Leh :Day 4

This morning I had the interview with the CEC, who much be a pretty big-wig, top-brass kind of guy. His house was ginormous, and when I told the taxi driver where I was going, he knew the name of the person who lived there (“Chering Dorjay?”). Basically, this guy was the governor of the Ladakh region, so he had no problem letting me film the interview. The view was beautiful, and afterwards he gave me some tea, and there was once again belabored small talk. The problem is they don’t ask questions back. I wonder if there is some cultural difference, and they’re thinking “God, she talks a lot, doesn’t she ever stop asking questions?” While I’m thinking “It’s like pulling teeth to get this conversation rolling!” Maybe it would be nicer just to sit in silence and sip tea. But it would have been awkward because he wasn’t having any.

Then I walked down to the Women’s Alliance, which had its headquarters and a café right down the road from his house. I was there very early, but luckily there were some tables for the café outside, so I sat down and wrote yesterday’s entry by hand. Then a little later, two women showed up, and I hoped they were some of the ones I had the names of to contact. They were all whities’ names. But Sam and Ellie, the women, were just tourists, here for some breakfast, so we all ate together. They lived in Goa, but were from England and Cyprus. After they left, I wondered a round a little bit because more and more people were finally starting to show up. I asked around, and found one lady on my contact list (Sharon Hoffman), and she suggested Alex, her colleague, also participate in the interview. Sharon turned out to have lived in New Orleans for a while, so we hit it off about that. I liked them both a lot, and they were so nice to submit to the interview without any advance notice. I hadn’t had any contact information for them. On the way out, I got a video about the NGO and the Ladakhi region, thinking it could count at research, but it also looked moderately interesting to me, too. It’s about local Ladakhi’s traveling to the West to see the “civilized” world, but of course they also see all the downsides that they don’t have to deal with, like nursing homes and landfills.

After Women’s Alliance, I tried to walk to LeDEG, another NGO right down the road, but I couldn’t find it despite Alex’s very good map. So I kept walking into town, and eventually got a taxi out to the guy that the Mr. Dorjay, the governor, had recommended I talk to. It turned out to be basically in the next town, so it was a long taxi drive, and then once we got to the Power Project Development Compound itself, the taxi driver had to take me around to a few different buildings, trying to help me find the right guy. Eventually, I found him, and he had a line out his door, so I knew this was going to be a foreshortened interview. I did get to skip to the head of the line (Why does this happen, I wonder?).

I forgot to say that I had gone home to change out of my green salwar-kameez because I realized it was doing more harm than good—it was Indian culture, not Ladakhi, and I was interviewing a lot of Ladakhis. So when I went out to PPD to interview SK Kakroo, I had changed to pants and a white kurta. And wouldn’t you know it, he was Indian. But I am not good at guessing from the names because I don’t know any of the languages I’m working with.

The “interview” was not particularly successful. He was very brusk, and also had his executive engineer, MK Varikoo, in the office with him. Both answered the questions, and neither seemed happy with me. But I got a few smiles out of them, so maybe they were just rushed and over-busy, and it was very nice of them to meet with me at all. I didn’t even ask to record this interview because I was pretty sure they wouldn’t want it recorded, and it would just set a poor tone to begin the talk that way. I probably only talked with them 15 minutes, which was frustrating considering how far I’d ridden to get there.

They did recommend I talk to someone else, Dean Mahmood, the executive engineer who would have the discharge data on the Indus. Of course this was very much of interest to me, so I walked around the compound to find this guy, but ended up finding only a few of his colleagues, who said he wasn’t in that day. Curse the luck, and it was my last day in Leh! I talked to his colleagues for a while. I seemed to attract an entourage wherever I went, which was weird. I don’t know if my research is really all that interesting, or if it’s just because I’m different and foreign and seemingly interesting. But anyway, after another short interview with this “subsidiary” guy, he mentioned I could walk to the Indus from where we were.

I was very excited about this possibility. Suddenly, the long taxi ride didn’t seem like a waste. I managed to go get some shots of the Indus, and it really was beautiful. There was a bridge over it, covered in prayer flags. The river was so small, it was hard to think of it supporting all of Pakistan. It will be interesting to see Tabby’s photos of the same river, and try to reconcile the two.

I then called the LeDEG guy to get the directions to his place. Grabbed a taxi straight back to him place, and conducted the interview, which he let me record. His name was a difficult-to-pronounce Sonam Jorgyes. He was helpful, but in a hurry, so the interview, while dense, was only about 30 minutes. I had to use the video camera, not the camera-camera’s video function because the batteries were dead. I was really nervous about the sound, but at least it was the first indoor-interview. Later, I at least found the sound was hearable, if nothing else.

Afterward, Sarah and I went to get a yak-cheese sandwich for dinner. I didn’t do my interview transcriptions that night as planned. We instead packed up for most of the evening, got all our bills taken care of, etc. Then went back to the roof to sleep, but it was already raining. It stopped eventually, so we got some sleep at least. Despite our rude Belgian roofmate.