Brighter Perspectives

I hope I will be able to post this blog. The comupter guy has warned me that we are at the end of the battery. As I've already described, the power situation in Leh is erratic.

Perspectives look a little brighter today as I finally managed to catch up with Skarchen's Director Ghulam Hussain. We spoke for a while and I set up a focus group with Skarchen people on Saturday. What I hope to find out is why they have chosen to promote the Tibetan part of Balti history and not any other part, and how they have worked creatively with traditional cultural materials in their renewal of Balti culture. For instance, they have taken the lyrics of old folk songs (so called Ghazals) and recorded them with pop music backgrounds to make them more likeable for young people (!). So far they have produced ten albums. Now they're planning a Bollywood style movie about a love story between a Balti from Pakistan and a Balti from Ladakh.

This morning Sonam brought a guy called Tsultrim who was doing an M Phil in sociology to ask my advice. He want to study the socio-economic development here. It's not easy to study at advance level here. Infact, he's a student at Annamalai University which is in Tamil Nadu although he doesn't have to go there. They have a study centre in Delhi. But the advisor is in Tamil Nadu. There are no library resources here and his literature list consisted of ancient books (some dating back to the 19th century). What he needs is to search electronic resources to catch up with the recent developments in the field, but how?