Notes and Encounters

Working the Wires

2009-05-13T19:35:00.003+01:00

I've been venturing out of the student garret recently, poking my nose back out into the real world of journalism. It's not a pretty place at the moment, with cutbacks and redundancies all over the place (keep an eye on my Media Notes blog to get an idea of the full impact of the news recession).

There is a lot of good journalism still going on however, and I've had a great few weeks seeing how others do it - first at The Star, and last week at The Press Association in London.

At PA I worked on the video and news desks, and had a few pieces picked up in the national press:

I covered the Court of Appeal, where the Stockwell Strangler slept through his hearing. Picked up by The Sun and the Daily Mail.
I also wrote about Camden Market's relaunch after it burned down last year. The BBC used the piece.
I covered a double suicide in a Finsbury Park hotel. A few local papers picked up my interview with the hotel owner.

The Stockwell Strangler

I also worked on the video desk, and interviewed Henry Cooper and some Olympic gymnasts.

If you have access to PA MediaPoint check the videos out here:

http://www.mediapoint.press.net/business/article.jsp?id=5761657

and here:

http://www.mediapoint.press.net/business/article.jsp?id=5761661

Ice-cream vendor keeps licence

2009-04-30T01:12:00.002+01:00

Anyone who was worried about John McNeil, the ice-cream van owner who faced losing his licence after a Sheffield school tried to ban him, will be glad to know he has kept his livelihood. The school withdrew its objection days before the licensing board hearing.

Published Date: 29 April 2009

By Ben Spencer

AN ICE cream man from Sheffield is to continue trading from the business his grandfather started - after the school which tried to ban him withdrew its objection.

John McNeil - who sells from a van near Handsworth Grange Community College - faced losing his licence after the school complained about the "unhealthy" ices he sells to pupils.
School business manager Steve Wild wrote to Sheffield Council complaining of the "cheap, unhealthy goods laced with all the wrong E numbers" sold from Joe's Ices.

SEE FULL STORY IN THE STAR

Sheffield forging company to cut a third of workers

2009-04-27T12:13:00.004+01:00

Front page exclusive in today’s Sheffield Star:

: Firth Rixson at Meadowhall, Sheffield

JOBS AXE HITS STEEL WORKERS

By Ben Spencer

Exclusive

Around 50 jobs are to go at Sheffield forging plant Firth Rixson – just days after stainless steel giant Outokumpu announced the loss of 110 jobs.

Staff at Firth Rixson Forgings have been told “up to 60 jobs” will be cut from the 156-strong workforce at the Meadowhall site.
Workers have received letters saying 42 staff from the shopfloor must go, and that another five workers from the offices will lose their jobs.
One employee facing the axe said every member of staff has been told they must reapply for their own jobs and, once the process is complete, 47 workers will go …

FULL STORY IN THE STAR

Sheffield school tries to ban ice cream van

2009-04-25T16:01:00.012+01:00

A Sheffield school is trying to stop an ice-cream seller renewing his trading licence - claiming he is hindering its efforts to meet Government nutritional standards. The school has complained that the e-numbers in the trader's ice-cream are bad for pupils and is affecting their behaviour in class. The school is opposing the renewal of his licence at a council meeting on Tuesday. See full story at THE SHEFFIELD STAR.

London

2009-04-16T16:12:00.005+01:00

This is the first in a series of posts showcasing my photography. Get in touch if you'd like to use any of the images, or need a photographer for an event.

All images © Ben Spencer 2008

LONDON

The City from the South Bank

St Paul's from the Millennium Bridge

On the tube

The Green Lanes

Turnpike Lane

The Number 29

Finsbury Park

The Harringay Ladder

The Green Lanes

Reflections of the BT Tower

The Green Lanes

Media Notes and the future of journalism

2009-02-19T11:29:00.003Z

My Media Notes blog is starting to hot up: a discussion of how newspapers will be produced in the post-recession era is attracting hits, comments and controversy. Charlie Beckett, the Press Gazette, and Milne Media have all discussed my report of a lecture given by Telegraph digital editor Edward Roussel.

The hidden valley of Zanskar - at bigworldmagazine.com

2009-02-12T16:23:00.002Z

Over a year since I actually wrote it, a story I put together about Ladakh has finally been published in start-up New York-based travel magazine, Big World.

The article has been heavily cut down - see full version here.

Ladakhi prayer flags. Image: Ben Spencer

Update: Ben in February 2009

2009-02-12T11:36:00.001Z

I haven't done much with this site recently, having been focussing my attention on another blog -- Media Notes -- discussing media issues as the global news industry undergoes transformation. Check it out.

The last year has been busy for me. I spent six months at The Week magazine, working as a researcher for a small team at Britain's most successful press digest. Lots of news reading, research, fact-checking, subbing, copy-editing, and a bit of writing.

In September I started a journalism masters in Sheffield, learning more about multi-media reporting, as well as getting to grips with some essential journalistic skills such as shorthand and media law.

Working in a different part of Britain has been interesting. South Yorkshire and Derbyshire have only just begun to recover from the decimation of mining and other heavy industries in the 1980s. The current recession is having a devestating effect on the regional economy. I've spent much of my time since moving north researching the economic downturn, and how it is affecting local people.

One example can be seen below.

Communities that Work: getting people back to work in Chesterfield

2008-12-09T16:16:00.002Z

A Chesterfield community employment centre has helped put 77 people back into work since it was saved from closure in April.

Communities That Work (CTW), a Derbyshire Primary Care Trust scheme operating in Chesterfield’s most deprived wards, was threatened with closure this year when funding from the Coalfields Regeneration Trust ran out. But local people petitioned Chesterfield Borough Council for assistance, and secured £300,000 – a years’ funding – from the council’s Working Neighbourhoods Fund.

Eight months later, CTW team leader Jane Pashley is preparing next years’ funding bid. This time, however, she is confident the scheme will survive.

Working out of a converted terraced house in the heart of the Rother estate in South Chesterfield, Mrs Pashley said: “We have beaten our target of 75 new jobs this year. The key to our success is we are right in the middle of the community, and we work with every aspect of an unemployed person’s welfare.”

The CTW team works in communities with some of the highest rates of unemployment in the East Midlands. Eight percent of Rother’s 18- to 24-year-olds claim benefits, compared to a national rate of five percent.

“Some families in Rother have three generations living off benefits,” Mrs Pashley said. “There are households which haven’t had anyone working for 20 or 30 years.”

Mrs Pashley, who previously worked for Job Centre Plus, thinks CTW offers a more rounded approach than other agencies.

“The job centres have 20-minute slots to get people work, and they are actually trying to decrease footfall,” she said. “We recognise that it may take five years or more to get a person who has always lived on benefits to a position where they can apply for work.”

Ricky Brown, 34, of Sycamore Avenue, Chesterfield, heard about the CTW scheme last year, when they helped his brother.

“He hadn’t worked for 10 years, and they got him a job,” he said. “He didn’t have a car, or smart clothes, so they lent him a shirt and drove him to the interview.”

Mr Brown was made redundant from Gunstone bakery in Dronfield last month. He came to the CTW drop-in session for help with his CV.

“I’m applying for a job with Tesco,” he said. “The advisors said I can put all kinds of things on my CV, even things I’ve done out of work. I just had my GCSEs and my jobs on there before.”

Rose Boaler, one of five guidance officers crammed into CTW’s small office, said: “The idea is to give people confidence in what they’ve got. They come out of school without qualifications, and some can’t even read. We try and give them confidence to go out to work.”

A Chesterfield-based recruitment agent said: “CTW do a good job and we took one person from them ourselves. But employers need workers who can fit in quickly and don’t need to be trained. The problem with the CTW people is they need a lot of help even once they’re working.”

Mrs Pashley recognised this could be a problem: “At the moment there are a lot of skilled, highly trained people being made redundant, and they are going to the top of the queue. It’s making it harder for us.”

Chesterfield Borough Council confirmed they are considering applications for funding from next year’s £1 million Working Neighbourhood Fund.

Colin Hampton, co-ordinator of the Derbyshire Unemployed Workers’ Centres, sits on the fund’s steering committee. He said: “The CTW scheme is very good at working with individuals. But if we’re really going to get people back into work in Chesterfield, we need to attract industries to the town, and that is not being done.”

Chesterfield MP Paul Holmes said: “It is wonderful news that in its first six months alone the project exceeded its whole-year targets for getting people back into work in areas of high unemployment like the Rother area.”

May Day Blues

2008-05-03T16:27:00.002+01:00

Exactly eleven years after the British people emphatically kicked the Tories out of government, voters turned out in the May Day elections to give David Cameron’s revamped Conservatives their approval. With 44% of the national vote, a new mayor in London, and 260 new Conservative councillors, the Tories are back in favour.

Gordon Brown’s government is in trouble. The Labour share of the vote slipped to 24%, taking them into third place behind the Liberal Democrats. A British government has not performed this badly in local elections since 1995, when John Major’s government received similar results two years before being buried by the New Labour landslide.

This is more than a mid-term slump, more than a protest vote against unpopular policies. This is a routing. Labour has been badly hurt in its heartlands, losing councils in North Tyneside, Bury and Southampton. Working class people have turned to the Tories, registering their anger at the 10p tax betrayal, and expressing their worries about the economy and rising food and fuel prices.

The message is clear: the British people have lost faith in the Prime Minister and his government. Less than a year after taking power Brown has lost his reputation as a skilled economist. James Purnell, the work and pensions secretary, yesterday defended Brown’s record: “At a time of economic uncertainty surely the person you want at the helm is the person who is seen as the most successful chancellor in British history.” But after his mismanagement of the Northern Rock bailout, the fluffing of the non-dom tax, and the climbdown over the 10p tax, Brown’s reputation is in tatters.

Tony Blair had a great deal of respect for Brown’s capability as an economist, but he was most in awe of his skills as a political strategist. In the past few months, however, Brown has shown little of the tactical nous he is famous for: in November he backed out of an election he would have probably won; in March he backtracked on a green budget that would have been welcomed; and his mishandling of the 10p tax issue has been farcical. The decision to axe the 10p tax band, which Brown introduced in 1999 to help low-earners, was a disastrous desertion of classic Labour territory. Abandoning the low-paid to appeal to the middle classes was a bad move, but the climbdown last week displayed political weakness and fiscal incompetence. Brown refused to reinstate the 10p tax band, instead offering to compensate people who have lost out in the tax restructure. Unfortunately reimbursing the 5.3 million people who have lost out is no simple task. Using a clumsy system of tax credits and allowances, the compensation package, designed to pay back the £700 million to those affected, will actually cost £3-6 billion. Many middle-income people will benefit twice from this blunder: first from the 2p cut to the middle tax band; and again when they pick up the unwieldy tax credits aimed at the poor.

So how will the Labour Party act to avoid losing power at the general election? David Miliband has been touted as a replacement for the Prime Minister, and as a young, charismatic politician in the same mould as Cameron and Clegg he is a tempting choice. But charisma and youth is not necessarily what Britain needs to face the challenges ahead. Brown has the skills, experience, and strategic awareness to get Britain and Labour through the economic downturn. He needs to act with determination, stop pandering to the centre-right, and assist those worst affected by the credit crunch.

Senior Labour Party figures have suggested that Brown has six months to prove that he is capable of winning the next election. The temptation will be to move to the right to get back the voters lost to the Conservatives. Ed Miliband told Radio Four on election day that in this time of economic uncertainty the Labour Party is the right choice for Britain, because its ideology allows the government to intervene in the economy to steer the country through difficulties. In order to survive, Brown needs to heed his Cabinet Minister’s point. The British people do not know what this government is about, what its aim are, what the plan is. Trying to take the Conservative’s centre-ground is a recipe for disaster, as the 10p tax fiasco has shown. Brown has six months to show what Labour means to do, and show that he has the determination to implement Labour policy. That is the only way he can win back Labour's natural supporters and gain the respect of the rest. Or Cameron will be celebrating in May 2010.

Boris the Mayor

2008-05-03T16:00:00.002+01:00

The votes have been counted, and London has spoken. And the city chose... Boris.

After months of intense campaigning, a fierce PR operation, and attacks from both left and right, Boris Johnson received 53% of the vote, narrowly beating Ken Livingstone’s 46%. He has been called a racist, a homophobe, and a buffoon, but now Boris is Mayor of London. The city has chosen; it has four years to live with the choice.

Boris must offer thanks, of course, to the Evening Standard, which has supported the Conservative candidate with all its resources. Standard editor Veronica Wadley is thought to have persuaded David Cameron to back Johnson as the Conservative candidate last summer, and put the full power of her newspaper behind him during the campaign. The paper, with its vast resources and London Lite offshoot, has been instrumental in persuading Londoners of the ‘need for a change’. Ex-BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan has run an effective smearing campaign against Livingstone, with a series of anti-Ken stories published on the front page of the Standard.

Veronica Wadley, Andrew Gilligan, and the 1,168,738 people who voted for Johnson will now have to cross their fingers and hope they backed the right candidate. Despite his charm and wit, Johnson’s experience of politics stretches no further than the safe Tory seat of Henley-on-Thames. Whether he is ready to take on what is probably the most powerful position in British politics remains to be seen.

Johnson has spoken passionately about London in recent weeks, and has promised much: affordable housing, reduced crime, and better transport. He has pledged to scrap bendy buses and reinstate Routemasters (he estimated this will cost £7-8m; experts suggest the figure will be closer to £110); he has assured Londoners of his green credentials; and reassured Conservatives that he will review the Congestion Charge. His manifesto is impressive, but he will have a hard time implementing it.

Ken Livingstone, despite his faults, was a great asset to the city. He had the strength and independence to drive progressive policies; without his forceful character the Congestion Charge would probably still be on the drawing board. He also managed to build bridges between London’s diverse communities in a way that Johnson, with his Eton education and background of privilege, is going to find difficult to replicate.

In his victory speech yesterday Johnson thanked those who voted for him: "I will work flat out to repay and to justify your confidence. Where there have been mistakes we will rectify them, where there are achievements we will build on them, where there are neglected opportunities we will seize on them."

Let’s hope, for London’s sake, that Johnson proves 1,168,738 Londoners right. Or, as Ian Jack has argued, maybe we will all just have to move to Scotland.

Sampling Cool Britannia

2008-01-12T00:38:00.002Z

Shri, formerly of Badmarsh & Shri fame, is on the verge of completing his fifth album since arriving in London from Bombay fifteen years ago. He took a break from the studio to talk about London, India, and the state of British-Asian music today.

FULL ARTICLE AT TEHELKA.COM

Climbing in Greenland

2008-01-01T21:33:00.002Z

Something slightly different: not an article about India, but a story about mountaineering in Greenland.

In August 2006 I set out with two friends to go new-routing in arctic Greenland. Between us we had done a handful of climbs in Britain, a bit of Scottish winter climbing, and had a single Alpine season each. Mad? Perhaps.

SEE STORY AT UKCLIMBING.COM

'Enough is enough'

2007-12-14T15:24:00.002Z

There are 1.3 million 'manual scavengers' in India. This is the official term for the safai karamcharis, caste-bound cleaners of human waste, Dalits who collect and dispose of the contents of India's toilets. Safai karamcharis are socially segregated, forced to use different water supplies, live in Dalit-only compounds, and barred from temples. They are untouchables.

In 1993 the Indian Government made manual scavenging illegal, but it persists on a massive scale. On 1 December the Safai Karamchari Andolan, a Dalit-rights NGO, met to discuss how to eradicate this practice and ensure the 1993 Act is enforced. The target: to eradicate manual scavenging by 2010.

SEE FULL ARTICLE AT TEHELKA.COM

Encounters with Royalty

2007-12-14T15:10:00.003Z

Gaj Singh II was crowned the Maharaja of Jodhpur in 1952, aged just four years old. He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford University, and returned to Rajasthan in 1970 to take up his rule. Just two years later, however, his titles and Privy purse were taken away by the Indian government; the age of the maharajas had come to an end. Singh turned his palaces into hotels, and now heads a huge tourism empire with 52 properties. The business of ruling is still the former maharaja's main motivation.

SEE INTERVIEW AT TEHELKA.COM

When the Trains Stop

2007-12-08T13:26:00.002Z

Eureka Forbes is one of India's biggest and best-known corporations. For the last three years it has made it into the list of 'Best Indian Employers,' and this year was placed fourth. Yet this same company employs Dalits to clean up human waste at train stations across India, without gloves, without masks, and wearing only plastic sandals. Aside from the apalling working conditions, and the fact that these men have no health care, job security or training, this job has been illegal in India since 1993.

SEE FULL INVESTIGATION AT TEHELKA.COM

SEE INTERVIEW WITH EUREKA FORBES EXECUTIVE AT TEHELKA.COM

India's Apartheid

2007-11-22T15:49:00.002Z

Despite the Indian Constitution - which bans discrimination on the basis of religion, race, gender or caste - members of the Dalit community, India's 'untouchables', face injustice and violence on a daily basis. At the beginning of November the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) was awarded the Rafto Prize - a prestigious human rights award. Faced with an Indian government that refuses to acknowledge caste discrimination, the Dalit rights movement is taking its struggle on to an international stage.

SEE ARTICLE AT TEHELKA.COM

The 2002 Gujarat Riots and the Tehelka revelations

2007-10-28T09:20:00.002Z

This week's revelations about leading politicians' involvement in the 2002 Gujarat riots have reawakened the debate about communal violence in India. A six-month sting by Tehelka, a Delhi-based news magazine, secured footage in which perpetrators of the violence confess to rape, murder, and the beating of thousands of Muslims. These acts were apparently orchestrated by leading politicians of the BJP, VHD, and Shev Sena organisations. A sitting MLA is also accused of encouraging the violence.

These shocking reports, and the resulting furore, highlights the issue of religious strife in a country that I recently asserted had spiritually adapted to the diversity of its faiths. The flexible nature of the Hindu faith, the adoption of other religions into its spiritual practices, is, I argued, the reason modern India can function in a crowded religious environment.

Gujarat 2002 has been hauled back into the public discourse, bringing the validity of this description of benign Hinduism into doubt. My optimism about a 'single religious community, united by diversity rather than bullied into hegemony,' may seem rather naïve in the current climate.

Tarun J. Tejpal, editor-in-chief of Tehelka, describes the Gujarat revelations as 'a slap in the face of the idea of modern India.' He argues that whilst the atrocities are hushed up by the state, whilst the men behind the violence are left to walk the streets of Gujarat, India will be doomed to repeat the crimes of the past: 'Because we do not remember, we repeat; because we do not look the evil in the eye, it dogs us all the time.'

Tejpal makes a valid point. The atrocities of Partition, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992, the Gujarat genocide: Hindutva's ugly head raises itself again and again. The Nehruvian-Gandhian dream of a secular India, united in its diversity, slips further away with each atrocity.

It is important to draw a distinction between Hindutva, a nasty strand of Hindu-nationalism founded by V.D. Savarkar in the 1920s, and Hinduism, which does not support the murder of innocents. The furore emerging in the wake of the Tehelka sting has revealed a nasty Hindutva streak, still alive and well even in the mainstream of Indian politics. Most Hindus, however, have responded with anger and shock at the revelations.

The India that Nehru and Gandhi dreamed of survives today, but it has been damaged by the repeated communal violence. Everywhere you look, there is evidence of people from different religious communities thriving in close proximity, whether it is the Sikh bus driver who displays icons of both Guru Nanak and Lord Krishna at the front of his bus, or Hindus worshiping in the Baha'i temple on Hindu holy days. If this 'Shining India' is going to survive, diversity needs to be celebrated, and communal violence condemned at every level of society. The state's protection of the criminals of Gujarat, and Congress' silence in the wake of the allegations, does nothing for India. Tejpal is right - the Gujarat riots are a slap in the face of the idea of modern India. This does not mean that modern India - an India in which diversity is celebrated and secularism defines the state - cannot survive the revelations. But if it is to survive - and thrive - in the twenty-first century, communalism has to be condemned by the government and the judiciary must be given free reign to convict the perpetrators of the Gujarat atrocities.

There is still hope for a 'single religious community, united by diversity rather than bullied into hegemony,' but it needs support from every level of society, government and state. Only then will the dream of Gandhi and Nehru be realised.

Encounters with Religion: the old meeting the new

2007-10-23T17:09:00.002+01:00

The Bahá’í House of Worship; picture by Michael Hoefner

In the midst of carefully tended lawns in the depths of the South Delhi suburbs sits an incongruous giant white structure. The Bahá’í House of Worship, one of only eight around the world, is designed to suggest an unfurling lotus, with great leaves of concrete and marble tapering to points forty metres above the ground. The effect is lost somewhat; the building looks more like some kind of spaceship than any flower. Standing out in the chaos and heat of India’s capital, the Bahá’í temple draws the crowds in their thousands, and is fast becoming one of Delhi’s prime tourist attractions.

I make the mistake of visiting in spiritual rush hour, one Sunday afternoon in mid-October. The hordes are out for the day: families from the nearby middle-class suburbs are drawn by the open gardens; students come with their friends, walking in large chattering groups; a few Western tourists nervously wield their giant cameras, looking uncomfortable in the afternoon heat.

Bahá’í is the youngest religion in the world, founded in Persia 150 years ago by the prophet Bahá'u'lláh. Bahá'u'lláh’s teachings promoted a single global religious community, the unification of humanity into one spiritual family. His modern-day followers believe in just one god, but assert that all religions worship this same god, irrespective of the nature of their worship. The Bahá’í faith is growing, but it still has only five million followers, a third of them in India. The Delhi House of Worship, which welcomes people to worship any god within its walls, sees four million visitors a year. I wonder how many of the visitors here today are followers of the Bahá’í faith. The bindis, sindoor, and dhotis suggest that this is an almost entirely Hindu gathering.

There are so many people here that we are formed into queues to gain entrance to the temple, with those at the front admitted in batches of fifty or sixty at a time. A young British woman, barefoot and elegantly dressed in a light salwar kameez, addresses the crowd: ‘Welcome to the Bahá’í House of Worship. People of all religions are invited to worship or meditate here, but are requested to maintain silence in the hall.’ A small bespectacled man repeats the welcome in Hindi, and we are ushered in to the building. The central hall of the House of Worship is a huge chamber, rising up to a great dome. The room is simple and minimalist. Marble and wood benches are arranged in rows facing the speaker’s platform. The walls are unadorned; the only decoration is a Persian rug under the lectern.

The murmur of voices and shuffling bare feet fills the hall, amplified by the great dome and marble floor. Young girls’ ankle bracelets jangle; a child calls for her mother, instantly shushed; two men giggle; several babies are crying. The turnover of people in the room is incredibly high. People come in, sit down for a minute, and then stand up and leave, unnerved by the quiet. I wonder at this inability to remain silent, and the apparent discomfort of most of the people in the room. Then it occurs to me that so much of Indian religion is noise: the bell struck at the entrance to the Hindu shrine; the call of the muezzin and the shouts of ‘Allah akbar!’ at the mosque; the perpetual singing of the Guru Granth Sahib at the Sikh gurudwara. Even sedate Buddhists monasteries are filled with the sound of constant chanting and the bell of prayer wheels. My Western ideas about religion being quiet, calm and composed obviously don’t apply. Religious worship here is a raucous celebration, a loud exclamation of faith.

I wonder what draws Hindus in their crowds to this alien place of worship. Are they here for the neat gardens, for the other-worldly architecture? Or do they have a real curiosity about the religion? Two weeks ago I was in Amritsar, the holy Sikh city on the Punjabi plains. Like the Bahá’í faith, Sikhism welcomes people of all religions to worship in its temples. Along with the thousands of Sikh pilgrims at Amritsar’s Golden Temple, there were many Hindus, perhaps one Hindu to every three Sikhs. I marvelled at this mingling of the religions. The Hindu visitors took part in the Sikh ceremonies, prostrating themselves alongside everyone else in front of the holy shrines. These were not just casual tourists, but participants in worship.

I met a young man from Chandigarh, a junior clerk on secondment to a bank in Amritsar. Staying with his elder brother, he was visiting the Golden Temple with his three-year-old nephew. He told me that he came to the Temple two or three times a week, always bringing his nephew. ‘But you are Hindu! Why do you come to the Sikh temple so often?’ I asked. He could not really clarify this, but as a way of explanation showed me his wrist: a sacred thread, bound there by a Hindu priest, sat alongside a karā, the heavy steel bracelet worn by every Sikh.

I had a similar encounter in Delhi’s Paharganj district. Invited into the home of a middle class Hindu family to celebrate the holy festival of dusshera, I was surprised that alongside paintings of Ganesh and Krishna, there hung a portrait of Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion.

The dichotomy of this religious intermingling is astounding to the Western mindset, even to someone like me, with no religious upbringing. In the Judeo-Christian tradition of unitary, consolidated religion, ruled by the teachings of a book, there is little if any scope for mixing religions or exploring others with anything more than a tourist’s mind-set. Hinduism, without a set scripture or clergy, and with its pantheon of gods, is perhaps flexible enough to evolve and adjust to its spiritual surroundings. In a country where Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Christians, and Bahá’ís live side-by-side in ever-increasing proximity, perhaps this is an effective route to religious survival.

Of course, I run the risk of painting an over-idealised picture. A degree of religious strife has been a problem in India for centuries: from the Moghul wars to the horrors of Partition, religious communities have sporadically turned upon one another, with disastrous results. The rise of the Hindu-nationalist BJP in the 1990s demonstrated the popularity of a grim anti-Muslim politics. The 1992 destruction of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya, believed to be on the site of the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama, is a stark example of how religions existing in such close quarters can be often prove to be volatile neighbours. What I’ve seen in India, however, suggests that despite the occasional violence (often encouraged by politicians), there is an underlying acceptance of spiritual diversity.

In Delhi’s Bahá’í Temple I sit and watch the people rush in and out of the building. It seems that these Hindu pilgrims, followers of the world’s oldest religion, are curiously examining this young addition to the spiritual realm. Bahá'u'lláh’s vision of a single religious community, united by diversity rather than bullied into hegemony, does not seem that remote.

The Amritsar Golden Temple; picture by Ben Spencer

The hidden valley of Zanskar

2007-10-17T14:14:00.002+01:00

Pictures by Kate Harris

Ladakh: land of high passes and mysterious lamas, remote valleys and a self-sufficient people; ‘mystical and magical, a balm for the tired soul’. So reads the tourist literature advertising India’s northern tip. I’m in Zanskar, a hidden valley walled in by the Great Himalayas to the south and the Ladakh Mountains to the north, to find out whether the tourist blurb reads true.

This arid Himalayan valley, protected by the mountains from the monsoon which ravages neighbouring Himachal Pradesh, yet irrigated by glacial melt waters, lies over 4,000m above sea level. The only access is on foot, either a four-day walk over the 5,100m Shingo La and Himachal Pradesh to the south, or a three-day walk from Padum and Kargil to the north-west. Anything not produced in Zanskar itself has to be carried in by donkey. A more remote part of India, or indeed, the world, would be hard to find.

I lean back against the roughly-hewn wall of the rocky path as a train of heavily-laden pack-donkeys edge past. Stones dislodged by the mules’ hooves rattle down the steep sides of the gorge, splashing into the waters of the Kargyak River several hundred meters below. The mule-herder seems unconcerned by the perilous drop as his animals sway along the path, their huge loads of rice, grain and building materials threatening to tip them over the edge. Despite the rough track, his confidence is understandable; he and his ancestors have been making this journey for generations. We could be 500 years, or even 2500 years, back in history.

But then I look at the man himself. Rather than wearing a traditional jacket and trousers of thick woolen cloth, common across the Central Asian plains from Ladakh to Mongolia, the pony-herder is dressed in a fake North Face jacket, Mountain Hardware trousers, and Etnies skateboarding shoes. Globalization seems to have hit even this remote part of the Indian Himalaya. But then, Zanskar is no stranger to travellers. An ancient trade route from Tibet and Afghanistan, the Zanskar valley links Leh and Kargil to the market towns of Manali and Kullu. These rough paths carved out of the rock have seen steady traffic during the summer months for millennia.

The long winter, however, is a different story: the mountain passes to the north and south are blocked with snow and until recently, the only route out was to walk along the frozen Zanskar river to the Indus valley. During these months few people brave the minus-twenty-degree temperature: Ladakhis shelter in their stone houses with their animals; their roofs piled high with fodder and dried yak dung harvested in September.

The harvest is taking place in front of my eyes. Everything here is done by hand, or with the aid of donkeys or yaks. Old Ladakhi men carry huge bundles of dried grass, two or three times as tall as themselves, to their houses for use as roofing, animal fodder, and fuel. Women gather in the potatoes and barley, whilst others use hand-carved ploughs to turn the soil. On high pastures young girls herd yaks, making cheese and curd from the milk. This is a truly pastoral economy: the Zanskari population is not just surviving off the land, but thriving in this high and wild landscape. Whilst wealth in material terms is rare here, there is very little evidence of the abject poverty so visible in the most of India. Tibetan Buddhism remains an important part of daily life: the landscape is dotted with stupas and mani walls, portraits of the Dalai Lama are displayed in most buildings, and the monasteries (gompas) are still an integral part of the social fabric. A young monk I met outside the village of Photoskar explained the tradition of sending the second son of the family to the monastery at the age of five. This seventeen-year-old lama crouched outside my tent as I heated some tea, and snuggled further into the North Face down jacket he wore over his purple monk’s robes. He outlined the honour and prestige his family gained by sending their child to the gompa, and explained that coming from a family of seven children, he was very privileged.

A visit to Phuktal Gompa, a spectacular monastery hanging from a cliff over the Tsarap River, further clarifies why the monasteries play such an important role. Accepting boys at the age of five years old, the monks at Phuktal Gompa teach a syllabus of mathematics, Buddhism, spiritual philosophy, English, and Hindi. In Zanskar educational resources are spread very thinly, and priorities tend to lean away from learning and towards the manual requirements of subsistence farming. In this context it is clear that sending a child to the gompa means that at least one member of a family will be educated.

At Phuktal Gompa, amongst the prayer flags, mani inscriptions and chortens, a small plaque catches my attention: the inscription commemorates Alexander Csoma de Koros, a Hungarian linguist who stayed in the monastery in 1825. This is another reminder of Zanskar’s long history as a temperate summer highway, a safe path for travellers across the Himalayas. This age-old route, however, has for the last few years become a major tourist trail, with increasing numbers of large trekking groups organized by tour-operators overseas. The effect this is having on the local economy is profound. The small population of Zanskar has been surprising resilient over the years, retaining its local culture, religion, and economy despite the annual summer influx of foreign influences. But increasingly, this resilience is being chipped away. A number of camping grounds, tea tents and concrete hotels have cropped up along the Zanskar valley, catering to a flood of tourists and their ponies, cooks, and guides.

Rubbish has become a major problem along the route. Traditionally, there was little in the way of waste-products in this remote region. Buildings were built out of stone and mud, roofs thatched with grass and dung, clothes woven from yak wool, and much was reused and recycled out of necessity. The tourists, and their guides, are bringing in plastic food containers, water bottles, and plastic bags; every camping spot is littered with broken whisky bottles, condensed milk tins, and discarded coffee packets; the paths are decorated with a pink trail of used toilet paper. Recently an effort has been made to clean up the valley: signs have been put up by trekking agencies based in Padum and Leh, beseeching travellers to ‘keep Zanskar green’, but often these signs are hidden behind piles of rubbish. Nana Ziesche, who runs the Germany-based company Ladakh Travel, has taken more active steps to sorting out the problem. In September she ran a clean-up trek, collecting rubbish along the popular trekking route from Lamayuru to Padum. Whilst this was a partial success, with the large team collecting 35 sacks of plastic rubbish, and burning much more, when they reached Padum it emerged there was no system for rubbish disposal. In such an isolated area, in a land with very thin topsoil, waste disposal is very difficult.

Aside from the spread of designer trekking wear and the rubbish problem, a more insidious effect of the summer tourist traffic is revealed by the occasional health warnings daubed on the sides of buildings. One such sign reads: ‘Life is precious: save our life from dangerous AIDS diseases’. In such a tranquil, remote area, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases comes as a shock. But with so many outsiders coming through each year, particularly from the busy tourist- and market-towns in Himachal Pradesh, Kashmir, and Nepal, maybe the spread of HIV and AIDS is not particularly surprising.

Whilst a number of health clinics and prevention programmes have sprung up in Zanskar in recent years, they will have a greater task on their hands in the future. The isolation and remoteness of the valley is under threat from two roads currently under construction. One creeps its way from Darcha and the Lahoul valley in the south, with the aim of climbing over the Shingo La into the Kargyak plain. The other comes from Padum in the west, already 25km long, forcing its way into the steep walls of the Lungnak gorge. When these two roads meet, Manali will be connected to Kargil and Srinagar, and the might of the Indian Armed forces will have a much quicker route to the Kashmir border than the unreliable Leh-Manali highroad (unsurpassable from October until May). This is an ambitious project, and will take many years to complete. The terrain is treacherous, and most of the trail-breaking work is being done by hand (by a mix of locals and drafted-in-Biharis).

The road will no doubt improve healthcare, education, and communications for the 12,000 inhabitants of Zanskar. But it remains to be seen whether this isolated pocket of the Himalayas can survive the combined onslaught of tourism and the Indian Army, and whether the resilient Zanskari people with their millennia-old ways, economy, and culture, can persevere. The tourist blurb still reads true… just. I’m not sure if it will remain accurate for many more years.