Snow Leopards in Ladakh

Ladakh is a land like no other, hundreds of mountain passes and monasteries, cold rugged deserts and the coldest inhabited place on earth after Siberia. Bounded by two of the world's mightiest mountain ranges, the Great Himalayas and the Karakoram, it lies athwart two other, the Ladakh range and the Zanskar range. Not quite in the popular tourist circuit like the Kashmir Valley, its a land of stark, rugged landscapes. A group of school friends getting together after 25 years, we travelled to Ladakh in August last year (2007), flying in to Leh from Delhi.

The land of rarefied air

The first part of any tourist's itinerary in Ladakh, is allocated for "acclimatization" so that tourists get used to the rarefied air of Ladakh before they undertake any strenuous activities like walking! Many discussions, scares and advice from people who had travelled to Ladakh (and lot more from people who had not travelled there!) advised us complete rest from 24 to 96 hours before we did anything! As soon as you land at Leh airport, oxygen cylinders are seen in the arrival area, making you involuntarily feel your pulse, heart rate and check if you are still breathing. After we had checked into the guest house, we thought the need for acclimatization was a bit exaggerated and mentioned this to the guest house owner, who warned us to stay indoors and sleep! We understood why as soon as we had finished our chai and headed up a flight of 10 stairs to get to our room, panting. We later learnt that Ladakhi people have special lungs to survive this rarefied air and so do their horses! After a days rest, we were OK and all set to explore Ladakh.

Rugged Moonscapes & Monasteries

As you approach the region of Ladakh, the aerial view is one of huge contrasts. The stark granite of the mountains, very high heaps of loose gravel and the only greenery that can be seen is in the narrow valleys. Geologically, the Ladakhi Himalayas have risen up from the sea, when the Indian Ocean tectonic plate and the southern end of the Eurasian plate collided 10 millions years ago. The sands of the sea was carried up to the summit of the mountains to create a combination of sandy deserts, moonscapes and hard granite backdrops.

Indus & the Zanskar

The mighty Himalayas and its snow are a quarter of the precipitation anywhere on earth and when the snows melt and the rivers bring water down to the Indian plains, they cause a quarter of the worlds sedimentation as well, carrying down everything from fine sand to large boulders. Amongst these is the set of melting glaciers that create the Indus and Zanskar rivers in Ladakh. These rivers merge at a point (with a spectacular visual colour difference of the two waters) and then flow down to the plains of the Pakistani Punjab, where our mother civilization existed a few thousand years ago. The Indus and Zanskar rivers are popular white-water rafting destinations and give spectacular views of the Ladakhi Himalyas from the valley floor along with the thrill of the roaring rapids, the real life roller coasters!

Meagre resources and harsh environments

Stretching the limits of human endurance, respecting the fine balance between humans and nature and to understand that man is just a spec in the universe who could live with about 1/1000th the resources that we now consume, you should spend some time in Ladakhi villages. Observe how they share resources, maintain their delicate environments and live with the bare minimum, growing barley, peas and potatoes in the summer and above all how Ladakhi's manage their water resources. Staying at the home of some villagers at Rumbak (setup as a Himalayan Homestay as a part of the Snow Leopard Conservancy program) which is reached after trekking a few hours through Hemis National Park, taught us this and much more. No wonder the Himalayas have been associated with asceticism in India since time immemorial!

Highland military - highest everything!

Ladakh has hundreds of military outposts, close that it is to the Chinese border and a scene of Chinese aggression and conflicts of 1962. All the roads in this region are built, managed and maintained by the Border Roads Organization (BRO) that has created some engineering marvels just to maintain connectivity with this part of the country. Everything here is the highest in the world - the roads (Khardung La Pass, highest motorable road at 18380 ft), the helipads, airport, golf course and even the public toilets! For details of the military sight seeing places in Ladakh and other places in India take a look at my earlier post on Military Tourism in India

Of Israelis & International Gourmet Food

Ladakh was on the international tourist circuit even before it became a domestic tourist destination. Only tough westerners (especially Israelis) could endure the cold, the physical exertion and enjoy the landscapes of a cold desert! Most Indians would rather prefer the green valleys of Kashmir, and have just begun to discover Ladakh as a destination. With this, influx from all over the world, where tourists spend many weeks and months in this region during a single trip, Leh is full of many restaurants and cuisines from all over the world. Israeli, Russian, French, German, Italian and English food (now what is that?) can be easily found replete with garden restaurants and its wood fired ovens. Ladakh is a particular favourite amongst a number of young Israelis who spend many months here, making a number of Israeli region dishes such as Humus a local dish of Ladakh. The local food consists of thukpa (noodle soup), momos (that popular Tibetan snack), yak cheese, khambiri bread, apricot jam and Ladakh's salt+butter based tea, onomatopoeically called gurgur chai. There exists an interesting connection between Ladakh and faraway Goa with both international tourists and restaurant staff. Many of the Maharashtrian, Goan, Bihari and other people in the trade here spend 4 months in Ladakh and move down to Goa during the winter along with their tourist friends!

The High Roads - Pangong Lake

Pangong Lake past the Changla Pass is the world’s highest brackish water lake at 14,256 feet above sea level. A place too easily arrived at is scarcely worth traveling to at all. Consider the ‘tired tourist’ who simply seeks solace in much talked about destinations, where he tends to relax and stroll the evenings away, buy a few souvenirs and sample the cuisine from the endless menu. And there’s the ‘tireless traveler’ - the learning by living person who opts for a destination in order to explore and experience the unknown. The 140 km 4 hour journey from Leh to Pangong Lake was as interesting as the destination, as we spotted yaks, dzos (cross between yak and cow) and pashmina goats (of the famous wool) on the way. A lake that extends for 160 kms, two-thirds of which is in China, and where you have absolutely nobody between you and the Gods! (a la Mansarovar)

Apricots & Tiger Hill
Our way out from Ladakh was on the Srinagar-Leh highway, a journey of @ 16 hours that needs a night halt at Kargil. The Kargil region is known for its apricot orchards and for Tiger Hill and Operation Vijay. The memorial in honour of the Indian soldiers who laid down their lives in the winter of 1998 is worth a visit and is described in detail in my article on military tourism. The journey into the Kashmir valley continues past a place which recorded the lowest temperature on inhabited earth (-64 degrees Celcius), past some amazing moonscapes until Zhojila Pass which overlooks the contrasting, green Kashmir Valley starting from Sonmarg.

Integrating Ladakh and Pune

After our visit to Ladakh, we sponsored a visit by the Ladakhi villagers whom we stayed with, to Pune and Mumbai. Three girls who are a part of the Snow Leopard Conservancy program (covered extensively in a recent National Geographic article) travelled to Pune from Ladakh on their own, experiencing many firsts. First flight, first time in a train, first time seeing Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and the sea! Angmo, Rigzen and Rinchen spent 10 days in and around Pune, Konkan and Tadoba and carried back fond memories of our hustle, bustle and our forests around Sinhagad. The girls displayed amazing confidence to undertake this travel all by themselves and topped it up with a confident presentation about Ladakh and the SLC program to an audience of 50+ people at a Rotary gathering.
We have now converted this into an annual program where we sponsor trips of Ladakhi villagers each year to Pune/Mumbai and promote ground level contact between our two regions. Anybody who wishes to support this endeavour, can write to me, I'll send you details and we'll include you in the program.

Minimalist Products: Value based product experience

We live in a world of mindless excesses, driven by competition to give, get and ask for MORE! Product designers in almost every industry are asked to pack as many features as possible into every product release. Whether its cars, consumer electronics, software products, multi-vitamin tablets or houses, the emphasis is on more "functionality". At the very least new products are released with more "packaging".

Over the years, this has reached extraordinary proportions of competitive "wastage". In an era where costs of doing business has been increasing (in spite of cost savings through increased efficiency, outsourcing & off shoring), this competition, to mindlessly provide more! has had a cascading effect on costs and has clouded clear thinking of what a particular product was really meant for. Perhaps the concept of FAB (Feature Benefit) analysis, so dear to all MBAs, hasn't helped in reducing this undue emphasis on number of product features either!

MINIMALISM - the term was coined rather abstractly yet profoundly (several minimalists quoted here) - as a means of describing in laudatory terms, or in a reductive and strongly critical manner, the works by protagonists of the American scene in the late Fifties and Sixties. In the field of architecture, the term Minimalism was used, at times with caution and at others with determination, to connote the works of architects from profoundly different origins and cultural backgrounds, who had based their own work on a reduction in expressive media, a rediscovery of the value of empty space and a radical elimination of everything that does not coincide with a programme, also with minimalistic design overtones, of extreme simplicity and formal cleanliness. Preventing products from being corrupted, or hidden, by the incidental debris of paraphernalia of every day life.

The Japanese describe Minimalists as, er.... Essentialists. Probably says it all!

Today's Excesses

Driven by excessive competition to differentiate through MORE features, size and colour!, almost every sector and product category that you see in the market worldwide, has a huge excess of features, size or packaging that remains unused by more than 80% of the consumers. The marketplace is a virtual graveyard of dead features and excessive resources that could be better used to offer more "useful value". Most telecom equipment vendors in the 80s and 90s produced PBX switches with features in excess of 5000! Most customers used 10 features, seldom used 25, and never used 4900! Colour TVs, VCRs, DVD players and their host of features - most used, PLAY, FFWD, EJECT and on the remote control of the TV which has 25+ buttons, most used CH++, CH--, POWER! Cars have tons of features that most owners never get to know of or try them only on the day they drive home from the car dealer. Same with refrigerators, ACs, music systems and mobile phones. Even architecture and house construction has been deeply affected by this, where "doomsday design" makes architects and builders design the full house around a air-conditioning system that would probably be used for 60 days in the summer, rather than designing for fresh air and cross ventilation that would be useful all through the year.

Computer Software products are still worse, with the relative ease with which new features can be added. Probably about 50+ % of features are seldom or never used.

The pressure to pack more!

Excessive competition, convenient thinking that more features are the only way to differentiate products and pressure from the sales force that's only trained to sell on the "we've got more" credo puts pressure on product developers and packagers to pack in more. Conventional thinking, lack of a sales strategy based on "real usefulness", lack of customer education with data on usage levels of various types of features, keeps the pressure going. Some of this pressure, spills over beyond product features to more and wasteful "packaging". Bigger boxes, with more print, manuals, etc. All this costs money (a lot of it) and seldom provides satisfaction or value to customers, beyond the day when they bring the product home.

The need for Minimalist Products
"Minimalist Products" that give the best value to customers and focus on the product experience over its entire life cycle is the need of today. Minimalist products will bring down development costs and speed up time to market at a strategic level (not just through productivity tools that cost a lot of money). Besides, consumers will have a much better product experience, will find it easier to use, not being overwhelmed by its features, and will not "feel cheated about being sold useless features". This "truthful" experience over the entire life of the product will perhaps bring consumers back to the company that sold the product, to buy their next genre of products. The minimalism in the product experience can be stretched from product features to limited user manuals, minimal packaging and even over more user friendly pricing such as "pay per use", "lease rental" and "community shared" pricing, etc.

Managing and Marketing Minimalist products

How is this change in strategic product management thinking to be managed? By imbibing cost consciousness, value assessment in every transaction, especially amongst senior managers of a company. Every product spec. should be carefully reviewed to clearly rank features from the "essential" to the "frivolous" and product development funded for only the "essential". Product development should include a limited launch phase for "Feature trials & feedback" - thus dropping more features from the final product that are not essential. The product architecture should be clearly layered, so that customers who need additional features will get them when they pay for them, whereas those who do not need them don't. Sales & Marketing needs to focus on marketing a new philosophy, a new practicality, the offer of value based, right priced product and on the complete product experience over its entire life, weaning customers away from frivolous one day experiences that don't mean much the very next day.

India - Perfect place for minimalist products

Be Innovative, Think Out of The Box! much touted corporate mantras. Thinking out of the Box, is often possible "when you live out of the box". The box referred to here is conventional (or legacy) thinking of products as developed in advanced markets. India, with its emphasis on "value for money" products, consumers not wanting to pay for "frivolous packaging" and by virtue of not having a legacy of having all product genres with a host of (mostly useless) features already, is best placed to show the world how world class, minimalist, yet useful products can be built at low costs and sold at high margins! This as long as minimal doesn't get to mean Shoddy!

Tata Motors, Nano has perhaps shown us the way, for all other sectors to follow.

Chasing the Monsoon: Rain Around the World

City folk normally have very little to do with the rains, forests, irrigation and agriculture. Therefore, I found much to my amusement, that we were tracking the progress of the Monsoons! and especially rains in the region around Pune and Bangalore quite closely. We're trying to green some hills around Pune and a friend is building a golf course near Bangalore. Rains, water harvesting and water as a resource had suddenly become quite critical for our projects. We started tracking the monsoons much like the Sensex or the international oil price!
Monsoons, the most awaited and discussed weather pattern in India (along with summer temperatures) and the nation's lifeline. Come May each year, the mangoes and the discussions about the rains begin. My childhood memories are full of the rains in the Western Ghats area where I grew up and the monsoon waterfalls in the ghats between Pune and Mumbai. More recently, the news about Michael Douglas starting work on Racing the Monsoon (although the movie is reportedly more about a diamond heist on a train), a sequel to the 1984 movie Romancing the Stone, got me thinking about all of my monsoon and rain experiences in India and around the world.

First Day of the monsoons - in Coorg

1st of June, the date cast in stone for most people in India and the Indian Meteorological Department in particular and the ETA of the annual Monsoons. All forecasts (tantamounting to "predictions of the future") of the monsoons are based on this date and the entire nation heaves a sigh of relief when the first showers of the monsoons arrive over coastal Kerala on or around this date. The "progress" of the monsoons is then tracked from this arrival date. One of the most endearing sights etched in my mind is seeing the first monsoon clouds on one side of the hills in Coorg (bordering Kerala). Dark clouds on one side of the hill and the sky pretty much clear on the other side. Imagine, seeing from this hill, dark monsoon clouds over the Kerala land mass and clear skies over the other slope towards Karnataka. This was around, 6 pm on 31st May. No rain on that day. We left for Bangalore the next morning at 6:30 am, and the monsoon rains started at 7:00 am on 1st June!

Monsoons along the West Coast - Konkan

The West Coast of India and the North East Region takes the brunt of the monsoon showers, shielding the rest of the country from a deluge that could have been devastating. For us not living in this part of the country, we probably don't know what monsoons really are. This is how one of our family friends who works at the University of NITIE near Mangalore described the monsoons to us, "Come visit us to see what the monsoons are. The season starts with a fortnight of extreme thunder and lightning in the pre-monsoon period, when power shuts down for most of this time, it rains cats, dogs and elephants for three months followed by thunder, lightning and no-power for another fortnight when the monsoons recede in Sept. Ask us what monsoons are!" Agumbe, a place in the Western Ghats (called Cherapunji of The South and known as the place where the teleserial Malgudi Days was shot) receives an annual rainfall of 7640 mm. i.e. about 25 feet of rain!

Monsoons the life giver

The forests of the North East and the Western Ghats have the highest bio-diversity in the world. A huge number of species are endemic to these parts of India and support an amazing variety of flora and fauna. From a huge variety of algae, ferns, orchids, butterflies to several species of amphibians. The fertile lands of the Indo-Gangetic plain are what they are due to the silt washed down every year and the monsoons that nurse these lands. Most of the water for drinking, irrigation and hydro-electricity is courtesy the rains during the monsoons. Even with just 100 hours of rain in most regions of India, it gives us sufficient water until the next monsoons arrive. Most of the agriculture in India is during the monsoons, and the hills, valleys and forests turn a verdant green teeming with all kinds of life forms. India's GDP takes a dip in the years when there's a bad monsoon with everything from tooth-paste to two wheeler sales taking a hit.

Monsoon Fury

As much as the monsoon rains are a life giver so are they a destroyer of lands, crops and peoples' lives. Ask the people who live along the Brahmaputra in Assam and Bangladesh. Rivers change course every year, sweeping away entire villages when they do and marooning many more where the only way to reach them is by helicopters flying overhead. I spent two days cut off from the world during the July 26th 2005, 1 metre Rain Deluge and the damage caused by the rampaging Mithi river (aka drain). A time when I waded through waist high water, with laptop on my head, my life story flashing through my brains in getting back to my hotel in Bandra, Mumbai. The only thing that worked in these two days in Mumbai was the resilience of the people that saw them help each other and peacefully "tide through" the effects of the deluge.

Rains around the world

Did you know that there is a North American Monsoon (NAM also called the Desert Monsoon)? These monsoons are active in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and California during July-Sept every year, but don't bring much rain to these deserts. A common discussion with many American colleagues (especially in the early 90s) were their questions about India's monsoons (since they would have seen images of floods in India on the telly the earlier night). A friend of mine, contrasting the deluge of the Indian monsoon, with the rain in California, told them "Compared to the monsoons in India, we could walk "between" the rain here in California".

Rains in UK? No monsoons here, just lots of drizzles all through the year!, was always interesting to see Brits expertly carry their big "brollies" racing through the side-walks of London to catch the next train to a place where it was likely to be raining too! And in Canada, I first discovered their rain when I thought I was lucky to see a snowfall for the first time in my life, only to be told that it was "freezing rain". Rain in Singapore is a daily affair, would begin to pour as I would be ready to take a taxi back to the hotel on my numerous visits there. In Africa, rains seem to be part of the folklore, as our ranger-guide in the Masai Mara explained to us, the great animal migration where 1.5 million animals (mainly widebeest and zebra) during Oct/Nov head for the southern plains from the Northern hills to catch the brief spell of tropical rain!

Singing in the Rain!

Ever noticed the difference between nursery rhymes taught in English medium schools and those in vernacular medium schools? One says "Rain, rain go away......", the other beckons the rain with, "Yere Yere Paawasa" (in Marathi or any other Indian language). Perhaps a sign of the difference between city folk and those closer to the earth in the villages. Lets all wait for Michael Douglas' film, take a walk in the rain, have piping hot cups of masala chai when its pouring outside and read the book Chasing the Monsoons by Alexander Frater. Enjoy!