A Life Lived For Others Is A Life Well Lived
do you remember
the last vacation you took at a very
popular tourism destination
do you know where you went where did you
hear about this place
did you see it on someone’s facebook
page or did you come across it in the
movies
and when you went there did you actually
go to just the tourism spots
or did you go beyond did you see what
was beyond those tourism spots
did you talk to your cab driver did you
go into a little village did you sit and
eat a meal with a
local villager 10 years ago
i went on a vacation to just a very
popular tourism destination in india
a place called ladakh ladakh is a high
altitude mountainous region
in the himalayan territory of india and
10 years ago it wasn’t as popular as it
was today as it is today
i went on a solo trek little realizing
anything about the region i had no idea
on my bucket list was just the two or
three treks that i wanted to do
being the over confident trekker that i
was i didn’t acclimatize as well and i
felt extremely ill
here’s the part that was different
i fell ill in a little village which is
part of my trek which had exactly
one family in that can you imagine a
village with exactly one family
the nearest other village was about four
hour walk away
so here i am cut off all by myself
in a village with just one family there
are no stores there are no hospitals
there’s no health care centers there is
nothing
my phone doesn’t work the village
doesn’t have electricity i don’t know
anyone
all i see is a family of three two goats
and a cow
and a yak i think it’s all this was my
introduction
to ladakh luckily for me and i say
luckily is
despite my illness i stopped to breathe
in the beauty of ladakh and i stopped to
look
and understand how is it that there is a
remote village so far away from a road
head
and that’s something i know so little
about being an indian i had no idea they
were villages like this
here is the beauty of this village in
this region
on that same trek i came across a school
this school had five children not in a
classroom mind you in the entire school
it had five children and two teachers of
which one of the teachers had
actually was on his way back to the main
town of lay
to buy midday meal supplies the school
was being reconstructed and painted for
just these five children
as most government schools are go this
it had a broken
blackboard it teaches two very shabby
looking rooms
bare floors and ladakh mind you goes
down to temperatures
very very low temperatures so let me
give you a little bit more about ladakh
ladakh like i said is a high altitude
regions region people
live in altitudes upwards of 9000 feet
let me give you something to compare it
with delhi gurgaon where i’m talking
from right now is
approximately 600 feet so you’re at an
altitude temperatures go down to minus
50 degrees in the winters
grass of the cargill region of ladakh is
arguably
the second most coldest region in the
entire planet
from the world over hundreds and
thousands of tourists come over to
ladakh
every year in fact the number of
tourists who come here
are more than the local population every
year there’s about 300 to 400 000
tourists to visit
do you know where they visit they visit
this beautiful lake called the pangong
lake which most of you would have seen
in the movies or on selfies and pictures
but here’s a little fact i bet you
didn’t know just beyond that beautiful
pangong lake are
few tiny little settlements hamlets
which have just a handful of homes there
is a little village there which is five
children
in its school there’s another one which
is 30 there is yet another one with 17
children
in the school i bet you didn’t know that
ladakh is home to the highest motorable
road people from the world overcome
there to click selfies but beyond that
more triple root
at few hundred a few hamlets almost 100
hamlets that are there which border
our two bordering neighbors china and
pakistan it is home
to the famous chardo trek which
trekkers come in from all over to come
and visit but did you know this part
it’s a trek for many for the outsiders
but for the it’s a lifeline
that’s the only way they travel to reach
their remote villages in winter
when the mountain passes are covered in
snow you and me enjoy winter out here
when we snuggled up in our blankets and
things come into our homes
many ladakhis are stuck in their
villages and do not come out for a few
months of a year because
in the winters the roads are shut there
is this is the other ladakh that most of
you don’t see
i was there for 21 days and during my
solo trek and the reality of ladakh hit
me what hit me was more was my sense of
shame that i knew
so little about a part of my own country
a background about me i come from a
corporate background i’m an
information technology professional i’ve
worked for many years in the us
came back quit to work with children i
was at the point of
that point of time in my life i was
teaching in a very
affluent private school here in gurgaon
the reality of the private school
and the facilities that my own children
have coming across a school with three
children
and five children blew my mind i came
back completely fired up with the
passion of wanting to do something i had
found my life’s purpose
but passion is one thing converting it
into a vision and a goal is something
entirely different
when i came back the first thing i did
was research
to understand why do i know so little
and what can i do to help what is the
reality the one thing that really amazed
me is
ladakh has 1 000 schools 1 000 schools
with an average
school strength of barely 25 children
and
education is today the single largest
reason for them to migrate that and job
opportunities
there is nothing out there to hold them
back in the villages barring a
government school
and they sometimes young children as
young as three or four years old go to
the cities to study and stay alone in
dormitories and hostels
most of these villages don’t have
electricity most of them still do not
have mobile connectivity but the people
want to stay there because that is their
home but their only aspiration is life
is better education for their children
and jobs for their children
this ladakh then became the one that i
said i want to change things or how can
i be
how can i help the one thing that
bothered me was if i don’t know anything
about this latak if i knew so little
chances are no one else does either so
my first thought
about building this passion into a
vision was
how do i make people aware of the real
ladakh how do i get people to go beyond
the tourism reasons
so if i thought that helped me was if i
were to put these villages and schools
on the map
google didn’t have information then can
i then
ask you to go to ladakh go to the real
villages and maybe contribute take a box
of crayons
take a football for a child take some
story books for them to read conduct a
reading workshop
so that’s the first thing we did i came
back
fired up and i quit my job and i started
this organization called 17 000 feet
foundation
as the name suggests i said i’m not
going to limit myself to ladakh
by the way this is the story of the most
of the indian himalayan region which is
another
10 states we started 17 000 feet
foundation along with my husband and our
third founding member who’s a ladakhi
with the simple reason how do we get
people to live better lives in their own
villages
first thing we did we mapped the entire
region of ladakh we visited 1 000
schools
it was beautiful to see that every
village had
every single child who went to school
there was not one single child who was
not going to school
and that’s such a beautiful thing to see
for me that made me want
do more for them i said how do i get
these children to stay back
and not travel outside so far away or
migrate
simple i said how can i work with the
parents perception that look your
government school is good
there is a system at work if every
single hamlet regardless of how small or
big
has a school it is a system that’s
trying to work so the best way we can
work is to support it
rather than create something in parallel
so we set about beautifying the schools
first things how do we make the schools
look better perform better
feel better so we started painting the
schools we provided carpeting we put up
playgrounds furniture
playgrounds do you have any idea how
difficult it is to set up a playground
in a remote villages which sometime
could take me three days of a walk to
reach
villages have to come out in full force
to help us not just this
do you know how difficult it is to set
up a playground in an area which is
mountainous
where you don’t have any electricity
villagers and our team members sit
together and break stones with their
bare hands
and this is the story of the ladakh
which is driven by a sense of community
of togetherness
that we started working we’ve set up
playgrounds now in over 140 schools and
this year we’ll be setting up 10 more
the playgrounds have attracted children
to the school like anything they want to
come there
they come there before the teachers come
in and they leave after the teachers
leave parents are pulling their children
out
of other schools and saying i want my
child to be here because the school is
looking beautiful
furniture do you know children sit on
the floor in minus 15 degrees centigrade
in delhi and gurgaon which faces some
sort of winters we shut the schools down
when it is 5 degrees
in ladakh schools continue up until
december when it is minus 15 degrees and
they shut for three months after
but the children go to school there are
regions in dhras where the snow
is at two feet three feet maybe even
four feet high
entire families move down for the winter
children actually go to in different
schools for six months and after the
snow melts which by the way could take
about a month
after the snow melts they come back to
their villages
i have pictures and visuals of children
studying
on in schools where this snow has
reached
two feet uh two floors two stories high
but they’re studying and they love
coming to school
this area we said how do we bring
digital education
so that’s another thing being a techie
myself a corporate techie
two years ago we even did this for us
reaching the last mile is not the
problem the problem is
reaching the last mile with the best
solution that is what we wanted to do we
waited eight years to get the perfect
solution
today we have also have a solution where
all of our schools are digitized they
have solar electricity
they have a unique offline solution
children are able to learn at home and
today during covet when
rest of the country most of the remote
areas children are sitting at home
our children have tablets in their hands
in their homes
we managed to do a whole lot for us
what has kept us going is the spirit of
the community in the sense of purpose
that they have
we managed to reduce migration most of
our children are back home now sitting
at home
going to the schools in their villages
and what keeps us going is the sense
of purpose that they gave us for us
ladakh has been a test bed
we call ourselves 17 000 feet foundation
and what we also do is we welcome people
like you to come in and be a part of our
program so next time you go to ladakh
don’t just go as a tourist you can go as
a volunteer tourist you can help us go
to this remote village
but if you go to that remote village
there you can contribute to the income
of that village
so next time you go anywhere look beyond
the tourism destination
maybe just maybe your life’s calling me
just be beyond there
thank you for listening i welcome you
all to ladakh someday the real ladakh
so as a ladakhi say july salaam alaikum
and namaste
you