DHELA THATCH - MY HIDEAWAY FOR THE DAY AFTER

 These are perilous times for homo sapiens, regardless of whether you believe in the predictions of Nostradamus or the epiphanies of Baba Venga. Thanks to a trio of psychopathic megalomaniacs, we are being pushed to the edge of extinction, one lie and tweet at a time. Drones and rockets are raining down in Russia and Ukraine like confetti on a Victory Day parade. West Asia is being showered with hypersonic missiles and ICBMs like the guests at an Ambani wedding with Rolex watches. Nearer home, there is no telling when the "sindoor" in our Vishwaguru's veins gets replaced with enriched uranium and we nuke Pakistan, to be nuked by China in turn as a return gift: the Chinese are nothing if not polite to a fault.

It's time for us to start looking for a safe hideaway to weather the nuclear winter that appears to be on its way, notwithstanding that current temperatures in North India do not presage a winter anytime soon. Donald Trump may have his underground shelters in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, and Mr. Modi may have his cave in Kedarnath to tide over the Day After (with or without cameras), but here in Puranikoti there are neither bunkers nor caves, just houses designed by Delhi-based architects which would not withstand a Kangana Ranaut tantrum, let alone a nuclear blast. So I've been applying my rapidly atrophying brain to think of a safe place where I could repair with the family and the pooch, and I think I've found it!

Dhela Thatch. (A thatch is a meadow or glade surrounded by thick forests, a traditional camping site for shepherds, Gujjars and trekkers). Dhela thatch is located deep in the Great Himalayan National Park (GHNP) of Kullu district, 35 kms from the nearest roadhead at Neuli in the valley of the Sainj river, at an altitude of 12000 feet. It takes two days of strenuous trekking to get there, and once there you don't want to leave, believe me. I didn't: I've camped there on three occasions on my treks in the GHNP: it's the nearest I've come to Eden, and if Worsworth  had been there he would have immediately dashed off a few poems before you could say "My heart leaps up..." 

                                      [ Dhela thatch in the GHNP. Photo by author.]

Dhela is a gently sloping meadow, about two acres in size, perched just below the ridge line that divides the Sainj and Tirthan valleys in the Great Himalayan National Park in Kullu. Surrounded by thick stands of oak and deodar, with dense thickets of dwarf rhododendron and hill bamboo on one side, it is an ideal camping site: there is even a little brook which provides water. The camping site is surrounded by a vast thicket of juniper and dwarf rhododendron where the monal and rarely sighted western tragopan come to feed at sun-set. The Forest department has built a stout log hut at its upper edge for use in the winters (at 12000 feet Dhela can get a lot of snow)- for the rest of the year one can happily pitch tents anywhere on the dale. The height, mix of vegetation and undergrowth and the open spaces make it an ideal habitat for Himachal's two most prized pheasant species- the monal and the highly endangered Western Tragopan (Jujju Rana- the King of Birds, literally) and sightings of both are quite common. The crags below it are home to the "ghoral" (mountain goat) which can be easily spotted sunning themselves in the morning sun. The view of the GHNP landscape from here is stupendous, framed by the majestic 16000 high Khandedhar range to the north, the even higher Pin Parbat massif to the north-west, the Tirthan ridge to the south-east, and beyond that the bleak ranges on which is located the holy peak of Srikhand Mahadev. There is a small "jogni" or religious cairn at the top of the ridge, bedecked with colourful prayer flags which is ideal for meditation, bird watching or simply sunning oneself with a favourite book.

       [Trekking party approaching Dhela Thatch. Photo by Sanjeeva Pandey]

          

Dhela is not a place where you have to DO anything; it is God's, and nature's, ultimate creation which invites you to simply immerse yourself in the simplicity, beauty and unhurried rhythms of a life unsullied by technology, materialism and human ambitions. Listen to the birds singing joyfully at dawn and dusk-not for you, but for the sheer joy of greeting another day, observe with wonder the rising sun every morning and feel its spreading warmth bringing to life God's myriad creatures, dip your hands in the little spring and drink of its snow-melt waters, marvel at the sight of the ghoral grazing on 75 degree slopes, gaze above at the lammergeier hovering in ever enlarging circles in the emerald blue skies, keeping watch on the world on behalf of its creator, sit cosily by a blazing campfire at night wondering why the moths hurl themselves into the fire-do they love its glow or do they fear it? Dhela has the questions, it also has the answers.

                          

                           [The incomparable Western Tragopan pheasant]

This is indeed Omar Khayyam territory for me:                                  

" Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,

 A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse- and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness-

And Wilderness is Paradise enow!"

THOUGHTS ON JIHADS, CIGARETTES AND THE PERFECT PLEASURE.

Baba Ramdev's recent video about starting a "sherbet jihad" against (presumably) the iconic Rooh Afza put me in mind of another jihad that has been raging for some time now but hasn't got the attention it deserves. I refer to the "cigarette jihad" against smokers, which is far more ubiquitous than the other jihads: the latter are limited in scope, applicable only to members of certain religions, but the cigarette jihad applies across the board to everyone who smokes, irrespective of his or her religion, and is a shocking display of secularism, in my view.

No one but a smoker understands fully the import of the saying: you can run but you can't hide; for a smoker today there's no place to hide (and have a quiet puff)- he is banished from restaurants, cinema halls, buses and metros, drawing rooms, planes and airports, and even in his own castle he has to take refuge in either a toilet or a balcony. His social status is lower than that of a Punjabi or Gujarati immigrant in Trump's America. Doctors talk down to him, Finance Ministers treat him like a milch cow, hotels consign him to non-smoking rooms without any room service, airport managers shove him into smoking cubicles resembling tandoors, socialites turn up their rump at him with a flounce, pretty girls refuse to share their mobile numbers with him. In Washington for a World Bank meeting, I had to go down thirty floors, out in the freezing cold, every time I wished to have a cigarette. Cadging a few million dollars from the Bank certainly wasn't worth the effort. But it wasn't always so for people of my generation.

I started smoking in my first year in college and have not looked back since, except to recollect, with a touch of nostalgia, the good days we have left behind. Those were the days of Clint Eastwood, Marlon Brando and Humphrey Bogart who always spoke through a cloud of smoke. One could smoke anywhere then- with a cup of coffee at Trinca's on Park Steet watching the non-pareil Usha Uthap belting out "Ramba ho", or in the AC coach of the the Vestibule train while travelling home to Kanpur from Calcutta, or while watching a movie in the Rivoli in Connaught Place. Till the early 1990s I distinctly remember being allowed to smoke even on international flights, occasionally even being gifted a couple of packs of Marlboros by an air hostess impressed with my diplomatic passport! (In those days wrestling federation chiefs didn't get these maroon passports!). Girls didn't exactly swoon over us (that was reserved for the leftists) but they did occasionally cuddle up for a second hand whiff and that was, as Omar Khayyam would have no doubt said, "Heaven enow." Why, one could even light up during job interviews: I remember being interviewed by the Director Personnel of SBI in the Parliament Street office in 1973 for the job of a Probationary Officer. I lit up while waiting for my turn in the ante-room; when I was called I walked in with my cigarette, waste not, want not being my creed. I didn't get the job, of course, but not because of the lighted fag: I suspect it had something to do with my answer to the Director's question: "Where do you see yourself five years from now in this Bank?" In hindsight, my answer was perhaps too cocky: "In your chair, sir." I have since learned that honesty is never the best policy at job interviews.

All pretty tragic, considering the benefits of smoking, both to the individual and to society. Non-smokers are not aware of what they are missing. Cigarettes are the food for broken souls. You can't buy happiness but anyone can buy cigarettes, and that comes pretty close. Oscar Wilde famously said that "a cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?" Groucho Marx went a step further when he stated that, given the choice between a woman and a cigar, he would always choose the cigar. At the age of 74, I see the wisdom in what he said: it's easier now to light up a cigarette than a woman. There are other benefits too: smoking is the perfect way to commit suicide without actually dying, and therefore it obviates the need for having to save up for your old age!

One final thought before I part with you, dear reader. Cigarettes, or at least the buying of them, is a very accurate indicator of inflation and rising costs of living, certainly much better than the consumption "basket" govt. economists are talking about all the time. This basket, of course, is rigged like a casino and contains only what suits the govt. But a smoker never lies. Let me illustrate my point.

I started my smoking career in the early 70's with the humble "beedi" (which cost about 25 paise for a pack of ten) since my Dad gave me a pocket money of Rs.10/- per month only and was a more difficult negotiator than Donald Trump. In the fullness of time, as domestic income rose, one progressed up the carcinogenic scale  to Wills Flake, Wills  Navy Cut, Gold Flake and India Kings. The apotheosis was attained when, after the generosity of the Sixth Pay Commission, one touched the sublime heights of Classics and Marlboro. Sadly, that didn't last long though with the arrival of Ms Sitharaman, Hardeep Singh Puri and Mr. Gadkari. So, like an Everest summiteer, one descended back the way one had come- a brand notch lower with the filing of each successive ITR. I am back to Wills Flakes these days, and desperately trying to keep the "beedis" at bay.

This bit of history is prime raw material for economists, who rarely trust cooked-up govt. figures to determine inflation rates, and look for secondary indicators: household savings, number of cars bought, power consumption, real estate prices, and so on. They also rely on some rather odd if not weird indicators. Alan Greenspan, the then Federal Reserve Chairman, invented the Underwear Index to gauge consumer sentiments and economic cycles- his theory was that in a downturn people bought fewer underwears! A more recent one has been reported by the Wall Street Journal: the Home Lunch indicator. It says that when more people bring lunch from home instead of eating in the cafeteria or a restaurant, that indicates a tightening of the budget belt and increase in cost of living. Visits to brothels and night clubs is another indicator- in an economic downturn they decline significantly!

This is precisely where the cigarette comes in handy as an economic indicator : a shift in the brand one smokes is a faithful index of the cost of living. The government should include it in their inflation basket. As for me, I'm desperately trying to reduce my daily intake of the cancer sticks but it's a losing battle, methinks, especially with pensioners likely to be denied the benefits of the 8th Pay Commission. As the gay smoker, who was trying to quit, confided in his friend: I'm down to two butts a day.

WHO'S AFRAID OF THE NEW NORMAL ?

India, we are told, has now entered a "New Normal" after that little "menage a trois" with Pakistan and China in the first week of May in which we still don't know who came out on top, as it were.  And there is certainly plenty of evidence to back this claim, viz. that we have plumbed new depths of abnormalcy.                                                                                      Our prime -time TV news channels apparently missed out on the cease-fire bit because they continue to fight the war every evening three weeks after the cease-fire, and are all in favour of expanding it to Turkiye. The Prime Minister has just had another blood transfusion and has replaced the RBCs in his veins with "sindoor", which perhaps explains why he goes red in the face every time he talks about the four day war. Shashi Tharoor has decided that when dealing with terrorists or the Congress high command covert action is ineffective; so now he has gone overt (against his party, not the terrorists) and placed one foot squarely in the BJP camp; as the poet said: if one foot comes, can the other be far behind? Mr. Jaishankar has by now dropped so many bricks that he can now use them to construct a mausoleum of his rhetorical follies; the latest brick (boulder, actually) being his response to a Danish journalist's question as to where the USA was during the recent conflict with Pakistan; our Delphic EAM's nonpareil reply- "the USA was in the United States". At least he knows his geography. Not to be outdone by a mere bureaucrat, the Supreme Court broke new ground by appointing an SIT of three police officers to decipher and interpret the nuances of an English post by a professor. So, move over Shashi Tharoor and Chetan Bhagat and Jug Suraiya-your lexicographic skills have now been replaced by a bunch of cops whose vocabulary consists almost entirely of four letter words. We now eagerly await the scholarly interpretation of four of India's finest.

Other aspects of the New Normal are even more disturbing. I refer, for instance, to our new-found "Boycott Jihad", which involves boycotting tourism/visits to every country that does not see eye to eye with, or say aye to aye to, us. This dimension of our foreign policy is not guided by the Ministry of External Affairs, as you would expect, but by companies like Make My Trip or Ease My Trip, and anchors headed by the (dis)likes of Arnab Goswami, Gaurav Sawant and Navika Kumar. And so, we have by now boycotted Pakistan, Maldives, Bangladesh, Turkiye, Azerbaijan, Canada. On the TRP chopping block are: France (for not sharing the Rafale source-code), Colombia (for condoling the death of Pakistanis in our attack), South Africa (for daring to haul Israel before the International Criminal Court), Bhutan (for charging a tourism tax of Rs. 1200 from every Indian tourist), Russia (for signing a two billion dollar project deal with Pakistan), the United Kingdom (for not returning the Kohinoor diamond), Antigua (for not returning Mohil Choksi). We would have boycotted the USA also, but for the fact that the sons and daughters of most of our Ministers are green card holders there, which could then be converted to yellow or red cards before they could say MAGA! There is, of course, no mention of China in this list of the damned, in keeping with our revered Prime Minister's credo that China's name should never be taken in vain, not even in pain.

Very soon, then, there shall be no country left which Indians could visit, and this is what gives me sleepless nights. Denied their globe-trotting opportunities, these bhaktourists would descend on the mountains, and villages like my Puranikoti, like a herd of locusts and strip bare our little Edens, transforming them into something resembling Gaza. The onslaught has already commenced after the Pahalgam massacre. Maybe the Himachal government should do something to make them boycott Himachal too, like proposing Kangana Ranaut's name as the next Prime Minister..... 

I am even more alarmed by another aspect of this New Normal, viz. water sharing, and not just with Pakistan. Our Prime Minister, who possesses a good turn of phrase, has announced that "Water and blood cannot flow together" and has turned off the Indus tap. To which the Chinese Foreign Minister has riposted: "Do not do to others what you don't want done to you." Which is a pacifist version of the more militaristic Confucius: "Do unto others BEFORE they do unto you."

Confucius was a Chinese too, and one highly regarded in his home land even today. I'm worried that President Xi may take him at his word and start doing something unto us: work has already commenced on the biggest dam in the world, on the Brahmaputra (Yarlung Tsangpo) at Grand Turn Canyon in Tibet, which can have ominous consequences for us were the descendants of Confucius so inclined. And China has an even bigger Indus tap than we do- the river originates in Tibet and China, being the upper riparian state, can dam it any time it wants. Two can play at this game, is what the Chinese FM was trying to convey.

The consequences of this new normal-denial of Indus waters- can be devastating for our northern states. It would be so for Pakistan too, but we are a democracy, unlike Pakistan, and it would be difficult for our government to manage the public uproar. The rulers of Pakistan, on the other hand, will take the consequences in their stride- its Generals and Punjabi elite don't need the water, they have their Scotch and vermouth on the rocks, you see.

But what's sauce for the Pakistani goose is also sauce for the Indian gander, and Mr. Modi's new water doctrine-that the upper riparian state can do whatever the hell it wants with the waters-may just exacerbate our own water wars. We already have plenty of them: Tamil Nadu and Karanataka have been scrapping over the Cauvery waters for decades; Delhi accuses Haryana of impounding the former's share of the Yamuna waters (when it is not poisoning it, that is); Odisha and Chattisgarh are at loggerheads over the Mahanadi river shares; Punjab and Haryana do not see eye to eye on the Sutjej-Yamuna Link Canal. Our Chief Ministers, who are usually up on the slow-take on most matters, were quick to act on the New Normal on water sharing. Just days after the four day war, Punjab Ministers quickly occupied the BBMB premises at Nangal, locked up the General Manager and stopped the flow of water to Haryana- it had exercised its right as the upper riparian state under the Modi doctrine! Not to be outdone, the usually docile Himachal Pradesh ( the "baap" of all alpha male riparian states, as its outspoken MP Kangana Ranaut would have said if Mr. Nadda had not gagged her) declared that it would not let any water flow from its state if it was not given its rightful due in the BBMB projects. 

There are other, more alarming, aspects of this New Normal: how a couple of belligerent Prime Ministerial statements have lowered the nuclear threshold to a, literally, tripping point; how details of the war are revealed in Singapore to a foreign press but not to the citizens of this country; how dozens of MPs can be suspended here and then sent abroad to defend the same government; the puzzle of trying to figure out where patriotism ends and nationalism begins.

Be prepared for new exciting times ahead as all traditional wisdom, the art of diplomacy and norms of governance are turned on their heads. As the Walrus would have said in Alice in Wonderland, at the risk of being hauled up for sedition: "My desire to be well informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane."