“Pakistani Himalayas”

I do not want to use other names, the political ones, for the region. I am identifying it with its ecology. Therefore, I name the region “Pakistani Himalayas” for my purposes. I have lived in the region since 2013 when I arrived her accidentally and with no purpose other than to be “in a cold, spiritual place high up in the Himalayas where I could live a life of quiet, writing and working, talking about the arrival and design of a new world”. What I found instead was a lot of loss, chaos, pain, confusion, anxiety, anger and grief that was visceral, immediate and very hostile in its delivery even though the good people of the region often do their best to restrain themselves. There is a lot of trauma, and deep pain and fear around identity. I was made familiar with issues I did not even have a political and social vocabulary for, me being a woman of arts, science, business, and pure knowledge, plus the troubling world of spirituality. Like most people, my ideas about mountains often come from fiction or science books and documentaries. Or, I am familiar with the culture and aesthetic of Indian and Nepalese Himalayas. I have, like most Pakistanis, no actual clue of the politics of the “Pakistani Himalayas” though as a gnostic and a humanist, I can understand the matters intuitively.

What I found and experienced was, at least in my case, often deeply dark and troubling, with glimmers of hope and bittersweet interactions and memories that, ultimately, turned sour due to the precipitation of circumstances, most noticeably the failure of my own capacity to bear life at high-altitude with no prep and bad resources, with the society trolling me. I quit, but I still retain what appear to be very valuable insights. I aim to share those here. Thus, a new blog category wherein we will find challenges and proposed solutions to challenges.