A Privilege of Simplicity
Having recently completed a 4000km motorcycle journey from Dehradun to Kaza to Ladakh and back through Kashmir, I felt called to share some reflections on life and travel.
The predicament of the human life is uniquely illuminated by travel. This is not to say that tourism does the same, but travel, exploration—the act of fronting the most vital and raw aspects of life come to the forefront of our awareness.
Isolated moments come to mind. I was on the way from Kaza in Spiti valley to Keylong, on the north side of the Atal tunnel. The route was only 150km but there was barely a paved road and that meant 6 hours of off-roading over dust, pebbles, bigger pebbles and parts which were essentially riverbed. Thankfully my bike’s suspension could handle it but this stretch was brutal. But this isn’t what was important there, it was the lives of the people I crossed paths with.
A little before Kunzum la, the pass that takes one from Spiti valley to Lahaul, there was a small village called Losar. A heavy mountain stream was flowing along the beginning of the village and there I found the only bridge on this 6 hour stretch. After crossing the bridge there were fields stretching all the way to the main river a little down the valley. The stream had been diverted into little streams that irrigated the crops here. Visually it was a green relief from the brown dusty road I’d faced until now.
I decided to stop and take a break for lunch at a small café or restaurant. It was packed and yet the locals who ran it were kind enough to offer me a seat. Slowly, I found out it was the front side of their house. When my food arrived, a simple thali of whatever they had prepared at the moment, a large group left. Suddenly I could see a little kid on the table next to me studying for school, refusing to do his homework. I saw the grandfather helping in the kitchen and coming out periodically to rest in a plastic chair just outside the kitchen. He didn’t seem to be resting but simply sitting down. How does one tell the difference? I don’t quite know but he seemed to delight in the simple pleasure of sitting down and staring at a wall, or his grandkids or me.
I must be honest but it was a surprise for me to fathom that there were school going children in this little village. I didn’t even know there was a school. The simple normality of this situation struck me as bizarre. Why?
Forward to Ladakh and I was exploring Eastern Ladakh with some people I’d met in the hostel in Leh. We reached a village called Nyoma, and decided to stay there for the night. There was an old man working at our lodging. At dinner time I asked him a bit about what he does and where he’s from. He told me he’d grown up here and in the winters he’d go to Leh and visit some of his family there but he enjoyed it in Nyoma. Mind you, this village is nearly 4200m in altitude so we were all suffering from light-headedness while this man was running around doing his thing in trying to feed us. He later told us that he didn’t own the property but it belonged to an old woman who came by later. He said he just helped her.
“I’m sure you get paid though right?” I asked him.
“Sometimes. But she helps me too.” He replied without any sign of disdain or remorse.
Behaviour unmotivated by economic activity? Again, quite bizarre.
What I witnessed in Nyoma is exactly what anthropologist Marcel Mauss called ‘gift economies’—systems where value circulates through relationships rather than transactions. David Graeber expanded on this, showing how these networks of give and take create bonds that market economies actively dissolve. The old man helping ‘sometimes for pay’ exists in a space between two economic logics: one where helping maintains the social fabric, another where labour demands compensation. His contentment is part of a web of participating in cycles of giving and receiving. Something economics can’t easily quantify.
The journey from Nyoma to Leh took us through some of the most remote stretches of Ladakh. A week later I went with some friends to Turtuk, on the edge of Ladakh and Gilgit-Baltistan. A small village and what is termed the greenest part of Ladakh. Turtuk was lower in altitude, about 2900m but still spectacularly surrounded by brown rocky mountains that towered above us. The village is located a little higher than the main road on a large flat plain of these mountains. It looked like regular erosion of rocks in the mountains had piled up and the villagers had made it flat and it was abundant with apricot trees, fields with vegetables, greens and things we could not name.
After having dinner we were walking back and found, to our surprise, the little alleys filled with life. It was too dark to see and each little path had space for two people to cross each other and had little channels and streams and flowing alongside it. Yet, children were running around without any light in this narrow area and not one bumped into us. The smaller alleys lined with houses were casually populated with women discussing their day. They were speaking Balti so there was nothing I could understand except maybe the word ‘chi’ which means ‘what’ in Ladakhi—though in Balti it’s actually ‘chi-a’ or ‘yaa’, a subtle linguistic connection between these mountain languages.
The atmosphere was jovial, communal and in the absolute darkness of the night there, strangely uplifting. It almost felt like a shame to come back from there and descend down to our lodging. The night was so dark that after coming back we got to see a clear night sky with stars.
So why are all these things so special? Why are they bizarre? And why do they seem to take a hold in my consciousness?
Well firstly, it is a reminder of a life that is simpler. A life where people don’t rush or try to make anything grand out of it, where they’re content with living where they’re at. Coming back to the cities reminded me of why this seemed so strange and so uplifting. In cities, everyone seemed to be rushing around trying to project status, people behave with subtle undercurrents of ambition. They search for power, pleasure and money. Their rhythms are divorced from seasons, climate, weather or any other natural cycles.
Whereas out in the countryside, there was a simplicity that was evident. So many times I’ve just seen people sitting at the side of the road staring and just looking at what passes by. Earlier I used to think these people are bored and they don’t know how to spend their time. But now I realised, they possessed something city people didn’t: space. They had not only physical space but also psychological space to spend their time in leisurely ways. Even though summer in those rugged mountains is a period of working because there is a harvest to be tended to.
It is far too easy to say that we in the cities have comfort, luxury, convenience and the privilege of modernity. But I believe the people living in remote parts of this nation (and possibly the world) have the privilege of simplicity—something we sorely lack and cannot have in our cities.
Psychologist Barry Schwartz documented how abundance of choice, that hallmark of urban modernity, often diminishes rather than enhances satisfaction. In cities, we navigate hundreds of micro-decisions daily—which coffee shop, which route, which brand, which experience. Each choice carries the weight of potential regret (FOMO).
The villagers I met inhabit a different relationship with possibility. Their constraints—geographic, economic, social—paradoxically free them from the weight of having to make so many choices daily. When the thali arrives, it’s whatever was cooked that day. There’s a profound rest in that simplicity. I noticed myself how things changed when I reached Srinagar. I was eating in restaurants with menu’s and I had to decide what I felt like eating. Sometimes I asked them, “what’s already made?” They replied, “Nothing. We make everything fresh to order.” While that’s nice, my heart sunk a little bit in having to make this choice.
Anthropologist Edward T. Hall distinguished between ‘ monochronic’ cultures that treat time as linear and segmented, and ‘ polychronic’ cultures where time flows more fluidly. The grandfather ‘simply sitting’ embodies polychronic time—he isn’t filling time or killing it, he’s inhabiting it. Time is his friend. Urban life enforces monochronic rhythms: meetings at 2, dinner at 7, productivity measured in units per hour. Mountain villages still move with what Hall called ‘natural time’—shaped by seasons, daylight, the rhythm of communal tasks.
If we take the example of Leh, it was a city that served as a trading centre. Well-located between Kashmir, eastern Ladakh, the valleys to the north (including the ancient Silk route from Kashgar) and the valleys to the south, it makes sense why Leh became the ‘center’ of it all. And while Leh is fast paced nowadays, one cannot hurry the Ladakhis there even if you try. Because they see no point in rushing.
What is the sense I am trying to convey in this essay? I’m not quite sure but there’s something here that I believe all of you have also felt on your own trips. Maybe it is a sense that we’ve lost the privilege of a simpler life. Maybe spending time in cities once again, I see how we are all chasing things. It seems like the thing you do in a city. I see how superfast internet has made us so susceptible to online marketing, leaving us easier to be influenced.
Perhaps this contrast, more than anything, reveals my own longing and not some absolute truth. Many in these villages would gladly trade their simplicity for urban opportunity—education for their children, healthcare for their parents, the chance to choose their path. We each yearn for what we feel we don’t have. The city dweller dreams of mountain silence; the villager imagines city possibilities. This perpetual elsewhere, this grass-forever-greener, might be the most human predicament of all. The question then becomes: how do we find what nourishes us wherever we are? How do we live well while recognising what genuine privileges—simple or complex—we actually possess?
Maybe this is just about environments—physical, social and psychological. Human beings inevitably want to do things they see others doing. This ‘monkey see-monkey do’ behaviour is hardwired into us. Seeing satisfaction in the way of life up in villages like Losar, Nyoma and Turtuk, people there are more accustomed to finding satisfaction in themselves too. Seeing others building hotels and guesthouses in Leh is prompting locals to do the same. And the chase for riches and pleasure in big cities is prompting us to do the same.
In all this, I believe there is a subconscious idea of salvation hidden in these narratives that fuel us. It seems we believe and we are told, if we keep going on this path and seeking these things, one day we’ll have enough. One day, we’ll be satisfied. One day, it’ll all make sense. But we rarely stop to think whether this ‘one day’ will ever come. Will it come for sure? How can we be so sure of how we’ll feel in the future? How do we know this is true?
In traditional communities there is also an idea of salvation given to people through social narratives and religious mythologies. This is to say they are not immune but I do get the feeling they enjoy the ride much more than we do. They don’t wish to get anywhere quickly. Slowly does it. While maybe we in the city do not always enjoy where we are at but wish to get somewhere else fast.
I’ve heard stories from people in Ladakh who have seen the rapid influence of ‘development’ in their lifetimes and they see the dark sides of this ‘progress’ we hold in such high esteem. Where people used to help each other for no other reason than to help their neighbour has now become a cash transaction. Families and communities that used to tend to fields and harvest together in song and celebration now feature one or two working members who have to bear the burden of this work themselves. A large number of Ladakhis have sent their children to study in cities and now those children have jobs and not all of them have come back. Their old ways of life are suffering as the parents have to do the work themselves and are finding it harder and harder to get help from their neighbours.
This ‘ what’s in it for me’ attitude has infiltrated Ladakh as well and the effects are quite clear to see.
Wendell Berry argues that true economy is rooted in household and community, where the goal is health and continuity rather than profit. This is very evident in Ladakh, where one naturally wonders how generations have lived here happily. Berry writes about how industrial (and modern) economics treats everything as extractable resource—land, labour, culture itself and even time. Community economics, by contrast, sees wealth in the maintenance of relationships, the fertility of soil, the continuation of skills and stories and most importantly celebration. What I witnessed in Ladakh mirrors Berry’s observation: when economics shifts from maintaining a place to exploiting it, the community fabric unravels.
James C. Scott shows how modern development tries to make messy, complex systems neat and measurable—and breaks them in the process. The old ways of farming, the informal agreements between neighbours, the houses built to fit the landscape—all these get replaced by standard, one-size-fits-all solutions. The harvest songs and communal labour I heard about in Ladakh are what Scott calls ‘metis’—practical wisdom passed down through generations, the kind you learn by doing, not from books. When development arrives with its spreadsheets and metrics, this knowledge gets labelled ‘backward’ and thrown away, even though it kept these communities thriving for centuries.
Yet perhaps it’s wrong to label what we’re witnessing as simply corruption or decline. These communities find themselves caught between worlds, navigating value systems that often speak past each other, or where one narrative dominates the other. The old ways weren’t consciously chosen—they simply emerged so. Now, faced with alternatives, there’s a negotiation happening, often without the luxury of deliberate choice. The tragedy lies in how these transformations unfold: communities drift into new patterns without fully understanding what they’re leaving behind or what they’re moving towards. In the space between the life that was and the life that might be, something essential risks being lost—the very capacity to choose consciously, to say ‘this matters more than that,’ to preserve what feeds the soul even when the market assigns it no value.
