me once again.
The training began the next day and I spent two days lecturing in Hindi to the
Heads from Govt Schools there; some of these schools are located at 15,000
feet ! Training began at 1120 (after the first period; it is after all a college for
Teachers) and ended at 4 pm on both days. Most of these HMs are were very
young, the average age must have been 25-30 not more. Schools in Ladakh are
shut from December to February; that is when the Teachers complete most of
their training for the new academic session. The training was held at the DIET
(District Institute of Education Training). The training rooms had hot stoves
called Bukhari-s, three of them, with chimneys leading through the roof. All the

Staff members sat in groups around the bukhari-s and every hour or so, a
woman would come in and add firewood to the stoves. Lunch was a strange
tea-and-bun affair of 20 mins; on both days we hit the town restaurant for
lunch at 430. I had some interesting food, the best being a thukpa, a spaghettiladen soup with veggies; very satisfying "winter" food.
The training was on Libraries: how to set them up, how to grade books, match
these to children and their reading abilities, and how to measure that the
Libraries have impact. We also talked of the various creative activities that we
could conduct in Libraries. At the end of the two days, the Principal of the
Institute Angmo Phuksong gave me something I was not prepared for: she
honoured me with a long silk scarf, called a Khatok, which she formally hung
around my neck. It is a very
Ladakhi way and also a very big
deal, I was told.
I was reading Pankaj Mishra's
An End to Suffering: the Buddha
in the World, an apt book for
this place. The travels and
thoughts of the author mingled
with my impressions, as I saw
Abbaley and Ammaley, our
hosts, sit in the sunshine
working the beads and reciting
the Name four lakh times. There
were shrines with large red and
yellow prayer wheels at street corners; a steep hill in upper Leh seemed to
have a monastery on top, but it seemed beyond me to attempt to get there. I
contented myself with listening and humming Tyagaraja's Manasa Yetulortune
in that lazy morning sunshine and talking in Tamil to the two house cats, who
insisted that I part with some of my puri-s.
It snowed on two days, both times in the morning and continuing through most
of the day. It was not snowing at 6 AM when I awoke, and the garden was bare;
by 630, there was a carpet of white that grew 2 inches as I watched. Across the
Indus, the mountains turned completely white that morning. On both days,
when the sun went down, it very rapidly grew really cold. Folks, the geese know
what they have on. The goose-down jacket kept me completely comfortable, as
did the thermal leg-wear. My shoes however, did not prevent my toes from
freezing, despite the double layer of woollen socks that I was wearing !
Blankets in the room were two very heavy razai-s; plus a sweater, a head cap
and the room heater was on. After a while, I either lost my head completely or I
got used to the cold perhaps or the thukpa was working, for I was walking
around barefoot in the room and to the tiled loo and even washing my feet
each time with cold water. Water was delivered to the room; two buckets of icecold water and a half-bucket of hot. Brushing, shaving and laving myself with
the cold water was, well, fun. On the last day, the bucket had pieces of ice
floating in it too!
The day before I left, we were free, so we drove 30 kms to Nimmu, west along
the Leh-Kargil highway. Stupendous scenery with vast open fields and slopes

and towering red-brown mountains covered generously with snow. Nimmu has
a Bihari-run shop that sells deadly samosas but sadly, the joint was closed that
day. While we waited for our friend Dawa to catch up with his friends here, we
wandered across the street, the highway that leads to Kargil in the west. An
Army truck with snow chains over its wheels was parked there, the driver
looking like a Telugu man for all I could tell. Across the street, a tiny and
brilliantly coloured J & K Transport bus was parked and ready to go, the driver
insistently honking to coax the reluctant passengers out of the tea-shop. Must
have been just the thin air, but I thought I saw Mithun Chakraborty drape a
blanket over Anita Raj's shoulders as they both climbed up and sat on the
freezing roof-top. Koi shaque? The bus disappeared in a flurry of snow and I
hummed Zeehaale Muskin mukon baranjhish, but my voice would just not come
out in the cold. My nose was also hurting with an insistent bleeding, a common
affliction for me when I visit cold places.
A short drive and here we were at Sangam: the Indus, flowing from the SouthEast, meeting the Zanskar, coming in from South-West. The already broad
Indus was almost completely frozen over but for two 20-feet wide streams
separated by icy islands; the Zanskar was laden with pieces of ice, and even
the water had a different colour! Paani da, rang vekh ke, Akhiyan jo hanjhu rul
de....certainly the sparkling sunlight, the champagne air, the untouched snow
and the immense peaks around me had my eyes streaming. I walked as far out
on the ice as I could; I swept away the inches of snow to see the frozen iceglass water of the Indus. And took a GPS reading that put me dead in the
middle of the Indus ( 34.165305N, 77.332089E ). Lovely!
Ladakhi girls are good-looking. Period. And the children are adorable! As I
departed, my host's little grand-daughter culled some apples from her rosy
Kashmiri cheeks and offered them to me as a parting gift. Abbaley gave me a
hug and Ammaley, a handshake.
I know that I will go back there again, to be once again part of the Campaign on
Ice.