Author: Janet Rizvi
Publishers: Oxford University Press
Pages: 264
Janet Rizvi’s book on Ladakh provides comprehensive information on every aspect of Ladakh – the life of it’s people, history, geography, religion, culture and economy. It is meant for people with serious interest in knowing about the region and understand the local culture and way of life, or to the non-casual traveller who is keen to get a detailed understanding of his or her destination before travelling. It can even serve as a guide, not in terms of where to stay and what to see, but giving in depth knowledge of every place visited.
The book is divided into chapters related to geography, history, culture, present day Ladakh and religious affiliations. Each chapter can be read independently and it should be easy to skip sections that the reader may not be interested in. How-ever, names from history are repeated in many chapters, making reading the chapters on history worthwhile. If a good introduction to everything related to Ladakh is what you are looking for, look no further than this book.
I have been experimenting a bit with Google Maps on including relevant maps with all the posts. The task of setting up maps seems to be a little cumbersome but it works fine and the effort seems worth it.
I shall now try to spice up posts in future with relevant maps. Here is a sample map I generated of Laxman Jhula, with a marker for the bridge across Ganga(click on the marker to get info). If time permits, I hope to add maps to existing posts too.
I am slightly worried on the dependency on Google here though. Ideally I would just make an image copy of the map and post it here, but Google Maps terms doesn’t seem to allow me to do it. Hopefully it should not cause any problems in near future. If you know of any alternatives, do let me know.
Nearly every image you see of Taj shows makes it look lonely. There is just the majestic monument against a nice blue sky. No other construction of any kind, no people, nothing else. It gives an impression as though you could get there and spend time all by yourself marveling the monument.
The truth is far from it; it is almost always buzzing with thousands of people. Even at 6am in the morning when the doors open, you see a queue of people waiting to be let in. The morning crowd is largely western but Indians arriving later in the day are also in a formidable number. The economic prosperity and newly found riches of the Indian economy are propelling people to get out in large numbers.
We are a country where tourism has kicked off well only in the last few years. Continued economic growth will only make more and more people footloose, freeing up their resources and enabling them to spend on travelling. That’s a good thing indeed, but the question comes, how many tourists can the Taj accommodate? It already feels crowded, and the system may not be able to bear two to three times more people in the future.
The number of people waiting to see the sunrise at Kanyakumari exceeds a few thousands in winter weekends.
The likely result is that numbers may have to be restricted sometime in future. That might mean booking a ticket and waiting for a few years for your turn to see the monument. Or the other thing that could happen – entry prices may be hiked up to unreasonable levels making it difficult for everyone to afford it.
It may be really long way for such a thing to happen at Taj Mahal. But Ranthambhore is feeling the heat for a long time, and entry restrictions have meant booking ahead far into future. Corbett National Park also has entry limits which can cause similar problems in the days to come. There are other national parks like Bandipur and Nagarahole where there are no restrictions yet, but the heavy inflow of tourists is indeed disturbing the animals and a step at restricting the flow may be inevitable.
The problem is not limited to India, the same trends can be seen world over. Machu Picchu, a prized possessions of Peru’s history is crowded with tourists and bookings are already closed for next few years. The trend is likely to continue and may affect more and more places all over the world. A news report talks of the lack of supply for the growing demand in tourism:
Indian call centre employees, Russian engineers, Chinese middle managers and Brazilian salesmen are scouring the web for deals on trips. They want to see Paris from the Eiffel Tower, relax in the Maldives and play blackjack in Las Vegas. According to the UN World Tourism Organisation, international tourist visits are expected to double by 2020, from roughly 800 million in 2008 to 1.6 billion…
…governments and institutions may seek to control demand by imposing heavy surcharges on travel to the most popular places or by requiring costly visas for access to them…
…rationing — and the resulting waiting lists — will become commonplace. Some groups, for example, are already calling for limits on traffic to ecologically sensitive destinations…
The way we are all going out in search of destinations, I can see this becoming more common all over the world.