At sundown a few evenings ago, I saw what I thought were two bees around my flower pots. They were still there an hour later. On taking a closer look I realised there were moths, though quite different from the hawk moth that I was familiar with. I took the camera out in time to get a few shots before nightfall. It wasn’t easy as these moths were flitting around like they couldn’t make up their minds; barely hovering over a flower for a second or so. Peter Smetacek, a lepidopterist-friend, helped me id the moths. Peter is one of India’s experts when it comes to butterflies and moths and has got a whole lot of us “infected” as he says, with his passion for the flutterby.
The Hippotion Celerio is also called the Vine hawk moth or Silver striped Hawk moth. With summer flowers blooming, I hope I get to see more of the Sphingidae family.
I saw a blind Acupuncturist. When I made my appointment I wasn’t sure if it was actual pain that motivated me or plain old curiosity that made me call. I guess it was a bit of both. I have never visited an Acupuncturist before. Neither had I heard of one in the Himalayan foothills where I live.
There are certain people you hear of that you immediately think you would like to meet and there are those that might as well not exist. What caught my interest was the fact that I’d heard this doctor is also a teacher who is passing on his skills to blind students. He has been practising the alternative science/ancient art of acupuncture for the last 40 years! I’m very grateful he agreed to meet me though he was under no obligation to do so.
This soft-spoken doctor, whose name I shall not reveal, is an elderly gentleman. He’s pretty spritely and energetic, which instantaneously raises the trust-barometer as far as I’m concerned. Healthy doctors do inspire confidence. He’s good-natured too and didn’t take me to be an absolute nincompoop. An added bonus these days. To top it all he is quite tech savvy and has his computer talking back to him.
I was fascinated by just how quickly he got down to diagnosing my problem. Switching between head and limb, asking questions, moving joints, applying pressure he swiftly found solutions to tackling my problem area and showed me extra exercises to improve my overall agility. All without sticking a single needle into me.
I felt I was being treated by a Zen master and was getting my money’s worth except he refused to charge! This, after spending at least an hour of his free time for me – a total stranger. Quite the man. Overnight I’m beginning to believe ‘the blind leading the blind’ is pretty awesome. You can see why.
In fact, it’s all blah. I was invited to Dunda village (Uttarakhand, India) by a colleague who heads ‘Community Engagement’ through the school I work for. These service projects, a collaboration between a hospital, an NGO and my school is a mutually beneficial arrangement between villages and us; mostly, providing opportunities to our students; exposing and sensitizing them to village life, actively engaging them in bringing about change, and hopefully impacting them for life.
Most of these projects are student-driven. They are instrumental in replacing destroyed irrigation systems, roofs, in some cases, houses and providing employment. Besides providing training in revival of more eco-friendly farming, animal husbandry, poultry farming, construction techniques and use of poly houses, building a brand new primary school, creating sand-based water filters and benefiting lives in other small ways. But this post isn’t what is being done and planned for the village but it’s about my undoing!
Green harvest of the Himalayas
The familiarization trip in a glossed-over-by-rain landscape was a great out of office experience. The sound of gushing waterfalls and paddy fields were a sight for sore eyes. In spite of all the green cover we could see where last year’s landslides had covered up fields with rocks and rubble, devastated irrigation channels overnight destroyed the livelihood of several villagers.
I always thought it was impossible to get two neighbouring villages to agree on anything.
There were 2 villages gathered under one roof that day, representing around 75 families. Though voicing their concerns rather rambunctiously at first, they simmered down to discussing and making decisions on their own.
An alcove originally used for oil lamps in a Himalayan village-home
I believed a woman has no voice in an Indian village
The head of the village/gram pradan who is a young woman chaired the meeting while lots of other women attended. They are no less vocal than their menfolk. I found out just how hard their lives are; even basic necessities like sanitary napkins are beyond their reach, making it almost impossible to venture too far from home when they’re menstruating. Plans are on to teach them to make low-cost yet hygienic and eco-friendly sanitary napkins. The younger girls, like all young girls, aspire for more. “English-coaching” and tailoring skills are part of their bucket list.
I was of the opinion that the ‘caste system’ in villages is set in stone
What really made me sit up and take notice was the fact that these villagers whose lives are steeped and driven by caste equations were nonchalantly nodding their heads in agreement when it came to the ‘right’ to education. They promised us that the new primary school would be open to any child from Dunda and the neighbouring villages.
Was it the collaboration between the facilitators that in turn triggered the collaboration between the villagers? I will never know for sure but it was rather unexpected to see them take a common stand. Perhaps once in a while one needs to visit a village to look at life afresh.
Considering I live in Mussoorie, it sounds a bit irrational that I should seek another hilltop to escape to; but there’s something to be said for wanting to get away from it all and I find Ranikhet is the place for me. Here’s why.
1. There aren’t many places on earth I can see the Himalayan range from Bandarpunch in the Garhwal, spanning across Trishul, Nandadevi, Panchaculi, in Kumaon, all the way to Apa Nampa in Nepal. After a good dousing of rain, the clouds settle and the air gets wafer-crisp. That’s when the peaks start revealing themselves. I can’t begin to describe how dramatically the colour of the setting sun sets the ice-cream peaks aflame. Come September, right through February, you can see the whole range, dawn to dusk. Imagine that! It’s reason enough for me!
Himalayan range up closeHimalayan sky at duskHimalayan snow peaks behind the foothills
2. Connectivity is erratic. Which turns out to be a good thing since the idea is to switch off from the everyday onslaught of data. Going to Ranikhet feels like checking into a spa where without paying spa rates. With the exception of my camera, I travel light into Ranikhet and feel better for it when I leave.
Himalayan Babbler after a dunkingA different hue of Himalaya
3. I can enjoy the simplicity of pastoral scenes that are becoming rarer by the day. I know I’m in Ranikhet when I see women carrying enormous piles of grass on their heads and sickles in their waistband. Or visit smoky tea shops where the tea and ‘fen’ taste better for reasons I can’t quite pin down. I love seeing village girls neatly turned out in school uniforms, their hair plaited with red ribbons, cheerfully walking miles, to school. I enjoy the sound of cowbells as much as I like chatting with locals who treat me like an old friend even time I visit.
Village woman from RanikhetWomen working the fields in a Himalayan villageA Typical Kumaoni house
4. Wildlife comes to me. I don’t have to pay an arm and a leg to enjoy nature. Jackals, foxes, martens, Sambar, Barking deer and Serows, Khaleej pheasants and leopards have literally crossed my path. As a nature lover, I can’t help but spew rhetoric about being awakened by the sweet melody of whistling thrushes on my rooftop. Or sipping chai in my garden watching the sunlight bounce off the iridescent head of the Flowerpecker. Or listening to the Francolin clearing his throat before every call. And hearing a carpenter drill only to discover it’s a Yellow-naped woodpecker. Or check out the latest leopard kill on the golf course. And seeing a jackal and a Steppe eagle soaking in the winter sun side by side! Or following butterflies that look so exotic, it’s a miracle they aren’t extinct. Need I go on?
Himalayan Khaleej pheasantHimalayan butterfly
Moth hawk
5. There is no home delivery. No Mc Donalds, Pizza Hut, or Café Coffe Day outlets here as yet. Definitely no malls. And yes, I’m grateful for the “unspoiled ” flavour of the place. There are any number of restaurants and a proper market; so one won’t starve for want of sustenance. For those of us who have homes here, our small soirees end long before city-wallas begin their nightlife.
6. Every house has a fruit tree, flowering pots or a vegetable patch. It could be the humble geranium in a rusty tin or the ‘kaddu’ drying on the rooftop; they make Ranikhet homely.
7. Not too many tourists. Funnily enough some of the reasons I love Ranikhet are the reasons why it’s not a popular holiday destination. Lucky for me!
Ever since we moved to the meandering, steep slopes of Mussoorie, I’ve been wondering how anyone, let alone the Brits of yore, could survive the hills without the intrepid Nepali coolie. (Coolie is a corruption of the Tamil kuli=wage or wage worker) I moved here from Ranikhet and we don’t see so many coolies there though I am sure most other hill stations depend on them a great deal. Initially, I rarely noticed the Nepali coolies myself; they do tend to blend into the hillside. You could say, it was my indifference that made me not ‘see’. If you were to remove all these coolies from the hillside, life here would be another kettle of fish altogether.
Manoj, one of the nicest coolies on the hillside
I live on a hilltop, a good 45 minute-walk from the market. Hypothetically speaking, if I choose not to leave my home for a month I could get by just by ordering on the phone. The car doesn’t come to our door step. No prizes for guessing who delivers all my provisions, carries sacks of manure for my potted geraniums, the 1/2 quintal of chopped wood for my winter stove… Or worse comes to worst, carries me out on a stretcher if I fracture a leg and can’t walk. For crying out loud, the house I live in wouldn’t have been built but for these coolies carrying the foundation bricks on their backs. At the cost of sounding flippant, I like to think of coolies as the Flipkart of the hills; they deliver. Moreover, they’re far more efficient, their work, far more commendable. I confess I haven’t stood in a queue since I moved here or waited days-on-end for a gas-cylinder refill! If you’re thinking ‘hills’ for an healthy lifestyle, find a hillside without coolies. They make life too easy! Nepali coolies are the hardiest workers I’ve seen; virtually unstoppable. You’ll pass them digging road side trenches bare handed in the grips of our Mussoorie winter and getting soaked to the bone in our cold monsoon-rain for a bread and egg delivery. Despite the cards they’ve been dealt, I find Nepali coolies to be a cheerful lot. I don’t quite subscribe to the theory that being mountain people they have more RBCs than most of us and therefore, are genetically stronger. So what ails our local hilly-billies? Can someone check their blood count and tell?
It’s the attitude and not the altitude that makes the Nepali coolie indispensable. It’s no secret that migrants work harder. Some of these coolies come from remote villages in Nepal 3-4 days journey away from here. For what, you wonder? Every coolie-dependent business is flourishing. Yet, the coolies’ earnest simplicity hasn’t got them too far. They’re ignored till required, kept at arm’s length and left to their own fate. They carry 25-30 kg loads multiple times a day for 5-6 km uphill for peanuts! The rate per load/day probably hasn’t changed for years. What can we do to improve their lot? Acknowledge their existence for starters? Treat them as humans not mules? Realise their worth? What do you think?
12 cartons of milk, 1 tray of eggs, flour, butter, 2 litres of oil et lots more.
In the dark just before dawn, when the blinding mist is in your face and you need several woolen layers to cut the biting cold, I found myself making my way to the school bus – still half an hour away – dressed in all my borrowed Tibetan finery. I hitched up my Tibetan Chuba with one hand, grabbed my umbrella and torch with another, prayed the rain wouldn’t soak right through and the local leopard wasn’t hungry – though not necessarily in that order. I half-stumbled, half-ran down the hill to find I was the first to arrive. The plan was to go down to the Mindrolling Monastery in Dehradun with our students to celebrate Losar. Half an hour later a bus load of sleepy kids and us chaperones headed down the winding road. For the first time, I noticed fresh snow on the sides of the road. Then the sun came out and it was a beautiful day to the end.
Inside Mindrolling monastery
The resonant sound of at least a hundred chanting monks welcomed us as we entered the monastery.
Sitting cross-legged, behind a row of novices, I watched monks making offerings and also receiving new year gifts/donations in the form of scarves, robes, cash, treats. Sweet rice and butter tea were served, followed by individual packs of treats which were handed out to our students and unexpectedly, to us chaperones too. I was surprised to be at the receiving end and yes, ridden by a sense of guilt; it should have been the other way around surely?
A noviceButter TeaOfferingsYellow HatsA new coat of paint for LosarBeautiful interiors of the monastery#Tibetan Nuns#Senior Pilgrim#Senior pilgrim2
Like all places of worship, the monastery grounds seemed to be a favourite jaunt for senior denizens.We visited a monastery close by where the young novices were housed. Once again we were treated to sweet rice, butter tea, and snacks. Novices introduced themselves one by one. It was quite an emotional moment. Contemplating on the austerity of their childhood I was aware how ostentatious my own life seems in comparison. I had to remind myself that these boys will be looked after and looked after well here for the rest of their lives. Who’s to say there isn’t another future Dalai Lama amongst them?
#New Year GiftsMy name is …
We also visited our Tibetan colleagues’ new home where they generously fed the lot of us to a grand Tibetan feast.The Rajaji National Park borders their new home; they have been visited by a wild elephant once. It won’t be the last time I’m sure!
The Monastery fringed by forestA prayer!Tibetan students and chaperones; we returned with a lot more than gifts.
*You could Google wood-horse but I shall always remember it as the year Himalayan winter refused to leave and the rains decided to visit early.
Earthy Matters 