Is corruption built into us by our culture and philosophy?

There's so much of hoo-ha all over this country because a quixotic campaigner has built a brand out of standing up against corruption and trying to get the government to legislate against corruption. I think it behoves us to try and understand the issue of corruption in the Indian milieu first before we really try to obliterate it!

When we as a people visit one of the holiest of shrines in this country, the Tirupati temple, many think nothing of paying a buck or two extra to ensure that they can get to the head of the darshan queue or to spend an extra few seconds in front of the deity. Is this not tantamount to bribing the powers that be right under the nose of your god? The fact that priests and temple-workers think nothing of accepting that bribe indicates that its ok to bribe to get an undue advantage! Why, there are actually different queues which officially cost different amounts to get to have a darshan - that must indicate that even the Gods think the rich are entitled to a quicker and longer darshan! Tough luck if you cannot afford the higher official fee. We have thus institutionalised a form of corruption right in the abode of the gods! There is thus no place in the country where all men will be equal, not even in a temple!

Then there is the system of paying humongous amounts of money to get your child into a suitable engineering or medical college - true, seats are limited but we think nothing of the need to make merit count and officially allow colleges to accept capitation money so even below-par students make it to professional college. This in turn creates a mediocracy where we should be building a meritocracy and then these mediocre students believe money can buy them anything and everything is purchasable. To me this is corruption too, corruption of young minds, who will go on to become the movers and shakers in the country, who believe that money talks, money opens doors, money gets you to the top of a queue - how then do we expect that people will shun corruption and follow a laid down law? Is it not quixotic to think so?

I read somewhere that almost every single war waged through our history from Alexander onward to the East India Company to the Moghuls and the Marathas it was money that was taken by some commander of the vanquished side that turned the tide and allowed the victor to win! To me this smacks of a pathological lack of pride in one's own kind which allows these crass leaders to sell out for a fistful of cash. This lack of pride runs right through us as a people - there seems so little for the people of this country to be genuinely proud of, no leaders worth following, no real heroes to emulate and nobody who genuinely cares for the country and its people it would seem. Maybe, thats what makes the Anna Hazare brand - here is somebody who atleast appears to genuinely care for the country and its people, never mind if he has quixotic ideas about quelling corruption, atleast he is not looking to line his pockets or atleast it seems so! 

A surprise visitor

It was Friday evening - I had gotten home early to be able to pack and catch a flight to Mumbai with the wife. We were to leave home at 1800hrs, the taxi was waiting, I was almost through with my packing in the bedroom upstairs, the door to the bedroom was shut and I was on the phone with a HDFC Customer relations guy. I was yelling at the guy for some deficiency in service and could not hear the commotion downstairs - then I heard the desperate screams for help from the wife downstairs! I rush down and see a huge owl looking at me from on top of my CD player! The wife was hysterical - 'get that thing out of the house' she yells! I move towards the avian visitor and the bird takes off for the kitchen exhaust fan - hangs on to the grill of the fan and looks at me with those haunting eyes. The wife scampers off upstairs - the doors to the front and back balconies are open so it beats me why the bird would not just fly out of the house! When I moved with a broom in hand to the exhaust fan the darn thing would fly to the drawing room and perch precariously on the tube light! I tried to dislodge it from its perch and it flies again into the kitchen! This time I grabbed my camera and took this picture - of the owl in our kitchen!


I finally managed to shoo the visitor out of the drawing room balcony door and before it could get out about 10 crows swooped on it and amidst a lot of screeching and crowing I could see owl feathers aflutter! I think the poor owl managed to get away because last night I saw an owl sitting on the parapet of the house opposite our drawing room balcony! I sure hope it was the same majestic bird that came visiting!

Legislating against corruption - what a joke!

The last two days have been crazy - Anna Hazare decides he must get his Lokpal bill against corruption and it has to be 'worded his way or its the highway'! If getting rid of corruption is only about legislation one could wish away corruption by a swish of that pen! I'm afraid I have a completely different take on the issue - tackling corruption is about people not bribing when they are asked to shell out undue monies. Its about showing the middle finger to the bribe-taker, not about legislating against bribes! To me its a no brainer that if people refuse to bribe there will be no corruption!

Somehow, we as a people think its ok that we pay a hundred bucks as bribe to a cop to let us off a traffic violation but its not ok for a politician or bureaucrat to make a couple of crores!! This is hypocrisy and somehow we are ok with being hypocrites as long as it suits us. It is this hypocritical attitude about almost everything in urban India that breeds corruption and I say again that legislation cannot change the corruption scene in this or any country where a hypocritical people think only about themselves and not for the collective good of the nation or a people.

Can we teach children in schools to change their attitude towards bribery - I guess we can but it again requires that those who teach have their own attitudes corrected, therein lies a himalayan problem! Seems like we need a new breed of teachers to start the anti-corruption movement going. Until that new breed of teacher comes along it will seem like I was a fool to teach my kids that 'honesty is the best policy' and 'thou shalt not bribe' because all around them they see dis-honesty and bribery and then wonder why their old man was such a weirdo, so completely out of kilt with the India around him!

Leh, Ladakh 31st July – 5th August 2011

It’s been a week of amazing travel that 7 of us have experienced up in the Ladakh Himalayas. We started off on the wrong foot by not realising that the Indira Gandhi International Airport’s Terminal 3 was several kilometers away from Terminal 1D which is where we had landed when our Indigo flight brought us into the capital from Chennai! Thanks to my buddy and classmate Pat Kerr we were able to gainfully use that extra day and we got around to having ourselves a very nice buffet lunch at a cute little restaurant called Omni (used to be an Irish pub called Bennigan’s). The next day we were not about to miss that flight and before we knew it we were winging our way northwards over the snow capped Himalayas that stretched for miles and miles, as far as the eye could see from that 30,000 foot vantage view we got from the window seats some of us had contrived to get!

The approach into Leh airport presented a stark contrast to all the snow capped mountains we had been viewing – the terrain around Leh was completely devoid of snow, just miles and miles of brown topped mountains stretching in every direction.

My altimeter reading at Leh – 3650m or 12045 feet

Some of the mountains actually had massive slopes of sand, yes fine sand! That’s when it strikes you that we are actually in a cold desert! And to our surprise it was really hot and all those layers of warm clothing we had plans of piling into seemed quite unnecessary! We were ferried to our accommodation and ordered to stay in doors to acclimatise. We had all heard and read so much about the need to let the body acclimatise that we were not about to get adventurous! In a few hours some of us were beginning to feel heavy headed and any rapid or strenuous movement began to leave us breathless! To make matters worse, we were housed under beautiful cotton-poplar trees which were shedding their seeds and with it massive amounts of fluffy cotton were swirling about in the air – almost like it were snowing! When the cotton lands on the ground it looks like the ground is carpeted with snow!

Doc Jimmy came down with a slight fever and a pain radiating from the back of his head down the rear of the right shoulder so an Army Nursing Assistant was sent out to check Doc J and all of us out for our blood oxygen concentration and BP - he advised us that Doc J should be seeing a doctor at the very well appointed Army Hospital nearby - there a Captain from the Army Medical Corps said it was a case of Shingles and gave Doc J a bagful of anti-retrovirals to fix the viral infection. Thankfully by next morning Doc J was feeling much better and was ready for the long haul trip across the third highest (my altimeter could read only upto to 5000m and we were way above that!) motorable road

Notice, my altimeter has exceeded its calibrated range of 5000m at Chang La! The needle is set to do its next round around the dial!

in the world - Chang La - to get to the most beautiful lake I have ever seen - the Pangong Tso. The lake is blue as blue can possibly get upto mid day and then it begins to change color to green, then to white and even brown by the evening!

The beautiful Pangong Tso

The road up was a killer - everybody except Gopan, Sudha and I, were puking away! But the sight of the lake set everybody right - it was simply breathtaking! Overlooking the Tso is a hill called Garnet Hill because it is strewn with rough garnet! We have some of that semi-precious stone for keep sake now! Pangong Tso is 135 km long and one third of it is in India and two-third in China so the Chinese border was rather near. The Tso is supposed to be the remnants of sea trapped in the Himalayas when those mountains were formed millions of years ago - so it is brackish but there are pockets in China where the lake has fresh water surrounded by brackish water!

On the way up to Pangong Tso we encountered a family of Himalayan Marmots - two of whom were having a sparring match either for food or female I guess - it was a sight to behold!

Himalayan Marmots sparring

We stopped by a beautiful spot on the Shyok river for tea and coffee - it was easily the most beautiful spot for a picnic - crystal clear water rushing over water-smoothened rocks while towering mountains looked down at the river from either side watching it snake its way through the valley.

The 150km return trip to Leh from the Tso was bone-jarring but the beautiful mountain terrain interspersed with emerald green villages along the Shyok and Indus rivers make you forget the condition of the road and that of your tired body!

Day Two

The plan was to visit the Patharsahib Gurudwara and the Sangam (confluence) of the Zanskar and Indus rivers in the morning. The direction was different from the one we took yesterday so the scenery too was different - the Gurudwara is set up at the spot where Guru Nanak is supposed to have meditated in the 16th century - an evil local who was not happy with the benign influence that the Guru was having over the locals decided to kill the Guru by rolling a huge stone onto him while he was meditating. Legend has it that the huge boulder turned to wax as it hit the Guru and left the impression of the meditating Guru on its surface. This boulder is still around and is housed in the Gurudwara which is the first stop for all Indian Army missions that head out to the frontiers - there they seek the Guru's blessings for a safe return from their tour of duty to the frontier.

Onward from the Gurudwara, before we encounter the Indus river on the Srinagar-Leh Highway (NH1) we cross Magnetic Point - supposedly a place where vehicles in neutral actually move up-slope defying gravity! It turns out that because the horizon is hidden by mountains all around the human eye has trouble discerning whether a slope is running up or down so what is supposed to be a vehicle going up-slope is really not so! After our little researches into the physics of the place we left to witness the two mighty rivers - the Indus and the Zanskar cutting through huge mountain gorges and meeting at the Sangam! Lovely sight, indeed.

On our way back to Leh we stopped by the Spituk Monastery on a hillside overlooking the Indus river and the Leh Valley. Buddhist monasteries are almost always built atop some hill/rock formation and it takes a huge effort to get up there because you get breathless after every couple of steps! Once on top it takes a few minutes to recoup your breathing rhythm.

We were busy clicking away in the monastery and Mary wandered into a huge room where there were plenty of Buddhist artifacts to photograph - one of the monks came by and promptly shut the huge red doors to the room with Mary inside! Luckily I was aware that Mary was in there so I told the monk and he re-opened the door to let a frightened Mary out! We couldn't stop laughing at the thought of what could have been if Mary was locked away there - the next morning when the monks opened the door they would have seen a woman in their monastery and looked up to the heavens and said 'thank you lord, our prayers have been answered - we have a woman for company - Mother Mary herself'!

We got back to Leh town and decided we were going to check out a Lonely Planet and NDTV recommended eatery called Mentokling Garden restaurant - the food was awesome and amazingly low priced too! Most of those around were whites from all over the world - they seemed to have become like the locals - totally laid back, happy and in no hurry at all! The Ladakhis have this amazing ability to befriend anybody and everybody and they are always smiling. Their worldly requirements are minimal so they tend to be happy with whatever it is they have - something we can all learn from the Ladakhis.

The afternoon was spent visiting the Hemis Gonpa (monastery in Ladakhi) - another amazing monastery, the richest in Ladakh, built initially in the 11^th century and rebuilt in the 16th century on a huge, rocky hillside! I will let the pictures do the talking about this beautiful monastery.

Then we moved on to the Shey Palace - another awesome structure atop yet another hilltop overlooking the Indus river and some interesting high altitude wetlands populated by ducks and fish.

I love this picture of ducks sitting on their grassy island and beholding the reflection of the heavens above in the waters of the Indus below!

The Shey palace has one of the nicest looking statues of the Maitreyi Buddha - the picture of this statue must have adorned hundreds of magazine covers if the magazine has ever covered Ladakh!

It is interesting to see how the Ladakhis are so consumed by the idea that evil demons must be kept at bay at all times and their whole life is spent keeping these demons away - that is why you see so many scary faced dragons and masks all over Ladakh. No house will be without these dragons or masks!

From atop the Shey palace you get a terrific view of the Thiksey Gonpa especially as the setting sun casts its light on the hillside. I have a lovely long-shot of that view of the Thiksey monastery which was supposed to have been the influence behind the Potala Palace in Tibet.

Unfortunately, by the time we were done with the Shey Palace the ladies had had enough of heights and monasteries and were in no mood to climb!

Day Three

We were headed back to a place a little short of the village of Chilling on the right bank of the Zanskar river to do some river rafting - we actually drive back along the Indus till we come across a much photographed bridge across the Indus, cross to the other side and drive towards the confluence of the Indus and Zanskar rivers and then turn left up-river along the right bank of the Zanskar to get to our launching point. The river was flowing quite fast but at places it slows to a pace that actually allows you to stop rowing and look vertically up the river gorge to see the Zanskar and Ladakh mountain ranges on either side of the river looking down on you! We luckily did not have any spills into the river even though we were kitted for it but we did see another raft turn turtle and the occupants were fighting the river currents while trying to get back on board an over turned raft! Later we learnt that the Army had chosen a rather mild place for us to do our rafting instead of going up river from Chilling where there were Grade 4 and Grade 5 rapids!! So I made a mental note to do that next time around!!

After the rafting it was time to visit the Hall of Fame - a memorial to those who fought to keep Ladakh free and a integral part of India from 1947-48, then again in 1962, yet again in 1971 and lastly in 1999. It was a beautifully set up memorial - with some amazing stuff on display. The 'Last Post' was particularly poignant - a letter written by a 22 year old Indian Army officer, Capt Vijayant Thapar (Robin) just before he was killed in a pitched battle atop one of those mountains! It left us all teary-eyed especially because we knew what a herculean effort it is to even breathe when we go about our daily activities in Leh and here you had these youngsters fighting at 20'000 feet or higher for days without letting up! It was good to see those Pakistani arms captured by those intrepid Indian soldiers - all of the arms have Pakistani flags stuck on in reverse as if to cock a snoop at the enemy!

After lunch at the base camp we headed off to the little village of Chushot on the banks of the Indus about 30 kms up-river from Leh where they have the only Bactrian Camel (Double Hump camel) Breeding Center in the world - it was amazing to see those almost extinct animals up close - we even got to see a 3 month old baby double hump camel named Tony, who's mother had refused to nurse him so the staff there had taken on the job of bottle feeding the baby! The little son (Chimmi) of one of the staff there had developed a great relationship with little Tony - the pics will tell you a better story than I can!

After the camel encounter the ladies said they wanted to experience a Ladakhi village while Doc Jimmy, Gopan and I headed off to see the majestic Shanti Stupa built with Japanese money. It is an imposing monument again atop a hillock that over looks the city of Leh and the Leh valley. Once again the pictures will

Adult Bactrian or double humped camel

describe this structure better than I can. We had told the ladies that it would involve a 200 step climb up here which is why they decided they'll do the village viewing!

As it turns out one can drive all the way up to Shanti Stupa!! We did not dare tell the ladies that we actually drove up there! They were amazed that the three of us could have climbed those imposing steps and still look fresh!! Doc J thought he'd atleast try going down the steps from Shanti Stupa - so

Tony the three-month-old Bactrian camel with friend Chimmi

Gopan and I said we'd meet him at the base in the car! A little while later Doc calls to say he aborted his mission to go down the steps because its a dizzying sight from on top and there are no hand rails to steady one's self!

Shanti Stupa at Leh

Maitreya Buddha at the prayer hall near the Shanti Stupa, Leh

Our last outing for the day was to a sound and light show at the Zorawar Fort maintained by the Corp of Engineers of the Army! This is a fort built by the great Dogra military strategist Zorawar Singh in the late 1800s after his army annexed Ladakh and he launched attacks on Tibet from here. It really must have taken a master strategist to marshal those forces of 10,000 men on horseback and foot and climb those treacherous high altitude passes to launch those successful attacks on Tibet in temperatures of 20 degrees below freezing! Zorawar and his army were the first specialist high altitude fighting force!

Day Four

We set out early morning for the trip up to Khardung La - the world's highest motorable pass - 18,380 feet! It is 42 km from Leh but takes about 2.5 hours to get there because the roads are steep, winding and prone to massive rock slides which make it really difficult to keep the road operational. Plenty of bikers, mostly on Royal Enfield Bullets, pass you as you inch along the road to the Khardung La Top!

Sudha, Doc Jimmy, Sheila, Mary and Bindu at Khardungla – 18380 feet. The snow capped peaks in the background are the Karakoram range of mountains

It was freezing up there and the altitude made every one of us woozy and disoriented!

The army runs the world's highest souvenir shop up there and the ladies really cleaned out that shop! We also got to be served cinnamon flavored tea at that height by the army - it obviously was a big draw with everybody there!

With Sudha, Bindu and Gopan at Khardungla Top

Over the top and down-hill to the north is the Nubra valley and further afield is Siachen. From K Top you get to see the majestic Karakoram Range completely covered in snow because it is much higher than the height we had got to! Hats off to folks like Pat Kerr who have ridden over 4 of the world's highest motorable passes inside 24 hours - a world record! We now know first-hand what a humongous effort it must have been. And I hear he is off again some time next week on another of his crazy bikey adventures in this area!

We had not yet set eyes on the famous Yak - the animal that keeps these gentle mountain folk fed with milk, cheese, meat, fuel and wool! So on our way down back to Leh I persuaded Jamyang Tashi our Logistics Officer (from the Ladakh Scouts) to take us to a Yak farm run by the army! Boy, are those animals impressive - about one and a half times the size of the regular cow it can survive in very cold weather and on very poor grade fodder. They are crossed with cows to produce Dzomos or Dzos for short - slightly diminutive animals used as pack animals and for milk - the male is infertile but the female Dzo can reproduce!

We were soon back at base camp and pretty badly off because most of us had headaches and were quite woozy on our feet from the rapid ascent and descent we had made! So we spent the afternoon in our rooms and the ladies decided the evening would be spent checking out the Leh market. The apricots in the market there were to die for and the Ladakhi jewelry seemed to have found favour with the four women in our company!

As we descended those twisted roads from South Pullu, where we met those Yaks, I looked up in to the sky to see one of the rarest of sights - a circular rainbow around the sun - why, there were actually two concentric rainbows. I managed to capture the inner rainbow on camera but not the outer rainbow. It was indeed a sight to remember.

So finally day five, the day we would leave Ladakh, was upon us - one cannot but feel a tinge of regret for leaving this beautiful place with its cheerful people and stark scenery. I look back with a lot of longing for all that I was leaving back and a faint hope that someday I will have the opportunity to return to this ethereal place.

Apricots galore