Four of us longtime
friends made a trip ('customised'
package tour) to
Kashmir with intentions of basking in nature’s pristine lap, eating delicious
food, procuring a few artifacts, and chatting endlessly. Nature’s lap was not
pristine. The food was rarely good, mostly nondescript, and in one instance very
bad (making the two of us who ate it sick for a couple of days). We had no way
of getting away with procuring ‘a few artifacts’: We had to fight off hordes of
salesmen (they are all men, many of them unselfconsciously goodlooking in our
estimation) before, during, and after our many, not few, purchases. We did chat
endlessly, so paisa vasool there!
The winding mountain
roads and the stretches of highway are frequently beset with traffic congestion
and vehicular exhaust that no tourist blurb will prepare you for. Tourists in
paradise spend more time and attention on the pragmatic tasks associated with
tourism, such as standing in queues for hours and clinging white-knuckled to a
horse’s saddle, than taking in the sights that they are in queues or on horseback
for. Some of the tourism-related occupations are protected by unions: Most
beauty spots do not permit ‘local sightseeing’ in private vehicles or outside
cabs. And there is no public transport to speak of. You have per force to use
the expensive local cabs to get around, and pay per location on the itinerary,
with strict limits on how long you can spend at any location, so that you do
not detain the cab driver at a place whose beauty or sales talent you are lost
in for an hour or more.
For all the protection
of tourist guides and transporters however, the big lacuna in tourism in
Kashmir is the lack of attention paid to retaining and nurturing the
cleanliness and beauty of the locales. Unlike other areas that see throngs of
visitors, and have developed, and to quite an extent enforced, stringent
policies on disposables and littering, Kashmir seems to have left this to the
inhabitants – locals and tourists – who evidently do not care overmuch. The
beauty spots are dotted with plastic litter, horse dung, and slush, and
swarming with ‘guides’ and salesmen. To approach anything like the Kashmir in
our minds (from the movies of the 60s and 70s), you need to tilt your eyes, and
ideally also your head, up by about 30 degrees so as to be able to view only
distant vistas of conifers and snow-capped mountains, and miss all the litter.
For the haseen vaadiyan, you need to move to ‘faraway look’ mode
from the car/lookout spot since tilting your head up will not serve. The
streams are delightful (especially from a distance, and with the litter-strewn
banks cropped out), as are the sun and moon, and distant patches of green and
white on the mountains. Natural beauty spots cannot stay beautiful in the face
of thoughtless littering, unless they are active volcanoes (which people
generally refrain from littering, so they don’t count).
With the plentiful
litter and the rarer burning pile of rubbish, we were naturally hesitant to try
the pay-and-use toilets at every tourist location. But to our pleasant
surprise, the toilets were clean, if not odourless.
On Dal Lake, one has
no hope of being able to sing even one stanza of a boat song undisturbed by a
salesboat that will draw up speedily and silently, presenting a pleasant
salesman who will draw your attention to the far cheaper goods that he has for
sale than you would come across elsewhere in your travels. Everything from
so-called saffron to sarees is cheaper on Dal Lake than on land far from
Srinagar. One remarkable experience we had on Dal Lake was that although it was
bursting with weeds that special clean-up boats were scooping up with
lacrosse-racquet like tools, and tons of organic domestic waste and sewage were
being contributed by the hundreds of houseboats every minute to the lake, it
was not stinky.
Guides in sharp contrast
to salesmen are gruff, even rude, and very aggressive about your need for their
services without which you supposedly cannot negotiate the terrain – something
that is proven wrong in minutes after you engage them when you espy others who
didn’t succumb to their haranguing managing quite all right guideless. An
astute observation that Posh made (on this, her second trip to Kashmir) was
that Kashmir seems to be popular only with Indians (we saw no more than 2-3
non-Indian tourists in all our time there), and that that might be at the root
of the non-obsequious/non-unctuous/customer-unfriendly deportment of the
‘guides’. Not that Indians were able to take all the aggressive marketing in
their stride – we heard many fruitless gripes about tourists being ‘milked’ and
hounded, but that is where it stopped. A far cry from the customer-is-king
pampering one sees of prospective and current customers in other
tourism-inclined states of India. On my observation that one transporter (horse
supplier) seemed impatient and angry (euphemisms for rude), his minion
explained that he was neither impatient nor angry, and that this was just how
they conversed. A novel argument that we heard from many guides and
transporters (horse/sled suppliers) was that we had clearly spent a lot to get
to Kashmir (one person even suggested that we had spent lakhs on the trip!),
and we shouldn’t hesitate to spend just a few hundred more on whatever they
were offering.
Everywhere we went,
photographers and their aides showed us albums of tourists dressed in gaudy
velvet pherans and colourful scarves with chunky (faux) silver
jewellery. We did as directed on the third day of our trip, posing for group
photographs and a few singles, but not availing ourselves of opportunities to
pose with fluffy lambs, rabbits, or snowy pigeons, or the ubiquitous plastic
flowers in baskets and empty waterpots. Maybe we will appear in an album in the
future, especially as bait for groups of friends travelling together!
Practically every
hotel and restaurant we went to had artificial flowers for decoration,
incongruous in a place famed for lovely real flowers, and beautiful embroidered
and carved flowers besides. We would appear to have visited Kashmir in a
suboptimal season for flowers though – the tulips had just closed shop, the
crocuses were months away, and we were not in the right zone for the lavender
that we saw posters of right from the airport. What we did get to see in the
gardens we visited were masses of pansies, irises, roses, snowballs, asters, and
daffodils, and quite a few other brilliantly coloured flowers that we couldn’t
catch the names of.
Velvet and
wood-carving seem to be popular everywhere – in hotels, all over houseboats,
and in shikaras too. Papier-mâché of high levels of artistry is another
visual treat and generally affordable. Embroidery can be large and striking, or
fine and beautiful, but does not come cheap. We stocked up on walnuts, dried
fruit, some seemingly magical Kashmiri rajma (that is said to need only 5
minutes of soaking – not yet verified by us), single garlic cloves that look
like apricot kernels, and the ‘sweat of stones’ (shilajit), and of
course, saffron. In the non-edibles category, sarees, shawls, stoles, the
softest cashmere (sweater), embroidered curtain material, and papier-mâché
articles formed all our loot from Kashmir. As dutiful Indians, Kavitha and I
bought cricket bats made of Kashmiri willow – one small souvenir-ish one and
one usable by adults for a real game – from a factory where they were made. We
were also treated (on my request) to the sight and feel of a replica of Sachin
Tendulkar’s bat.
The famed Kashmiri
cuisine is not easy to come by in many places, and where it is available, there
is generally little besides a few mutton dishes. Fresh, local vegetarian dishes
and light, everyday foods are off the table. Chilli powder is of a rich colour,
but not very pungent; salt is easily in excess for health and taste; and sugar
is at a healthy and close to tasteless low. The kahwa is
delicious, and the desserts bland. Menus are crammed with the usual pan-Indian
Punjabi/Mughlai food.
We had fresh apple
juice (how could we exit Kashmir without) just outside an orchard of cute,
trimmed trees with bottles of sugar water tied to some branches as artificial
pollination promoters. The juice was nice, but the information that we received
of ‘at least 10-15 pesticides’ to be applied to the trees, and several other
chemicals as fertilisers besides was decidedly not nice.
Despite our keenness
to visit, or at least view, the Hazratbal mosque, we did not. Our driver consistently
assigned it low priority on our daily lists of spots we wanted to visit, and
showed no enthusiasm to even drive past it, perhaps deciding for us that four
Hindu women have no pressing need to view a mosque. We barely managed two of
the many gardens in the city, overcoming his reluctance to drive even a few
metres beyond his daily quota. We glimpsed a gurudwara on our way one day, and
a board indicating the way to a temple. No churches or synagogues. The one holy
spot that we well and truly visited was the Shankaracharya temple. For this, we
argued with our driver, who would take us no farther than the foot of the hill
that the temple was on, then with an auto driver who demanded an exorbitant
amount to take us to the gate of the temple, but discharged us a third of the
distance away citing a traffic jam on the hill. We then trudged up the hill,
and proceeded to labour up the 250 steep steps (it seemed like more). The path
to the temple was cleaner than any other place we saw in Kashmir. I cannot be
sure that faith can move mountains, but I can certainly confirm that faith can
move one up a mountain. I, accomplished in neither the faith nor the fitness
departments, made unimpressive progress up the steps, using many of the broad
ledges flanking the steps to catch my breath and sip water, giving me all the
leisure to observe elderly/out of shape/juvenile/apparently unwell people, and
those in uncomfortable footwear forging ahead to worship. Perhaps the strenuous
climb kept the devotees disciplined, and they could express their usual selves only
at the conclusion of the climb: After they got to the temple premises and shed
their footwear, and photographed themselves and companions against the temple
or the view of Srinagar laid out all around the base of the hill, some demonstrated
an urgency in ascending the last 5-6 steps to the sanctum sanctorum, overtaking
others, and sticking on in the sanctum sanctorum, prolonging their communion
with the deity, even photographing the Shivalinga (expressly disallowed). When
asked about the Sharada peeth in the area, the priest used an unexpected
term to indicate its location – Azad Kashmir! An elderly Sikh man was selling
holy(ish) Hindu books, and beads and idols at a table along the steps. All the
taxi and auto drivers transporting people to and from the temple were Muslim. It
was a nice tableau of some of the religious diversity in the place.
It was another story
altogether with gender. There were hardly any women or girls to be seen, outdoors
or even indoors in shops, hotels, and restaurants. Locals don’t loiter - female
locals, that is. This is a huge red flag to me. When I see girls and women
using public spaces with confidence and comfort, for gainful employment or
aimless occupation, I think highly of the place on this count. When the only
females I see on the streets are students hurrying to or from educational
institutions, and women escorting children and groceries home, the place falls
like a stone in my estimation. Kashmir is a clear non-starter in
gender-egalitarianism.
A recommendation to
those dreaming of a lovely vacation in Kashmir: Have a stroke of good luck,
find a pro-active knowledgeable guide and places to stay and visit in offbeat
locations, and use polarised glasses that cull the litter from your vistas. Or
gather your friends at home or at a resort (in a non-Kashmir location) and
watch a pre-disposable-plastics-era Kapoor movie set in Kashmir instead.
