In summer, Parvati's upper meadows are a lush gardens of wild flowers. Saw these horses on my trek to Spiti in'07
Parvati (Sanskrit: पार्वती, IAST: Pārvatī) from whom the valley takes its name is the Hindu goddess of fertility, love and devotion; as well as of divine strength and power. Daughter of Himavan the mountain king and wife of Shiva, she is the gentle and nurturing aspect of the Hindu goddess Shakti.
A week ago I reached the upper Parvati valley just under 3000m up in the Himalayas. Here in the little village of Pulga pine smoke drifts up into the air from houses made of stone with large wooden verandahs on all sides. The narrow paths between the houses are cluttered with goats, cows, wood piles and haystacks. A caravan of mules heavily loaded with construction materials, tinkers up the mountain path into the village. A old woman with a leathery wrinkled face a mystical eyes returns from the forest with a large bundle of broken pine branches on her back. Here at least, unlike across most of the subcontinent and indeed Southeast Asia, the air is clean. Not as clean as as it used to be, but still quite clean.
A fairly typical house in Pulga, surrounded by wheat, apple orchards and other crops
The region is famous for its hashish. Some come here just to to sit and smoke in cafes, drink Chai and debate which is the tastiest puff in the valley. Higher up in the valley in villages like Pulga there are many other types of travellers, those that come to experience the beautiful mountain environment and its unique Himalayan culture.
It’s still a 30 minute hike up to Pulga from the road. Since I was first here 11 years ago the road has got a little closer, and even without one there’s been a lot of development. The village has changed physically and socially, but it’s still a very beautiful and homey place. I really hope it can stay this way.
An old woman in traditional dress hurding her cows through the village - pic '07 trip
After our long journey across North India, we’ve landed the Astralship here. This is our first flash-mob innovation workshop. At this altitude there’s almost no noise or distractions, so we’re getting into some deep flow and working on our VR language learning game. I’m also devoting some of my time to working out how to tokenise projects, and seeing if we can seed a community entity to facilitate sustainable development in the village.
2 of the Astral Crew. Dave does 3D modelling and game design for VR language learning app and Aglae is a project coordinator
Tokenisation is a tough one. Setting up a new economic entity is like designing a board game. The balance has to be right, so that all the players are engaged and incentivised to work together. It can be easier when everyone is a volunteer and tokens are taken off the table. I had a go at this with a traditional shares-based company once, but it didn’t work out and a great project ended up a mess. Since then, blockchain technology has created a whole new world of tokenization options.
{Thunderclap: people to sign up and their fb and twitter accounts automatically repost your content at a specific time in the future creating a lot of visibility on social media.}
We prepared a Thunderclap social media push to launch the Astralship ICO on 8/8/17. We looked at projects like Primal Base, and sketched out a white paper. We were decentralising innovation and co-living. Back then it felt that with a web page and a smart contract you could raise a lot of money very quickly for a good idea, whether or not you could actually realise it. Maybe we could have, the market was ready to buy anything that moved and so for a time we considered rushing forward with an ICO to catch the wave.
Sailing Astralship is very dynamic, as summer approached I decided to abandon the ICO attempt knowing that a weather window of opportunity was probably closing. It was a little painful to see the thunderclap momentum diverted into a face-saving but fairly arbitrary social media post that gave us a short spike in web traffic but otherwise had no tangible impact. Holding our course would have meant pulling a fast one. I can’t really say I had a particular ethical issue with this; Crypto was looking for teams that wanted to build the new world and Astralship was wholeheartedly in and ready for anything.
My reason for not sailing for that new world with the initial ICO surge on a hastily built raft strapped together with hopes, dreams and good intentions, was that I realised the project and team weren’t yet ready and perhaps my appetite for risk is a little diminished. I've learnt my lesson about going too fast. I was shipwrecked once already.
Last time I was in India was two years ago, in late 2015 I arrived here in Parvati with two young developers. Dan, a web wizard on his first trip to a developing country, and Rishabh an Indian A.I. guy who but had been visiting us in the UK. We spent Diwali with Rishabh’s family in Rajasthan and then made our way up to Parvati just as the nights were starting to turn frosty. Pulga had changed from when I first saw it 9 years earlier but still I felt an intense sense of homecoming as we walk into the sleepy village at dusk. Admittedly, I grew up on a small holding in rural Wales and perhaps there are some surprising parallels between life on a hippy farm in the 80’s and today. Whatever, this place really was a home for me back in 2007. It was a shelter, a solace, a protection from the chaos of the modern world and its apparently broken but expanding systems of growth.
A Baba makes a Boom. Blessing his hashish pipe called a Chillum before he lights it.
That ‘07 trip was at a boundary point in my life. I’d just turned 30. Having spent my 20s mostly travelling or studying abroad I went back from the trip to start an MSc in Computer Science. A practical path, but one I may have taken simply because I couldn’t find another. It lead to me starting a PhD, buying a Chapel, getting a job in the University and starting an IT venture. When I left India that time I had a deep feeling it was time for me to find a base. It may have taken longer than I was expecting but that volition has certainly been fulfilled. The Chapel in Snowdonia is certainly a base. After a long winter there though, it's great to be home in Pulga again.
Now, as April is passing into May 2018, there is sometimes rain in the evening and occasionally colder weather that brings the snowline lower on the mountainside for a day or two. At night it can feel cold, but it’s a long way from frost. We are escaping the melting heat of the north Indian planes here, but on warm days like today the snows are evaporating en masse creating new clouds in the blue sky that spawn directly from the mountain peaks like smoke from volcanoes. This year the season is about a month earlier than normal and I hear there was almost no snow last winter, something our host Dev Raj cannot remember having happened before in all his 40 something years. I was expecting the place to be almost deserted in April, but by now it feel much like the high season of 11 years ago.
Trash ready to burn. Sadly there's nowhere else for it to go.
I catch the scent of burning plastic on the breeze coming through the window. This happens more frequently than it did 2 years ago and I don’t remember ever smelling it on my first visit. In those days there was less trash and the “burn-it strategy” had yet to be widely adopted. When I did see plastic burning it felt like a terrible crime against the pristine cleanliness of the Himalayas meadows. It still offends me when the sickly scent reaches my nostrils through the guest house window, ‘why do I have to be poisoned even here?’. But I’m aware that down below I wouldn’t even notice this relatively tiny amount of air pollution.
Some days, like today, I also feel like there is the slightest hint of brown in the air when I look a the bright snow caps. It must work its way up from the plains below where 1.5 Billion Indians are engaged in trying to advance their own personal development with little concern for the bigger environmental picture. 3 hours down the valley and the haze is less disputable, another 7 from there descending to the plains is a steady progression to where sometimes the visibility is barely 100m through the smog.
Last time I found these subjective environmental indicators of our planet dying were personally quite discouraging. This time though I was well emotionally prepared for how the situation would worsen, and so was pleasantly surprised to find a number of positive signs that show a rising awareness of environmental issues in India. When I first came, there were very few Indian travellers, but today foreigners are the ones becoming rare and tourism is set to balloon much more as a millennial generation of middle class Indians now have the means to escape the pollution and work grind of corporate life. I live in hope that development here can take a strong environmentally aware direction before the air and ground become all too similar to the one most of the tourist are trying to escape.
Last time I was in India, I'd just set up an exciting Healthtech spin-out to take forward an app for hospitals I’d been developing with the local health board. I was handing over the daily running to other and arrived buoyant and excited about setting up an entity in India, but soon cracks in the collaboration were showing and things didn’t work out as I’d hoped. In the end, I had to let it all go and carefully re-examine my core beliefs before I found the strength to rebuild and come here again, this time with Astralship.
In my next post I’ll talk more about these challenges, the recent development in that story, how the experience has shaped me and how the new adventure is taking shape.
