CHAPTER NINE
PEOPLE FROM MARS
At one village I witnessed a trekking group armed with cameras, bon bons, and pens, virtually attack the villagers. Dressed in fluorescent greens, reds, and blues, they poked their cameras in unsuspecting faces without a word and then moved on to their next victim.
Angry tourist, 1990

Imagine living your day-to-day life as usual and suddenly waking up to find your town invaded by people from another planet speaking a strange tongue and looking even stranger, these extraterrestrials lead quite extraordinary lives. They do not appear to know what work is, but enjoy constant leisure. Moreover, they have special powers and inexhaustible wealth.
Imagine further how your children might react to this experience, how fascinated they would be. Just think how difficult it would be to stop them from following these creatures, to convince them that they were better off staying home with you. How could you prevent impressionable teenagers, in their search for identity, from being swept off their feet?
I was in Ladakh from the time tourism started, and was able to observe the process of change from the beginning. Since I spoke the language fluently, I gained an insight into the intense psychological pressures that modernization brings. Looking at the modern world from something of a Ladakhi perspective, I also became aware that our culture looks infinitely more successful from the outside than we experience it on the inside.
With no warning, people from another world descended on Ladakh. Each day many would spend as much as a hundred dollars, an amount roughly equivalent to someone spending fifty thousand dollars a day in America. In the traditional subsistence economy, money played a minor role, used primarily for luxuries—jewelry, silver, and gold. Basic needs—food, clothing, and shelter—were provided for without money. The labor one needed was free of charge, part of an intricate web of human relationships.
In one day a tourist would spend the same amount that a Ladakhi family might in a year. Ladakhis did not realize that money played a completely different role for the foreigners; that back home they needed it to survive; that food, clothing, and shelter all cost money— a lot of money. Compared to these strangers, they suddenly felt poor.
During my first years in Ladakh, young children I had never seen before used to run up to me and press apricots into my hands. Now-little figures, looking shabbily Dickensian in threadbare Western clothing, greet foreigners with an empty outstretched hand. They demand “one pen, one pen,” a phrase that has become the new mantra of Ladakhi children.
The tourists, for their part, think Ladakhis are backward. The few who experience the hospitality of a village home invariably speak of this as the highlight of their holiday. But most of them can only see Ladakhi culture from the outside, and they view it out of the experience of their own culture and economy. They assume that money plays the same role in Ladakh as at home. If they meet a Ladakhi who is earning only two dollars a day, they are horrified and show it. Implicitly or explicitly, they say to him, “Oh, you poor thing. I’d better give you a big tip.” To Western eyes, Ladakhis look poor. Tourists can only see the material side of the culture—worn-out woolen robes, the dzo pulling a plough, the barren land. They cannot see peace of mind or the quality of family and community relations. They cannot see the psychological, social, and spiritual wealth of the Ladakhis.
Besides giving the illusion that all Westerners are multimillionaires, the tourist also helps perpetuate another faulty image of modern life—that we never work. It looks as though our technologies do the work for us. In industrial society today, we actually spend more hours working than people in rural, agrarian economies. But that is not how it looks to the Ladakhis. For them, work is physical work, walking, and carrying things. A person sitting behind the wheel of a car or pushing buttons on a typewriter doesn’t appear to be working. One day I had spent ten hours writing letters. I was exhausted, stressed, and had a headache. In the evening, when I complained about being tired because of having worked so hard, the family I was living with laughed; they thought I was joking. In their eyes, I had not been working; I had been sitting in front of a table, nice and clean, no sweat on my brow, pushing a pen across a piece of paper. This was not work. Ladakhis have not yet experienced the sort of stress, boredom, or frustration that is so much a part of our lives in the West. Once, I tried to explain the concept of stress to some villagers. “You mean you get angry because you have to work?” was the response.
Every day I saw people from two cultures, a world apart, looking at each other and seeing superficial, one-dimensional images. Tourists see people carrying loads on their backs and walking long distances over high mountain passes and say, “How terrible; what a life of drudgery.” They forget that they have traveled thousands of miles and spent thousands of dollars for the pleasure of walking through the same mountains with heavy backpacks. They also forget how much their bodies suffer from lack of use at home.
During working hours they get no exercise, so they spend their free time trying to make up for it. Some will even drive to a health club——across a polluted city in rush hour—to sit in a basement, pedaling a bicycle that does not go anywhere. And they actually pay for the privilege.
Development has brought not only tourism, but also Western and Indian films and, more recently, television. Together they provide overwhelming images of luxury and power. There are countless tools and magical gadgets. And there are machines— machines to take pictures, machines to tell the time, machines to make fire, to travel from one place to another, to talk with someone far away. Machines can do everything for you; it is no wonder the tourists look so clean and have such soft, white hands.
In films, the rich, the beautiful, and the brave lead lives filled with excitement and glamour. For the young Ladakhis, the picture they present is irresistible. By contrast, their own lives seem primitive’, silly, and inefficient. The one-dimensional view of modern life becomes a slap in the face. They feel stupid and ashamed. They are asked by their parents to choose a way of life that involves working in the fields and getting their hands dirty for very little or no money. Their own culture seems absurd compared with the world of the tourists and film heroes.
For millions of youths in rural areas of the world, modem Western culture appears far superior to their own. It is not surprising since, looking as they do from the outside, all they can see is the material side of the modern world—the side in which Western culture excels. They cannot so readily see the social or psychological dimensions—the stress, the loneliness, the fear of growing old. Nor can they see environmental decay, inflation, or unemployment. On the other hand, they know their own culture inside out, including all its limitations and imperfections.
The sudden influx of Western influence has caused some Ladakhis—the young men in particular—to develop feelings of inferiority. They reject their own culture wholesale, and at the same time eagerly embrace the new one. They rush after the symbols of modernity: sunglasses, Walkmans, and blue jeans several sizes too small— not because they find those jeans more attractive or comfortable, but because they are symbols of modern life.
Modern symbols have also contributed to an increase in aggression in Ladakh. Now young boys see violence glamorized on the screen. From Western-style films, they can easily get the impression that if they want to be modern, they should smoke one cigarette after another, get a fast car, and race through the countryside shooting people left and right! It has been painful to see the changes in young Ladakhi friends. Of course they do not all turn violent, but they do become angry and less secure. I have seen a gentle culture change—a culture in which men, even young men, were happy to cuddle a baby or to be loving and soft with their grandmothers.
Dawa was about fifteen when I met him, and he was still living in his village. When the tourists started corning, he became a guide. He used his donkeys and mules for trekking, as pack animals. I lost contact with him for several years, but I heard that he had started his own tourist agency—one of the first Ladakhis to do so. Then one day in the bazaar I bumped into a young man wearing the latest fashion gear: metallic sunglasses, a T-shirt advertising an American rock band, skin-tight blue jeans, and basketball shoes. It was Dawa.
“I hardly recognized you,” I said in Ladakhi.
“Changed a bit, eh?” he replied proudly in English.
We went to a restaurant crowded with tourists from every part of the globe. Dawa insisted on talking in English. “You know I’m working for myself now? Business is great, Helena. I have lots of customers and I’m making a lot of money. I have a room in Leh now.”
I’m surprised I haven’t seen more of you,” I said.
“Well, I’m hardly ever here—I collect the groups myself in Srinagar, and spend most of the time trekking and visiting monasteries.”
“You like your new life?”
“I like it. Most of the tourists are real VIPs! Not like these Ladakhis who just laze around all day.” He grinned at me. “A surgeon from New York gave me this,” he said, pointing to his brand-new backpack.
“Do you go back to the village much?”
“Every few months—to take them rice and sugar. And they always want me back to help with the harvest.”
“How does it feel to go home?”
“Boring. It’s so backward there! We still don’t have electricity, and Abi [grandmother] doesn’t even want it.”
“Maybe she likes the old ways.”
“Well, they can be stuck in the old ways if they want, but Ladakh will change around them. We’ve worked in the fields long enough, Helena; we don’t want to work so hard anymore.” “I thought you said Ladakhis just laze around all day.”
“I mean they don’t know how to get ahead.”
Dawa ostentatiously pulled a pack of Marlboros from his pocket. When I turned down his offer, he lit one for himself and leaned toward me with a worried look.
“I had a fight with my girlfriend this morning. I was looking for her when I met you.”
“Oh! Who’s your girlfriend?”
“I’m not sure I still have a girlfriend, but she’s from Holland. She was in one of my tour groups and stayed on to be with me. But she doesn’t like it here anymore—she wants to go home. And she wants me to go with her, to live in Holland.”
“Would you do that?” I asked.
“I can’t leave my family. They need the money I earn. But she can’t understand that.”