A Study in Starch

Tirthan Valley, Day 3 (October 11, 2014)

The next day we drove to the village of Gushaini and then walked the 8 kilometer (5 mile) uphill trail to the entrance of Great Himalaya National Park.  We didn’t intend to do a 10-mile roundtrip walk in one day but we decided we’d go as far as we could.   We encountered quite a few villagers walking down the path.  It turns out that there are a fair few villages along the trail and many of the residents do the trail daily from their homes to the main village of Gushaini. The architecture is fairly consistent here: a rectangular two-level structure, with the bottom floor used for storage and the top floor being an enclosed veranda wrapping around the sleeping rooms. 

Villagers on the way down the hill

Trail to entrance of Great Himalayan National Park

View of the river from the trail

Local architecture of village home.  Notice corn drying on roof

Bird-spotting

View from the trail

About 2 miles up the trail

Poor tired donkeys carrying sand up the hill for construction

Marina kept marveling at the fact that all building materials are brought up the hill, mostly by poor tired little donkeys.  Gautam had told us that he had seen a villager drag a log that was about a foot in diameter and 17 feet long up the hill.  The mountain people were tough, he said, and we had seen that ourselves.  Women bent forward carried huge loads of grass on their backs.  I thought of the old woman we had seen at the Golden Temple who couldn’t stand up, whose back was bent forward forever, and who could only see the ground below her.  A lifetime of carrying heavy loads would have done this.  How many others were destined for this?  Arguably, even the poorest person in Europe is much better off financially than the poorest person in India.  Europe has a large social net to catch those less fortunate; here there’s very little social welfare.  How is it that some people have the good fortune to be born in Europe or America and others end up at the bottom rung of the social ladder in India or China?  Is it simply luck?  I don’t believe, as the Hindus do, that one’s current life is determined by the bad karma of a past life.  That’s too simplistic, too easy a way to dismiss the misfortunes of millions, and probably an explanation derived by powerful priests and kings to keep the man on the street from striving to improve his lot.  It’s fashionable in certain spiritual circles to believe that the soul chooses its life before being born, chooses its gender, parents, and many traumatic experiences.  I’m not sure if I believe that either.  It’s more empowering than the Hindu belief (or for that matter the Christian notion of original sin) but it still seems too easy an explanation to dismiss problematic and thorny situations, and still has an element of holding a person responsible for being born into a bad situation.  Maybe we need to find a reason other than pure chance for winning the lottery of life to relieve our own guilt.   How else to justify to ourselves how some of us got so lucky?      

These and other thoughts occupied me as we walked the trail.  We were expecting to see a lot of birds and butterflies, but apparently, in India, even the birds get a late start to the day, and we didn’t see many of them until later in the afternoon on our walk back.   We didn’t have a pedometer with us so we couldn’t tell exactly, but after my legs told me that we had done approximately 3 miles, mostly uphill, we stopped in the middle of the path, sat down on a shaded rock, and ate our packed lunch.  We humans sure do eat a lot of starch, probably because it’s cheap and easy.  In America, you can have potato starch with your wheat starch (burger with fries), and in India, you can have the same (potato vegetable with wheat tortilla).   As I write this, I’m on the plane, and in the airport as well as on the plane, every meal option is primarily a starch: sandwiches, pasta, rice and veg.  It’s no wonder so many of us have the shape of potatoes. 

 

After our starchy lunch, we headed back to the lodge and Marina tried her hand at fly-fishing again while I watched the evening soap opera of birds at the river through my binoculars.  They chased each other around, guarding territory, they took baths, they fed on insects.  Remarkable.  The naked and untrained eye has no idea of the high drama going on in nature all the time.