An Idea of Home

"Every house where love abides
And friendship is a guest,
Is surely home, and home sweet home
For there the heart can rest."

Henry Van Dyke

I owe thanks to Tenzin Dolkar (who I like to think of as my one and only Tibetan reader) for introducing me to her good friend, Pema, when she found out that I was going on holiday in her hometown back in April. It was a shame that I did not get to meet Tenzin too since she no longer lives in McLeod Ganj, but life's unfair like that. Contrary to the curmudgeonly, misanthropic image I tend to project, I genuinely do enjoy meeting new people and having meaningful conversations with them.

Pema was a delight and a darling. She's sweet, chatty, hospitable, and knows practically everyone in town. Out of the four weeks I spent roving about Western Himalayan region, three of them were spent in Dharamsala and the surrounding towns and villages - and in that time, I had met up with Pema about four times over a cuppa or a bite. We spoke at length about a great many pertinent subjects like regional and international politics, Tibetan culture, local attractions, human rights, medicine, religion, books, films, and food (of course). We also had words about that pervasive, pulsing issue close to every exiled Tibetan's heart: the dream of a free Tibet.

Pema has very realistic and pragmatic views on the matter. She knew the People's Republic of China will never unclench its greedy claws around her people's land or grant Tibetans true autonomy in their own governance, but still she strives for it. I agree with her almost unreservedly, but a dialogue between two minds mirroring one another is seldom fruitful and never interesting. So, I went meta - I wanted to quiz her about the thoughts behind her thoughts. Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching satirical fantasy series for children has this immensely sensible concepts of First Sight and Second Thoughts which not nearly enough adults know about (but should). First Sight is the ability to see what's there instead of what you think is there. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think.

"Do you want Tibet freed?" I asked her point blank over coffee at Moon Peak Cafe.

"Of course!" she told me emphatically. "It's my homeland!"

I enquired further. I asked if she was born there.

"No, I was born here in India," she said.

"Have you ever been to to Tibet?"

"No..." She then smiled, understanding what I was getting at. "It's odd but somehow, I feel a very strong connection to that place."

Pema, my Tibetan Spirit Guide™, enjoys her anonymity
so I photoshopped a Vajrapani mask over her face.

That is what I truly find fascinating. She has in mind a home in a country she was not born in, and yearns to return to a land that had never heard her footfalls. Why? Why indeed.

My life story parallels Pema's but with a radically different perspective. I am ethnically Chinese and my grandparents came to the Malay Archipelago from villages in China I cannot even name, let alone pronounce. I was born here in Malaysia, and I grew up breathing Malaysian air and drinking Malaysian water. At no point in my entire existence do I even entertain the thought of China as my home. I feel absolutely no longing for the patch of dirt which some dead stranger related to me by blood happened to have been birthed on. Unlike some Malaysian Chinese who harbour borrowed pride of China's every successes and would reflexively defend China's every transgression in the world's eye, I find almost everything about the People's Republic deplorable; their values running counter to everything I cherish and stand for.

When I first landed on Indian soil in 2006 with more than a hundred other Malaysians, I realised for the first time just how powerful the idea of a home can be. Homesickness was a visible, tangible disease around campus. I've heard of how my colleagues - some of them grown men - cry themselves to shambles in their hostel beds at night, moaning like stuck pigs for a mere physical location they feel sentimental for. Eventually, a few cracked under the duress and chose to quit medical school before the first semester was up just to return to familiarity. It their first time away from home for any substantial period of time, you see, and the shock proved to be too much for them to withstand. It ironic that some of these homesick Malaysians descended from Indian migrants, and India is actually their ancestral crib.

Meanwhile, I also noticed that I am completely immune to homesickness and one has to wonder if it's because I'm deficient in some ways in the attic. If I am a Tibetan refugee, do I have it in my heart to ache for Tibet?

Perhaps, it's just the way I think about the way I think. My idea of home is protean. Sometimes, it's a person - a lover - and the warmth between her arms, and in other times, it's a state of mind. A home may mean the whole world to many but the whole wide world is home to me. Those are words I live by. The rest, if that's how one chooses to parse it, are simply details.

What does "home" mean to you?



P.S. Thanks you, Pema and Tenzin, for helping to make McLeod Ganj a home for me.



Always home,

k0k s3n w4i

The Genitalia of Hindu Worship

"Religion is like a penis.

It's fine to have one.

It's fine to be proud of it.

But please don't whip it out in public and start waving it around,

And please don't try to shove it down my children's throats."

Seen on a T-shirt

Addendum: Yours isn't better than everyone else's, regardless of what you may think.

One of my earliest primers in comparative religion came from a large, hardcover book called Myths and Legends by Bellingham, Whittaker and Grant which I bought when I was in high school because I was such a huge mythology junkie back then. It is essentially a complete idiot's guide to Norse, Greek, Chinese, Japanese and Indian stories of divinity with lots of excellent colour photographs of religious relics and arts in it. However, it is by no means encyclopaedic as it left out Middle Eastern mythoi such as Christianity and Islam, which are the two most popular superstitious belief systems in the world today.

I brought this up because pretty much everything I know about Hinduism came from between the pages of that book. In it, I first learned about Shiva Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance and the Paragon of Paradoxes, which I still consider one of the coolest gods ever conceived by the minds of humankind. However, in my readings, I also found out some stuff about Shaivistic worship which are downright goofy.

Highlighted text reads: "But Shiva is most often worshipped as the
lingam. The lingam is usually a cylinder of dark, shiny stone with a curved
top set in a circular receptacle, or yoni, the symbol of female sexuality."

Page 152 of my copy of Myths and Legends says: "Shiva is a very ancient god. He is still extremely popular today and is often worshipped in the form of a lingam, a stone phallus."

Alongside the androgynous Ardhanarishvara (the Lord who is half-woman), the lingam is an iconograph of Shiva I have always kept an eye out for. It supposedly represents his awesome "male creative energy", which is an euphemism if I ever seen one. When I was in Shiv-Bhumi, the earthly Abode of Shiva in Bharmour, I was seeing lingams everywhere in the Chaurasi Temple complex which boasts no less than 84 of Shiva's godly tallywhacker littering the compound. It made me feel slightly violated, like I was being spiritually bukkake-ta the whole time I was there.

The most impressive shrine in the compound is the 6th century Manimahesh temple...

The tinsel streamers undulating in the breeze like sperms weren't helping to put me at ease at all.

... which houses Shiva's thick black lingam.

"Kneel and worship my monolithic ebony rod, mortals!"

Come to think of it, even the stone Śikhara-style temple is shaped like a mega-sized rock-solid schlong.

And what more, it's ribbed for her pleasure.

Look at how wide its corona, I mean, roof is. And it's so long tall that it's almost a skyraper. Skyscraper! I meant to say skyscraper!

Okay, moving on.

The iconographical counterpart of the lingam is the yoni, which is the Sanskrit word for the female genitalia, and it is thought to be a symbol for the divine feminine, the source of all that exists, and it looks like a minimalistic square womb with a vaginal passage leading out of it (if you remember, I have actually mentioned the yoni in passing in one of my older posts about the Jesus Fish). When the source of existence, yoni, is conjugalated with the creative force, lingam, it becomes the abstract symbol of creation itself: the linga-yoni.

Here's one I found in the same temple courtyard,

Um, that is NOT how sex works, kids.

The orange stuff covering Shiva's rigid manhood is kumkum, a powder used for social and religious markings in Hindu culture. Devotees would rub the lingam and then anoint their foreheads with their kumkum-stained fingers, making a mark called a tilaka. I don't even need to try - the jokes practically write themselves now.

And thus concludes today's lesson on the beliefs and practices of a major world religion. Isn't learning fun?

For the post describing my thrilling trip to Bharmour, follow this link: Landslides! Rockfalls! And the Road to Bharmour.

An avid 'Where's Willy?' player,
k0k s3n w4i

The Weird Meats of Tibet

"Vegetarianism is harmless enough though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness."

Robert Hutchison, address to the
British Medical Association, 1930

After mucking about in McLeod Ganj for a couple of weeks, I've grown rather familiar with a lot of the usual suspects of Tibetan cuisine like thukpa, momo, tsampa, phingsha, tingmo and laping (particularly the dry, yellow ones which I really liked). I've even had Tibetan butter tea or pocha before which was quite horrible none too suitable for my palate, but I still remain ready to give anything new a try. On that note, I went to my ever-helpful Tibetan Spirit Guide™ to see if she had anything a little bit more uh, exotic to recommend to me.

That's when I first learned about lowa khatsa, one of her favourite dishes. I wrote it down in my notebook so I could order it the next time I find myself in a Tibetan restaurant.

And I did.

Oooh, what is it?

It's spicy bits of fried LUNG. Surprise!

I am not a fan of animal innards. With the exception of a piece of barbecued goat liver straight from the cooking fire which I ate when I was trekking in the Thar Desert a few years ago, I've never taken a real shine to any internal organs of any animals. It's not that I'm squeamish or anything - I just don't like the taste and texture of viscera. Now, lung... I've never eaten that before. I never thought I'd acquire a taste for pig's blood tofu either, but I did.

For those who are curious as to what manner of creature the lung were appropriated from: it's goat. Or at least that's what the waiter told me. I'm not sure if it's a dish prepared exclusively using goat lungs or if any lung would do just fine though.

The texture of the lowa was spongy and squishy, like deep fried bean curd but airier (it's filled with hollow cavities after all). It reminds me of the time when I was in the first year of med school and the lecturer invited me to squeeze a whole human lung just for fun. I still remember the little bubbles of formaldehyde frothing out of the bronchus. Chewing on a wad of lowa feels very much like that except instead of my palms, I'm getting that sensation in my mouth. Some people might find that upsetting, but I bet it's not as upsetting as that time when my Ex-Grrrfriend™ swallowed a piece of human fat (remind me to tell you that story sometime).

There was no extraordinary lung-ey flavour which I could ascertain, but it was quite heavily spiced after all. As a whole, it tasted okay but I was too busy noticing the alien texture to notice much of anything else about it. I wouldn't shun it if it's on the table, but I am sure I wouldn't be in a hurry to order it again on my own volition.

Another Tibetan delight which the Tibetan Spirit Guide™ got me to try is gyurma which she described enigmatically as "Tibetan sausage".

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what gyurma looks like.

They looked exactly the dismembered ends of cancerous penes deep-fried in oil. Go ahead. Google 'penile squamous cell carcinoma' if you dare.

Then again, I'm pretty sure Chinese sausages or lapcheong (which I consider to be delicious) look equally unappetising to people who are unused to its how it looks like. Anyway, gyurma is described in Wikipedia as Tibetan blood sausages with yak or sheep blood and roasted barley flour or rice as filler, a fact I wasn't privy to when I tucked in.

The sausage skin was rather tough and rubbery, like several layers of condoms melted together, while the inside was firm (but not uniformly so). All in all, it was a rather dry affair. Unlike lapcheong which has a very strong savoury and sweet fragrant taste, the gyurma I had was bland, surprising considering its very in-your-face appearance. I experimented with salt, vinegar and hot sauce, but the results were less than exciting.

Since I've only tried the the above two dishes only once, I'm not sure if what I had was how they usually taste like - but in my defense, I did order them from a certain restaurant that the Tibetan Spirit Guide™ vouched for. Still, I can't possibly like everything that comes out of a Tibetan kitchen right?

Especially when they are pieces of fried lung and blood sausages. Heck, I don't even like everything that comes out of a Chinese kitchen! Yes, I'm looking at you, chicken feet. You are bloody disgusting.

Strange meats before him,

k0k s3n w4i

Landslides! Rockfalls! The Rough Road to Bharmour

"Мчится дальняя дорога,
осталось нам не много

И с попутным нам ветром,
мы ждем яркого света

Тот свет в конце туннеля,
нас манит к нашей цели

Через рвы и преграды,
мы ждем больше награды.

Солнышко лучистое, небеса так чисты

Освещают нам дорогу с высока"

Дорога (2009), МакSим

I was all ready to leave Chamba before the night was. Quietly placing my key at the receptionist's counter, I tread softly out of the guesthouse and walked the twenty or so paces to the town's bus station where about a hundred people swaddled in their travelling blankets were waiting blankly (some from the evening before) to depart. My first challenge of the newborn day was to ascertain which bus I expect to board by repeating the name of my destination emphatically to strangers whose command of English starts and ends at, "No English." The air was chilly so I amused myself by huffing and sighing misty breaths from the warmth of my chest. On the foggy main street, a ritual procession of Hindu trumpeters, pipers, cymbalists and mantra mumblers marched in and then marched out of earshot again. It was far from six and farther still from true daylight.

That day, my plan was to visit the 1500 years old township of Bharmour situated about 65 kilometres east of Chamba. The ancient erstwhile capital of the region is nestled on the side of a mountain at the altitude of about 2195 metres, overlooking "the edge of a seemingly bottomless valley" according to the tatty photocopied pages of my guidebook. It's a three-hour journey by bus. In theory.

The breakfast stop at the village of Rakh after the first half-hour.

The road is a thrilling and treacherous one. It's narrow, serpentine and crumbly at parts. There's a constant danger that it might just give way under the weight of say, a bus, and plunge it into the mighty Ravi River below. The other threat loomed overhead in the form of fractured shale mountains known to moodily unload cascades of rocks at a moment's notice. By the way, I am not recounting these possible perils to romanticise my journey or make me appear more intrepid that I really am. I actually experienced several of these hazards when I was on the road to Bharmour. Honest-to-goat.

Landslid and rockfallen before the first hour of the journey was even up.

I have never felt such an immediate threat to my life as when I had to get off the bus and make my way past the debris on foot, noticing only after I was halfway through that stray shards of razor-sharp shales were still tumbling down the mountainside! The landslide was ongoing! Without so much as a yelp of panic, I sprinted the rest of the way across before one could cleave my skull open and decorate the countryside with my tofu.

Check out how massive the rocks are compared to the puny wayfarers.

Being unable to speak with any of my fellow passengers due to our pesky language barrier, I assumed that there would be relay transportation on the other side, but the walk to it was unexpectedly long. Apparently, a similar obstacle had also blocked the road ahead of us, creating a few kilometres of pedestrian-only stretch.

I honestly saw it as a stroke of good luck. It allowed me to sightsee and take photographs at my leisure, and the Himalayan scenery there was a grand affair to behold; so majestic that it gave me chills.

This is what I live for. This, and sushi.

A little rain cataract.

Imagine a segment of that rock face sliding down and crushing the people below.

After my unexpected but refreshing hike, I boarded the second bus and was on my merry way again - for about forty minutes. Another bountiful tandem collapse of shale and soil had rendered the road impassable for anything wider than a bicycle, and once more everybody had to get down and get a move on. The fact that no one grumbled or was at a loss for what to do made me think that such delays are so routine that the people here hardly notice them anymore.

My next ride was a jeep which was stuffed about a dozen people past safe capacity - that's normal hereabouts. Lucky for me, I got to ride shotgun, allowing me to continue basking in the magnificent views and snap more pictures. I don't recommend this for those who are afraid of heights or are generally faint of heart because the jeep cuts really close to the edge. There's a very real fear of being tossed clean out of the vehicle and down, down, down into the white waters below should the jeep hit a particularly nasty pothole or brake abruptly. Compounding the thrill was our speedster driver who saw no reason to go easy on the accelerator as he snaked with reckless abandon through the precarious mountain road.

Waterfall down a sheer cliff.

That jeep there should give you a sense of scale.

Believe it or not, the road to Bharmour is a two-lane highway.

The river Ravi, which accompanies the road two-thirds of the way.

The subsequent turn of events may be a wee bit hard to swallow but I assure you it did happen. We were ejected from the jeep due to yet another pile of rocks and soil standing between us and Bharmour. I knew the tempestuous rainstorm which paid the Chamba Valley region a visit the night before was no drizzle but still I wouldn't have imagined that it was strong enough to smash the stony hills here to smithereens. Still, I suppose I ought to be thankful that this time, there was no need to walk very far to hitch a ride on the next bus.

Eventually, I arrived in the village of Kharamukh which marks the end second third point of the barely functional  highway to Bharmour. Here, the road crosses a thin bridge spanning the Ravi, and ascends a few hundred feet before disappearing into what looked like a crack in the mountain range.

At the confluence of the Budhil and the Ravi.

The last third of the Bharmour Road runs along the side of a tributary of the Ravi River called the Budhil which was responsible for cutting the canyon out over millions of years. I didn't think it was possible but the landscape on this leg of the journey is even more awe-inspiring than the part before. Sighing, I wished the bus would stop so I can go down, stretch my legs, and drink it all in.

Ever heard of the simile, "as big as a house"? Those white spots dotting the terraced mountainside are houses.

I got my wish.

This time, the impediment came in the form of a section of the road which had caved under its own weight and tumbled the long way down to the Budhil River at the bottom of the "seemingly bottomless valley". There were no survivors - mainly because no vehicles were ill-fated enough to be travelling on the road at the moment of its structural failure. I am certain that it wouldn't have been a good way to go. Also, it's quite a discomfiting thing to know that at any given second, the very ground beneath the wheels of your bus can just quit its job without so much as a two-week notice.

Examining the disaster area, I realised that the road was built entirely out of shale shards chipped right off the mountain's face and stacked above one another with nary a lick of mortar, glue or phlegm to hold them together (actually, seeing that it's India and its people's love of spitting, I'm not completely ready to rule out phlegm yet), and I'm not talking Incan-style masonry with precisely cut and fitted stone blocks here either. Even to my untrained eye, the shale bits looked like they were simply heaped together higgledy-piggledy, helter-skelter, pell-mell, willy-nilly and all other manners of rhyming reduplicative compound words which convey just how little the engineers and their road builders cared - assuming generously, of course, that an engineer was involved at some stage of the road's construction. Doubtful.

I posted this picture once in an older post. Here it is again for your viewing pleasure.

After tippy-toeing across the defect in the road and boarding my fourth bus that morning, I was admittedly a lot less confident in my chances of survival but I filed it away in the Hakuna Matata Bobby McFerrin part of my brain. Before too long, Bharmour segued into view without warning from around a rocky promontory like Hilton's Shangri-La walled in by snow-capped mountains and roofed by the cloud-swathed sky. It was an impressive sight to behold indeed.

Who wouldn't want to live in a place like this?

Bharmour, formerly known as Brahmpura.

A stitched photograph of the scenery as seen from the Chaurasi Hotel's restaurant in Bharmour. Click to enlarge.
This one is hard to make because I never meant the constituting photographs to be combined in the first place.

Hanuman says, "S'up?" Ganesha says, "OH HAI."

So, after a five hour journey totalling four bus rides, two long walks and a perilous jeep run, I finally managed to complete a journey that usually takes only three hours on a single bus. I thought I made pretty good time considering that there were six separate landslides and rockfalls which stood between my destination and I. In a more civilised part of the world, I wouldn't even have a prayer of reaching there because the road would have been closed to the public for daft reasons such as "safety", "surveyance" and "reparation works".

The hills around these parts are prime hiking country but for a day-tripper like me who was a wee bit behind schedule, there was only one point of real interest: the ancient Chaurasi temple compound with its ornately-sculpted stone Śikhara shrines. The absolute centrepiece of the the flagstone square is the monumental 6th century Manimahesh Temple which houses a god's penis within its sanctum sanctorum.

I've seen pictures of it when it was covered in snow. It was breathtaking.

There were also pesky schoolchildren everywhere. A few public schools operate around the area and students from these institutes frequently use the surplus of free space in the courtyard as outdoor classrooms. So if you plan to visit this location, do remember to carry a can of kids repellant with you.

Holy crap! Why didn't my classroom look like this when I was in Primary School?!

Of course, as beautiful as these old Śikharas are, they cannot hold a candle to the real star attractions of Bharmour: the amazing spectacle of the tremendous skyscraping mountains and the adventure of actually getting there (though I'm fairly certain that the number of hindrances I personally faced was quite immoderate). It was a total treat for me to have to brave the same road back to Chamba later that afternoon.

The bus drivers and conductors however, did not share my enthusiasm for the return journey. My departure was interrupted by a shouting match between the conductors of two different buses trying to decide which team should go to Chamba while the other go wherever else buses from Bharmour have to go - and as far as I could tell, they were trying to settle it by seeing who can spray more saliva into the other guy's face.

It was a local science teacher who explained the nature of the disagreement to me and after a whole day of speaking in single-word utterances, I was glad to have someone I could have an actual conversation with. I don't remember what we talked about, but one thing he said stuck with me:

"It's a good thing that the people of India still fear the gods. It prevents most of them from stealing and robbing others because they think that they are constantly being watched."

The Battle of the Bus Conductors finally concluded with the younger, less-loud loser and his driver having to shuttle the waiting passengers back to Chamba. Soon, we arrived back at where the road had wimped out and fallen off.

See, I wasn't joking at all about how flimsily the road was constructed.

Same scene, but shot further away from the dust cloud.

This was certainly a first for me: standing quietly by and watching as they sloppily rebuild the road I was going to traverse across in a multi-tonne bus. It's like watching my surgeon read some hastily scrawled instructions on the back of a paper napkin right before he performs a circumcision on my unmentionables. My testicles shrank at the very thought.

It took less than an hour for the road crew and friends to make the passage wide enough to admit the bus I was on, and their haste gave me no reassurance whatsoever. All the passengers (including yours truly) pragmatically made the crossing first, and had the bus rendezvous with us on the other side. It was miracle that the newly assembled road held fast. Thank Lord Shiva and his magic sky dick!

Then it started raining. That's worrying.

♪ The goats are going to Bharmour! ♫

♪ The humans are going to Chamba! ♫

Well, that looks safe.

Fortunately, there were no further snags for the rest of way back except for a little stream of silt that we had to ford. It was quite exciting to be honest what with the gushing, grey rainwater eroding the road away from the bottom of our tires and trying to wash our bus down the drink. I wanted to call the Long-Suffering Girlfriend™ to tell her that I love her in case anything should happen to me, but I had very little credit left so I decided to be thrifty and save it instead.

I didn't realise it till much later but seemed that in the few short hours I spent gallivanting in Bharmour, they have managed to clear the detritus from all the rockslides I've ran into earlier that morning. I thought that was bloody efficient, don't you?

Anyway, to cap this story off, I arrived in Chamba at dinnertime in the same bus I left Bharmour with, which probably does not happen everyday. I felt unnaturally serene in spite of spending having just spent an entire day experiencing what most people would consider one annoyance after another. I can't really explain it. Some people find inner peace from fishing, prayers or transcendental meditation. For me, it's being out there in the great Himalayan outdoors where the gorgeous landscape is actively trying to kill me.

***

For those interested in making this expedition yourselves, here's a useful sightseer's summary and diagram,

The blue line represents the rivers while the orange one represents the road.

Travelling from Chamba, the view will be on the right in the first third of the journey up until the village of Rakh. After that, the road crosses the river Ravi, shifting the scenery to the road's left. Even after crossing the Ravi a second time at Kharamukh, the scenery remains on the left as the road accompanies the Budhil River throughout the final third. So, it's advisable to try and bag a seat on the left side of your bus or cab for maximum enjoyment. Me? I switched sides accordingly every time I had to change transports, but don't count on a rockfall to help you with that.

That is all. Hope I have made you jealous with you have enjoyed all my pictures.



P.S. If you felt that the part of the post about the Chaurasi temple complex in Bharmour was a tad brief, it's because I've cannibalised pictures from it for another post.



From Bharmour with amour,

k0k s3n w4i

Khajjiar in Less Than a Dozen Snapshots

"And I'd like to give my love to everybody, and let them know that the grass may look greener on the other side, but believe me, it's just as hard to cut."

Little Richard

Khajjiar looks like it belongs on the back of a postcard. It's little more than a tidy little meadow surrounding a puny lake and ringed by a dense deodar forest midway between quaint Dalhousie and the city of Chamba - 2000 metres above sea level. In 1992, the Swiss Ambassador officially baptised Khajjiar as the Mini Switzerland of Himachal Pradesh because it apparently harbours a rare combination of three distinct ecosystems: lake, pasture and forest for the price of one. I daresay "lake" is a rather immodest exaggeration of its sole body of water. It's more of a "pond" or "puddle" really. Now before any ecologists pop in to call me names, I want to just say that I know the distinction between lakes and ponds are not determined their size but rather by the presence of an aphotic zone - but I just couldn't call that wimpy patch of wetness in the middle of Khajjiar a lake with a straight face.

Nevertheless, it's a great spot to spend an afternoon, and I spent most of mine there sitting on the porch of an unoccupied wooden chalet writing, while watching holidaymakers make their holidays and honeymooners moon their honeys. Kids, I imagine, would love this grassy wonderland. They can ride horses and ponies. They can strap themselves inside huge plastic spheres and be rolled down the hill tumble dryer style. They can ride the wind on plastic wings as several men tow them by sprinting comically below ground. For tourists with absolutely no sense of dignity, they can pay to hold a bunny in a basketful of flowers while their companions photograph their moment of self-inflicted dorkiness.

Anyway, pictures.

1. That's pretty much all of Khajjiar right there in the picture.

2. This is a view of Khajjiar from the opposite end of the clearing.

3. A long way from the original.

4. The Battle of the Sexes starts young.

5. Bowl for sheeps while you're inside a giant, man-sized hamster ball!

6. A giant coppery statue of Shiva at a temple nearby.

7. The surrounding mountains and valleys sure looks pretty. You can't see this from the Khajjiar meadow.

8. Such a pretty colour. I wish I know a herpetologist who can help me identify this lil' feller here.

9. A ladybird on a weird bleached-looking bit of vegetative matter.

10. My heart goes out to those who feel like they need to pay to have their photographs taken with a rabbit.

11. A cow in front of the world's smallest Ferris wheel.

Khajjiar is a very cheery, peaceful sort of place, if a little too gentle for my taste. There's a bus that heads out there from Dalhousie every morning, early, passing by the Kalatop Wildlife Sanctuary. In the evening, another bus will swing Khajjiar on its way to Chamba. There are guesthouses there, both privately-owned and government-run, should one feel so inclined to linger.

Oh yeah, funny aside: I was asking the manager about the room prices in one of the Himachal Pradesh Tourism Development Corp. (HPTDC) hotels and he flat out told me that it's not worth staying there. Instead, he cheerfully recommended that I look into some of the non-government inns. Either he's receiving a cut of commission from the private hoteliers or he simply didn't want guests messing up one of his nice rooms and actually giving him work to do.

Never been to the real Switzerland,

k0k s3n w4i

Aboard the Kangra Seven-to-Seven

"I'll tell you a riddle. You're waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you don't know for sure. But it doesn't matter. How can it not matter to you where that train will take you?"

Mal in Inception (2010)

The Dauladhar mountains, as seen from the Kangra Valley.

Little birds on the internet told me that one of the best ways to see the entire span of the Kangra Valley in a day is through a window of a train on the Kangra Rail. There are only two mountain lines which run in Himachal Pradesh: this and the Kalka-Shimla Toy Train - which I rode three years ago and declared to be the Best Train Ride Ever™. While the Kalka-Shimla Railway make a boast of its 864 bridges and 102 tunnels, the Kangra rail claims to be an entirely different marvel of architecture. Through the sage planning of its engineers, it deftly avoided most obstacles on its way. In its hundred miles, it only bores through the hills twice, allowing an almost ever-present, unimpeded view of snowy, glaciated peaks and golden-green fields as far as the eye can feast.

On a whim (of which I have many), I decided to ride it from end to end so I made my way from Bir to Joginder Nagar, a nowhere municipality of no particular note, and stayed a night there just so I could catch the early morning seven-twenty bound for Pathankot. As expected, Joginder Nagar features zero sightseeing value but by a freak stroke of fate, something actually interesting happened on the evening I rode into town - but that, my dear readers, is a story for another time.

Metaphorical mathematics states that a picture equals a thousand words, so I'll just shut up for a sec and let you see for yourself what I saw on my day-long train ride.

This picture was taken literally minutes after the train left Joginder Nagar.

No words I say can add anything to this.

I can, however, throw in a turbaned dude if you're into that sort of thing.

Ah, alpine mountains and snow-fed streams!

There's something warm, fuzzy and wholesome about richly golden wheatfields under a big blue sky.

Getting access to these stirringly beautiful countryside scenery is not without its sacrifices. While the initial stretch of tracks between Joginder Nagar and Baijnath Paprola gathers few travellers (so few that I could freely change seats from one side of the train to the other as I please), the majority of the subsequent leg of the ride came straight out of a National Geographic special where the immensity of India's fecund population introduces itself to me and packed my carriage far beyond the point of safe capacity. About half of the passengers on board was physically extruded outside the train through the doors and windows. The laws of Physics dictate that solid objects like human beings cannot occupy the same space at the same time are absolute and cannot be broken, but I can tell you that it's not for the lack of trying.

I shall show it to you through sepia-coloured glasses, if only to soften the deplorable violation of the human right to personal space you are about to witness with false nostalgia.

With sepia.

Without sepia.

For the blokes who were clinging precariously to the train's chassis like copepods do to the eyes of Greenland sharks, the ride must have been quite a thrill, particularly when the vehicular beast rumbles across chasms on skeleton bridges.

I'm just glad I didn't have to do this with my ten-kilogramme backpack strapped to me.

This guy was clinging to my window. Check out how far his ass is from the hard, unforgiving ground below.

Bridge over a mostly dry riverbed.

I remained seated by a window for the entire second half of the journey, but not by choice. I was boxed in and wedged in place by an Indian family comprising of four generations of women. For more than six hours, I could not get up to go to the loo or stand up to stretch my leg. There were times when I found myself chanting mentally, 'Stay sane, man, and keep it all together now,' over and over again like a madness mantra.

A plump Tibetan teenage girl seemed to have lost it, and started weeping piteously. I assumed that she was bemoaning the inhumane conditions she found herself trapped in, but I could be wrong. Considering how familiar I was with the Tibetan language (i.e. not even a little), she could very well be grieving her puppy which just got eaten by a wildcat earlier that morning. The trans-generational gaggle of ladies around me tried to do the motherly thing and comfort her, but she proved to be obstinately inconsolable.

With sepia.

Without sepia.

I seem to get stuck with little girls on trains more frequently than it is statistically probable. This kid couldn't speak any English at all so I amused myself by pretending that everything she said was a Hindi variant of 'Are we there yet?'

Alright, I admit that I didn't actually had as bad a time as I have led you to believe. It was a novel experience, and for me, that overrides any discomfort I have to endure to live it. Most of the passengers on my train were a fun lot. They whooped every time we cross a bridge, and those who hung out at of the doorways happily helped those trapped inside to refill water and buy snacks when we make stops at stations. In the two tunnels the locomotive wormed through, everyone just misplaced their excrement and howled wildly in unison as if we were on a roller-coaster. Little girls, grown men, and housewives; they were all doing it. It it was a strangely heartwarming slice of life and I am to have been there to see it.

Even so, I can't say I was feeling too sorry when the train pulled into Pathankot at half past six. Novelties do wear out after all.

A myna I saw at the Baijnath Paprola station.

It can also do this.

P.S. If you're going in an easterly direction, from Pathankot to Joginder Nagar, you should sit on the right side of the train in the first half of the journey. In the second half, the scenery is on the left side.

Sardined,

k0k s3n w4i