Parvez Dewan’s Jammu, Kashmir, Ladakh: Ladakh

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Parvez Dewan can send you to sleep about Ladakh. If anyone has the Ultimate Dossier on this land, it is he, after years of running about India’s northernmost region, administering and adventuring his way around its desert plains, passes and lakes. Along the way, he discovered that Kargil and Leh had large Buddhas carved into the mountainside, noticed that the world’s purest Aryans’, the Drokpas, weren’t amused by suggestions that there was mass kissing at their festival, and taught himself polo on the endless Kargyak Plains – the highest inhabited place in the world. Parvez started the Ladakh festival, threw open to tourists seven thitherto ‘forbidden’ areas (but got bounced back from Siachen), developed an admiration for the history, culture and people of the occupied Gilgit-Baltistan-Hunza region, introduced the Suru Valley and Goshan-Murad Bagh to the international media, and waited for weeks to sight the snow leaopard. He was luckier with the wild ass, Brahmini ducks and black necked cranes, though. The first officer of India’s elite civil service, the IAS, to be posted in Zanskar, Parvez Dewan’s innings in Ladakh started on a note that was to bind him to the culture of this exciting land. On his third day in Zanskar, on a tour of the Char gorge, he found himself trapped in a huge snowstorm (in a comfortable house, though). He spet that week learning the Bodhi (Ladakh) alphabet. This later led to his writing Ladakhi-English and Ladakhi-German phrasebooks and translating a Ladakhi epic. In this first-of-its-kind encyclpaedic three volume set on Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, one on each region, Parvez Dewan shares in detail, his interest and excitement in the fabled land that has been the arena of his adult life: an up-to-date yet timeless guide to the magical trinity of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh that crowns the sub-continent of India.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Parvez Dewan

Parvez Dewan was educated at St. Stephen's College, Delhi, and the University of Cambridge, and was elected a Visiting Research Fellow of Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University. He hitchhiked through Nicaragua to study its total literacy miracle and trawled Cambodia and Central Asia for their architectural links to Kashmir's temples and shrines. An officer of the Indian Administrative Service, he is currently the Divisional Commissioner of Kashmir. Two of his libretti were recorded as rock operas in Denmark, a third was telecast on Britain's Channel Four (and none of the three was ever heard of again). At St. Stephen's he was elected President of the College Union society and was awarded the L. Raghubir singh History Prize for ranking first in his B.A. (Hons.) class. At Cambridge, he was awarded the Jennings Prize in 1987 for obtaining the highest marks, and a distinction, in the Development Studies class. He was the Senior Treasurer of the Cambridge University (C.U.) Friends of the Earth and was also with the C.U. Green Party. Most of the publications that Parvez has written for had to fold up (Youth Times, JS, The Hindustan times Evening News, The Metropolitan on Saturday, Shama (Urdu) and such sections of The Times of India as he regularly contributed to). However, some survived (notably the Times of India, India Today, The Hindustan Times, The Statesman and Stardust).

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Bibliographic information

Title
Parvez Dewan’s Jammu, Kashmir, Ladakh: Ladakh
Author
Edition
1st ed.
Publisher
ISBN
8170492009
Length
588p., Plates; Map; Glossary; Appendix; Bibliography; Index; 26cm.
Subjects