Manali

It's like Telegraph Avenue crossed with Aspen and...oh...India, too

Manali is an unusual place. There are two Manali’s actually, “New Manali” and “Old Manali”, the former being where the Indian tourists go and the latter being where foreign tourists go. The spatial segregation between these two groups is remarkable in its completeness. The foreigners only venture down into town (2 _ km downhill) to use the ATM or catch a bus. I can’t get over how blatant the myth-making in this place is. Lonely Planet informs that “When Manali was first discovered by travellers in the 60s, it was a peaceful Shangri-La”. I’m sorry Lonely Planet, but you clearly don’t know your history. In my research, I came across mention of Manali in European travel guides as early as 1907.

Even though it is almost June, it still feels like winter here. Temperatures are in the 40s during the day and drop below freezing at night. I had to buy several winter layers. It’s quite a change from the heat of the plains where I was just days ago. Unlike Shimla, which is located atop a mountain ridge in the early foothills of the Himalayas, Manali is located in a valley. Manali is actually lower in elevation (by a couple hundred meters) than Shimla, but it is much further north and in proximity to some truly great mountain ranges. On all sides, the mountains rise up sheer vertical faces climbing to snow-covered peaks of 20,000 feet and above. Rohtang Pass, at 14,000, it a mere 50 km away, but it is a steep climb. The passes are not yet actually open to regular traffic. Only jeeps can make it through. And so there are hundreds of travel agents around town trying to book tourists on shared jeep rides across the mountains. These can be quite expensive, at close to $50 a day. The geographer in me has this to say: jeep travel represents a form of privileged spatial accessibility. The most remote areas of the Himalayas are indeed accessible, but only to those with the money to  pay for the access, which comes at a steep price. I wasn’t really thinking when I came up here this early in the season. I want to go over the pass to Spiti and Lahaul, but I don’t want to take a jeep. The passes will probably open up in another few weeks to regular traffic, at which point it will be possible to take public transportation. I might head south to warmer (but still mountainous) environs and wait a couple weeks and then return to see if the passes are open. I’m here until July. I should have enough time. That’s what’s nice about staying in one region.

The bus ride from Shimla to Manali took 10 hours. The first several hours were spent descending from the mountain on which Shimla resides, along precipitous, cliff-hugging narrow road, barely wide enough for two buses or trucks to pass. And yet they do, often, and oftentimes nearly calamitously. The entire route is crowded with vehicles. Lots of buses, lots of trucks, but most of all private automobiles, often SUVs, driven by middle class Indian tourists. We descended down to a fairly low elevation at Bilaspur, where it was hot and arid, and then started slowly climbing, following the Beas River. Manali is green, damp, and cold. It feels a lot like a mountain in The Rockies or Sierra Nevada or Alps. New Manali is a bustling modern town lined of concrete block hotels. There are all sorts of activities for the Indian tourists. Among the most popular is rappelling across the river on a wire. At the Buddhist Gompa in town, Indian tourists clamber around snapping photographs in the monks’ faces, clanging the bell, and treating it like a theme park.

Up in Old Manali, hugging the hillside, is a little village that is entirely given towards the international backpacker crowd. Or just because it’s quieter. It is a lot quieter here, removed from the noise of the city. The guesthouses are simple affairs, rustic wooden cottages, all with attached cafes and menus boasting the usual backpacker fare: pancakes, museli, porridge, cornflakes, omelets, Chinese food, salads, pizza, lasagna, spaghetti, and Israeli food. The average length of stay here is one month. So it starts to feel like a community. You see the same people every day, and interact with the same shop owners and restaurants. The shop owners are really friendly and trusting. If you don’t have the right change after your dinner, they’ll “don’t worry about it” and you can just pay them the next day.

People who have been here for years talk about how much it’s changed, how much Manali in general has changed. The manager of my guesthouse started his business in 1989, at which point he said there were only a handful of guesthouses. Since then, dozens have sprung up. Initially, guesthouses were located in actual village houses. Now they are built from scratch, often 3 or 4 stories. According to the manager, there is no building code, no government regulation over what gets built, because we are outside the city’s jurisdiction and in a village. I met a yogi with business cards who laments that things have changed, that the scene is no longer as social as it once was. People stick to their own groups more now. At my guesthouses, guests rarely use the comfortable cafÈ space, with floor seating on carpets and low tables, and instead order food room service. The Ford Corporation is going to build a major international-standard ski resort,  the first of its kind in India, just up the valley from here, with a multi-billion dollar price tag. That will be the death knell, many believe.

I’ve finally started getting some interviews. It took me long enough. It’s turned out to be more difficult than I had thought. Every tourist here speaks a little English, but tourists from France or Israel do not necessarily speak enough to be able to converse with me in an interview. Today I managed to get three interviews – two Brits and a Hollander†—which I think is pretty good for one day.

It’s been raining off and on for the last few days, so I haven’t been able to do as much hiking as I’d like.

The hillsides around here are dotted with apple orchards. The shops sell locally made juices and jams and honey. There are also several bakeries selling croissants, cakes, and pies. And there are even cheese shops, selling Swiss-style cheeses. Clearly with the Western consumer in mind. These commodities may be cheap by Western standards, but they are quite expensive by Indian standards. Backpackers make a point of living on a budget, but they seem perfectly willing to spent money on luxury consumer goods that suit their own particular tastes.

Many of the people working in this village are not actually from here, but have come from other parts of India, or from Nepal, to make money on the tourists. The local villagers continue to go about their own business. They are of the Pahari ethnic group, which stretches across the Himalayas. They don’t look much like Indians but they share a lot in common with other mountain peoples in Nepal, Pakistan, and Tibet. Yesterday I watched a volleyball game in the local village. It is said that the mountain peoples of the Himalaya are fare more progressive than people in the Hindu belt, that literacy and women’s rights are fare more valued here.

Israelis are easily the largest group represented here. So much of a presence are they that businesses have signs in Hebrew, and the keyboards in the internet cafes have the Hebrew letters written on them. There is a lot said about the Israeli backpackers and much of it is not nice. I have come across several articles, which I will paste below. The neocolonial discourse that I am more or less examining is alive and well in a discourse that is aimed specifically against Israeli backpackers. They are perceived as close-minded, rude, greedy, aggressive, disrespectful, and single-minded in their pursuits (namely, sitting around smoking hashish). The same could be said of tourists from any country, I would have assumed, but this discourse seems only aimed at Israelis. It is full of the language of spatial colonization. The Israelis, it is said, concentrate in enclaves and literally take over space. Their relationship with Indians is one of absolute hierarchy and servitude. I’d heard vague rumblings of this discourse before, but this is the first I’ve seen where it’s so strong and out in the open. And I have to admit it kind of throws me for a loop. The parallels to Israel’s settlements in the West Bank couldn’t be clearer, which perhaps explains while Al Quada has recently made threats to bomb the Israeli beach resorts of Goa, India. But this is a really hot potato, and I don’t know if I want to touch it. Any criticism of Israel gets automatically conflated with anti-semitism. Plus, what I’ve seen with my own eyes, although it definitely confirms that Israelis dominate in numbers, does not come as close to some of the damning accusations I have seen. I really question whether this neocolonial accusation aimed at Israelis should not be equally aimed at other Western backpackers. It seems awfully dangerous to me to pin such reprehensible behavior upon an entire nationality. Still, the argument that Israelis are in a unique situation among the global youth because they have just gotten out of their mandatory military service and therefore, having been through what they’ve been through and all, need to really unwind and rebel. The idea presented in these articles, that Israel realizes the need for their youth to relieve pent up frustration but would rather not suffer its repercussions on its own soil, happily ships its disgruntled youth over to India to run amok there, if true, is rather disturbing. It dose conjure up the idea of colonialism at the international state-upon-state level. India does not have to be anyone’s pleasure ground. Well, I don’t know what to think yet. As I’ve said, nothing I’ve observed deserves such alarm. But I’ll include the articles below nonetheless

Today I went on a substantial hike. I’ve been feeling pretty lazy. It’s easy to do here in Manali I’ve already extended my stay here from longer than my original plan. There are people staying here for months, even years. Some of the shops are run by foreigners who just decide to settle down here. Because people stay so long, the place starts to feel like a neighborhood, and you get to know the various villagepeople with whom you interact. For instance, although there are five bakeries in town, I always go to the same one because I’ve built up a nice rapport with the Nepali baker.

On my way into new town today I ran into the first American I’ve met since being in India, with the exception of the guy from Mill Valley in Shimla. He was from Portland and seemed like he’d been doing this for some time. A 40-something hippie, I thought he’d make a great interview subject. My hike took me high up the wall of the mountain on the other side of the Beas River, first through the village of Vashisht, and then up the mountain in search of a waterfall. I never got right up to the waterfall, but I got close, and the views were simply stunning. We’d been having cold, rainy, gray weather for my first several days in Manali, and this was the first truly glorious, sunny clear day, and for the first time I could see…the actual main ridge of the Great Himalaya mountain system. It had been hidden from view before, but now, there it was, a mere 50 km up the valley. On the trail I met three young women from Vashisht village. 20, 19, and 18, they had brought their cows up the trail to graze for the day while they sat around, knitted, and talked. I first came them when I was sitting in a glen having a picnic and one  of the girls suddenly appeared to fill her water bottle in the gurgling stream beside me. I was surprised by how open the girls were, inviting me over to talk with them (they all spoke fluent English), and generally being very friendly and even a little flirty. That is not typical in India (where most village women would not talk to foreign men). But the Himalayas are different. What I found interesting is that the girls’ father runs the Big Fish restaurant in Vashisht. I’d always assumed that the villagers who ran the guesthouses and restaurants and other tourists services were in a different class than those who still followed traditional village practices. But here were the daughters of a modern restauranter, who still spend their day grazing their cows 2000 feet up a mountain path (speaking of which, I was very impressed by the cows’ ability to negotiate such steep paths). Then I realized that the villages, although they have adapted to capitalize off tourism, still retain many of their ways, and that is a good thing. The Pahari people in the villages around here are really nice people.

On the way back into town I met a recently married couple. She’s from Canada, he’s from Tibet! They met in Dharamsala during her two year stay in India (which is about to come to an end as they both start a new life in the United States). He escaped from Tibet seven years ago and joined the exile community in India. I asked him about the escape. He, together with a small group of other young men, paid a guide to lead them over the mountains, on foot, for 27 days, to freedom in Nepal, and then India. If they had been caught, they probably would have ended up in forced labor camps or tortured or even killed by the Chinese. Needless to say, he can never go back to Tibet. He said over 2000 other Tibetans make the same escape every year.

Now, the articles on Israelis:

A bad trip in India

By Aryeh Dayan

Here is a popular joke among Israeli backpackers in India: An Indian asks an Israeli backpacker, "So how many Israelis are there?" The backpacker answers "Five million" and the Indian then asks "and how many in Israel?" Daria Maoz, who is writing her doctorate on Israeli backpackers in India, believes the joke increasingly reflects the feelings of Indians in light of the Israeli "invasion" of their country. Some 15 years after Israelis first began traveling en mass to the subcontinent, where they initially received a warm welcome, Maoz's research points to a growing discomfort with the Israeli presence in India. The problem is not the large number of Israelis who travel to India, but their behavior, which the Indians are finding increasingly difficult to bear.

Any talk of an Israeli conquest of India is hardly borne out by the hard facts. The Indian consulate in Tel Aviv issues some 30,000 visas a year to Israeli backpackers and Maoz estimates that a further 20,000 take out visas at the Indian consulates in Thailand and Nepal. "Fifty thousand tourists account for barely 2 percent of the total number of tourists that visit India every year," says Maoz. Indeed, in a giant country that is home to over a billion people it is hard to see how 50,000 people can be considered a threat."

The explanation is simple, says Maoz. The Israeli backpacker population is concentrated in a few small and clearly defined regions. "In some places the Israelis make up 90 percent of the tourist population," she says, "and when hundreds or even thousands of Israelis are concentrated in one village or neighborhood you just can't ignore their very striking presence."

That's what happens in places like Bhagsu and Dharamkot, two not very large villages near Dharamsala, and in Bashisht and Old Manali, two neighborhoods of Manali, which like Dharamsala lies in the north of India. The situation is similar in the south of the country, especially in places like Goa's "Tel Aviv beach"."The Israeli backpackers take over these areas and set up their own colonies," says Maoz. "In the last eight years they've turned those places into Israeli enclaves and in peak seasons they are flooded with thousands of Israeli backpackers. Some of them stay for long periods, even several years. Most of them stay a few weeks or months, but when they leave, other Israelis take their place creating permanent Israeli settlements with transient populations."

Maoz has found that relations between the Israelis and the natives correspond to those anthropologists have found in other Third World countries subject to an influx of large groups of tourists from the West. In a recent lecture at Ben-Gurion University, Maoz defined these relations as "hierarchical, one-sided and depressing". In an interview with Haaretz she described the Israeli backpackers' relations with the native population as "neo-colonial."

According to Maoz, most Israeli backpackers treat the Indians as if their sole purpose in life was to serve them. They ignore the locals' needs and feelings, treat them and their traditions with contempt and regard the Israeli enclaves as playgrounds where they can do almost anything they desire. Uninhibited drug use is a prime example. "I don't think that the Indians will continue to put up with the situation for much longer," warns Maoz. "The hosts and the guests are sitting on a powder keg that could blow up at any moment."

Drugs and spirituality

Daria Maoz's interest in India and Israeli backpackers began several years ago when she was 27. She quit her job as an attorney and enrolled in an MA course at the School of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In her first year, she decided to write a seminar paper on rights of transition in Israeli society. She focused on her peers in their 20s and 30s who are facing "anxiety over a second growing up phase" and decide to change their profession. She discovered that many of them travel to India before choosing a new direction.

Maoz herself only traveled to India for the first time a year later after deciding to write her MA thesis on Israeli backpackers in the subcontinent. Later, she elected to devote her doctorate to the subject and her lecturers advised her to gather her material through "active observation." That meant Maoz had to visit India on two more occasions.

During her first visit, which lasted two and a half months, she spent time with backpackers, staying in the same hostels, eating in the same restaurants, hanging out in the same tea houses, taking part in meditation and yoga lessons, going trekking and observing trance parties with all their drug-taking rituals. That journey, during which she interviewed dozens of backpackers, provided material for her doctoral thesis and inspiration for a novel "India Will Love Me" published in 2002.

Maoz's last visit to India was devoted to interviewing Indians who provide tourist services in the Israeli enclaves. What she found in those enclaves she describes as a complete Israeli takeover of the local culture and space. "When you arrive at the Israeli enclaves in Dharamkot or Manali you feel as if you were in Israel itself," says Maoz. "With the exception of the Indian backdrop, everything there is Israeli. All you hear walking down the street is Hebrew and everyone you meet is Israeli. Even the rickshaws have signs posted in Hebrew advertising trance parties.

"Most of the rickshaw owners don't even know what the signs say. You walk into a restaurant and the menus are in Hebrew and the food is Israeli. At the hostels and guesthouses you can find books in Hebrew and at Internet cafes you can read Israeli websites and send e-mail in Hebrew. Many of the Indians that work with Israeli tourists can speak Hebrew, some of them quite fluently."

Maoz believes the phenomenon creates a neo-colonial situation in the enclaves. The Israeli tourists, she says, reject the local culture, aren't interested in Indian food, in Indian traditions or the local lingo. "The Israelis' supposed interest in Indian spirituality is reflected in conversation among the backpackers, but not in action. Before they even leave Israel they know that `India is spirituality'. Two days after arriving they are already dressed in white and telling each other that the `energy is flowing' that they are living `here and now' and that their `chakras are open'. It's a kind of instant spirituality, a sort of ritual they know they have to go through."

But when it comes down to it, says Maoz, they are a lot more interested in trance parties and smoking drugs then in spiritual practices.

Judaism too sometimes finds its way into the heady mixture of trance, drugs and so-called spirituality. One of the strangest phenomena Maoz came across occurred at the Chabad House in Dharamsala, a center set up by Chabad Hasidim from Israel, which attracts dozens of Israeli backpackers every Shabbat. Maoz visited the Dharamsala Chabad House on Rosh Hashanah and saw hundreds of Israeli backpackers taking part in a prayer service and festive dinner. She also saw how after dinner the backpackers headed off to a nearby site for a trance and drug party that lasted some 42 hours. A week and a half later she met them again at Chabad House where they had come for the pre-fast Yom Kippur meal. After dinner Maoz saw the backpackers pass a joint. They called it the pre-fast joint.

Baksheesh and boycotts

Parties and drugs are two of the main points of friction between the backpackers and the local population. The loud music played at parties that go on till the early hours of the morning, sometimes at guesthouses situated in the middle of a village or residential neighborhood, can be heard everywhere and disturbs the locals. The Israelis' excessive drug use makes their enclaves a magnet for Indian drug dealers and other criminal elements. The locals are at a loss. If they turn to the police, they will lose their livelihood and even if they do complain there is no guarantee anything will be done about it.

One Israeli who organizes trance parties told Maoz that before every party he makes sure to pay baksheesh (tips) to the right people and that keeps the police well away.

Maoz's research dug up other problematic issues that lead to friction between the backpackers and the locals. A restaurant owner in Dharamkot told her of an Israeli who drank five cups of tea, but when asked to pay the bill, which came to some five rupees or half an Israeli shekel, he refused claiming he had only drunk three cups. In the ensuing argument, the Israeli threatened the restaurant owner, telling him that he would organize a boycott of the restaurant. This could be a deathblow in a place so reliant on Israeli tourists. In another case, Israeli backpackers boycotted a guesthouse because the owners asked them to pay for sheets they had torn up. According to Maoz, the backpackers claimed the reason for the boycott was that the German wife of the owner was a `Nazi'.

There are a few Israelis who went to India several years ago and stayed on in each of the Israeli enclaves. Most of them have opened cafes and restaurants or tattoo and piercing parlors that also sell drug paraphernalia. Most of them refuse to serve Indians. The Chabad House is also out of bounds for the locals with the exception of the kitchen workers.

Based on her interviews with dozens of Indians who come into daily contact with Israeli backpackers, Maoz researched the ways the locals choose to cope with the negative phenomena. "Most of them simply bow their heads and put up with the situation," she says. They accept all the Israelis' conditions; they let them post signs without knowing what's written on them; they don't argue when someone refuses to pay and they don't complain to the police when the parties disturb them." The Indians, Maoz says, complain they don't have any choice - without the Israelis' money they wouldn't be able to make a living.

But Maoz also found two small groups that adopted other strategies. One employed what Maoz called `hidden resistance', using the Israeli presence to gain money and power. This group, Maoz says, is made up primarily of Indians who arrive from areas outside the Israeli enclaves and pass themselves off as spiritual teachers. "The Israelis are looking for spirituality," one such spiritual guru, who worked as a schoolteacher in his home town, told Maoz, " so we sell them spirituality." Maoz says that during the peak seasons, Indians flow to the Israeli enclaves selling themselves as masters and babas (holy men), teaching Reiki, yoga, meditation and anything else Israelis care to learn.

The other group uses what Maoz calls "open resistance." Some of them try to educate the Israelis in various ways such as hanging signs in their shops saying "Respect us and we will respect you." Others hint that they don't want to serve Israelis by putting up signs saying "no drugs" and a few have even gone so far as to declare "No Israelis served here."

One of the main findings of Maoz's research is that Israeli society has an interest in sending its young people to India. "Israeli society understands that after long, hard and frustrating military service and before integrating into society, Israeli youngsters need avenues to let off steam and to challenge accepted norms. Instead of having them do this it in Israel, they are sent to India."

If Maoz's findings are right, then sooner or later the Indians' patience will wear thin. Here and there, Maoz says, there have already been the occasional clashes between Indians and Israelis. "The Israelis in India increasingly permit themselves to do whatever they feel like, while the Indians are forced to show an ever greater degree of restraint. But under the surface tensions are brewing and I believe that the moment will come when more and more Indians will decide that financial profits just aren't worth their continued self-constraint. Eventually, they will react in the same way as the Palestinians in 1987 when the intifada broke out."

Maoz's use of the intifada as a metaphor for the situation is far from coincidental. During her visits to India she heard several Israelis compare the Indians to the Palestinians before the intifada. "They're primitive and dirty, but they serve us exceptionally well," one Israeli backpacker told Maoz, "just like the Arabs in the territories before they decided to raise their heads."

Youth Curry - Insight on Indian Youth

TUESDAY, JANUARY 09, 2007

Shalom India

In Europe, you huff and puff your way up spiral stairways in cathedrals. In India you huff and puff your way down crooked pathways in hill stations. All in search of a view. A 'mountain view' to be more precise. Is it worth it? Usually not. The mist has all but obscured the mountains in this particular instance.

You pause for a while, inhaling the fresh and fragrant Kodaikanal air. Time to trudge back up. Yes, you are now hungry. Very hungry. Which is why little thatched huts have sprung up every 200 metres. Omlet sandwiches and chai form the standard menu.

But wait, there's a more enterprising lady towards the top of the trail. She'll whip up a mean Maggi, a frothy fresh lime soda. Even a falafel or a 'sabich' . Uh oh, wherever there's sabich, the Israelis follow. Rather, wherever there are Israelis the strange stuff they eat finds its way on the menu.

And sure enough, two rugged, dark haired young men and a pretty, blonde haired woman enter the humble restaurant. They want sabich. It's not available. They settle for rice with mix vegetables. One of the guys enacts anti-masala theatre.

"No this one (picking up a green chilli).. last time you put it and I go.. in and out.. in and out.. toilet." Ha ha, the cooking lady laughs. Almost like she does it deliberately.

"How much time you take?" asks the draamebaaz. "We... very hungry.. fifteen minat? I very hungry.. I (rolling eyes) eat this pole." His companions laugh and go sit on the plastic chairs outside.

We're still waiting for the Maggi. Ordered more than fifteen minat ago. I strike up a conversation. "Yes.. we are from Israel," he says in a thick - for lack of a better word - Israeli accent. "We travel across India for one year."

I've been to Goa recently, I say to him. "Many Israelis there."

Actually, I am surprised to see Israelis in Kodai. I thought they essentially came to Goa - for the sun, sand and rave parties. A good - or at least visible - number seem to have adopted the 'dual' lifestyle. Six months in Israel, six months in Goa. In fact, there seem to be numerous Israeli owned businesses - the kind that sell yummy food and other interesting goods at the Saturday night flea market in Arpora.

But Goa does not agree with Dramabhai. "I no like Goa... " he says emphatically."I like Varkkala.. you go Varkkala?"

No...

"Where you from?"

Bombay.

"Oh," he shakes his head." I no like Bombay.. people.. poor people, sleep on road. Very bad."

I agree, yes, it's not a good thing.

"You no feel afraid.. poor people.. they come in your house at night?"

I am a little peeved now. Uh..no, that does not happen. We are mostly safe.

"Very bad .. this poor peoples... what people like you are doing for this?"

I am... getting angry now. I mean, maybe we aren't doing anything - or at least not enough. But it's not like I'm asking what he's doing about the Middle Eastern peace process. Here he is - bumming around my flawed but fun country instead.

The maggi arrives and we get busy slurping it up. It's New Year's eve and I am in no mood to slug it out with this jungli Israeli maanav. We go our separate ways, taking leave abruptly.

Minding your manners

So usme kya galat keh diya usne, you may ask. Well nothing, perhaps. But there are certain unwritten rules when you are a visitor in a foreign country. You try to appreciate the local culture. You find good things to say to random locals. You hold your tongue when you sense unkind words rolling out.

Ah, but these Israelis aren't here for the 'incredible India' experience. They are on quite a different 'trip'. Although it may be wrong to stereotype, cheap drugs are one of the big attractions for young Israelis making their way to India. That may hold true for other nationalities as well, but with Israelis there's another peculiar feature. They tend to form 'communes'.

And I'm not saying this based on a couple of casual encounters, the phenomenon has been well documented.

An interesting article titled 'Israelis invade India' follows 23 year old Shai Levy's post-military service pilgrimage to India. Writer Dikla Kadosh notes:

Levi, 23, came to India to unwind, relax, and forget the horrors he witnessed during the height of the Palestinian intifada, when blood stained the streets of Israeli and Palestinian neighborhoods on a regular basis. He came to escape responsibility and the stress of Western life....

As for the connections they make with the Indian culture, Levi characterized them as mostly superficial. Although he found the people to be very open and easy to get along with, he noticed that Israelis tend to keep to their own kind, only interacting with Indians in matters of business. They communicate with Indians in English and barter, sometimes aggressively, over goods.

...Ramesh Choudharg, a room service attendant at the Hare Rama guest house where the Chabad center is located, had mixed feelings about the Israeli guests he encounters. "Sometimes they make big balagan,” he said, using a Hebrew word meaning 'mess'."

Naresh Fernandes, the editor of Time Out Mumbai wrote an article exploring the relationship between Indians and Israelis some years ago. He says:

Driving a hard bargain at the bazaar, he said, is the least of Israelis’ offenses in India. According to him, the perception Indians have of Israelis is that they are only interested in drugs and parties. The post-army twenty-somethings alternate between being lazy idlers, he said, and violent aggressors.

A Britisher whom I chatted up at Goa's Anjuna beach - practically taken over by Israelis - had an interesting observation. 'Norman' is a guy with tattoos all over his body, sitting at a beachside restaurant in an obviously elevated state. He loves to talk - in 10 minutes flat you know his entire life history (or at least the version he finds convenient to share).

Yes, he does drugs, but only to take away the pain of his 'broken back' and his wife who left him for another man and other life issues which require 'herbal medicine'. Given his propensity for story telling, we may have another Shantaram in the making.

But, I digress. The point Norman made about Israelis was this,"They're so aggressive.. so brazen.. they just sit around here with their chillums .. huge ones.. smoking pot in broad daylight." Whereas, we Britishers at least keep up appearances. "We're not so open.. almost inviting trouble.. I don't know how they do it.. how much they pay the cops!"

What's in it for them?

A young rabbi who runs 'Chabad House' in Mumbai, where young Israelis camp en route to Goa or Rajasthan explains...

“They need relief...They come here to do everything the army didn’t allow them to do. Their shoes had to be polished and tied – here they wear sandals. They had to cut their hair – here they grow their hair long.”

Holtzberg is not excusing their behaviour. He just understands the reasons behind it better than the Indians that come into contact with the hordes of escapists.

And here's what another fellow Israeli has to say:

Itzick Sabag, a 23-year-old Israeli who came to the United States after completing his army service and now lives in New York, is not surprised that Israelis have such a negative reputation in India. The type of person who goes there, he said, has no ambition or direction and is mainly interested in doing nothing. India is the perfect place to do just that.

“People go to different places for different reasons after the army,” he said. “They go to South America for hiking, climbing, outdoors stuff. They go to America to work or go to school. And they go to India to do drugs.”

So how many Israelis visit India anyways? In 2003, 32,157 visas were issued to Israeli nationals, making it no 15 among countries sending in maximum tourists to India. I could not locate a figure for subsequent years - as our Ministry of Tourism now tracks only the top 10 countries.

Israel is not one of them, yet its touristss are creating ripples...

The 'enclaves'

Not sheer numbers but the tendency to congregate in a few places is the problem. Daria Maoz chose to complete her doctorate thesis on Israeli backpackers in India. She observes:

The Israeli backpacker population is concentrated in a few small and clearly defined regions. "In some places the Israelis make up 90 percent of the tourist population...and when hundreds or even thousands of Israelis are concentrated in one village or neighbourhood you just can't ignore their very striking presence."

That's what happens in places like Bhagsu and Dharamkot, two not very large villages near Dharamsala, and in Bashisht and Old Manali, two neighborhoods of Manali, which like Dharamsala lies in the north of India. The situation is similar in the south of the country, especially in places like Goa's "Tel Aviv beach".

More Israeli enclaves include Kasol in Himachal Pradesh, Hampi in Karnataka. And where these enclaves spring up, here's what happens..

"The Israeli backpackers take over these areas and set up their own colonies," says Maoz. "In the last eight years they've turned those places into Israeli enclaves and in peak seasons they are flooded with thousands of Israeli backpackers. Some of them stay for long periods, even several years. Most of them stay a few weeks or months, but when they leave, other Israelis take their place creating permanent Israeli settlements with transient populations."

...According to Maoz, most Israeli backpackers treat the Indians as if their sole purpose in life was to serve them. They ignore the locals' needs and feelings, treat them and their traditions with contempt and regard the Israeli enclaves as playgrounds where they can do almost anything they desire. Uninhibited drug use is a prime example.

While writing her thesis, Maoz needed to 'observe' her subjects closely. She made several trips to India and adopted the backpacker lifestyle. She describes the enclaves as describes as a 'complete Israeli takeover of the local culture and space'.

"When you arrive at the Israeli enclaves in Dharamkot or Manali you feel as if you were in Israel itself...All you hear walking down the street is Hebrew and everyone you meet is Israeli. Even the rickshaws have signs posted in Hebrew advertising trance parties..."

Maoz believes the phenomenon creates a neo-colonial situation in the enclaves. The Israeli tourists, she says, reject the local culture, aren't interested in Indian food, in Indian traditions or the local lingo.

Even their interest in 'spirituality' is very superficial.

Two days after arriving they are already dressed in white and telling each other that the `energy is flowing' that they are living `here and now' and that their `chakras are open'. .. When it comes down to it, says Maoz, they are a lot more interested in trance parties and smoking drugs then in spiritual practices.

One of the strangest phenomena Maoz came across occurred at the Chabad House in Dharamsala.

Maoz visited the Dharamsala Chabad House on Rosh Hashanah and saw hundreds of Israeli backpackers taking part in a prayer service and festive dinner. She also saw how after dinner the backpackers headed off to a nearby site for a trance and drug party that lasted some 42 hours. A week and a half later she met them again at Chabad House where they had come for the pre-fast Yom Kippur meal. After dinner Maoz saw the backpackers pass a joint.

They called it the pre-fast joint.

All this doesn't go down well with the locals. But, it's paapi pet ka sawaal. Tourists bring in much needed business, so they grimace and bear it.

A restaurant owner in Dharamkot told her of an Israeli who drank five cups of tea, but when asked to pay the bill, which came to some five rupees or half an Israeli shekel, he refused claiming he had only drunk three cups. In the ensuing argument, the Israeli threatened the restaurant owner, telling him that he would organize a boycott of the restaurant...

An amusing form of 'resistance' is Indians who pass themselves off as spiritual teachers.

"The Israelis are looking for spirituality," one such spiritual guru, who worked as a schoolteacher in his home town, told Maoz, " so we sell them spirituality." Maoz says that during the peak seasons, Indians flow to the Israeli enclaves selling themselves as masters and babas (holy men), teaching Reiki, yoga, meditation and anything else Israelis care to learn.

And, her final conclusion:

One of the main findings of Maoz's research is that Israeli society has an interest in sending its young people to India. "Israeli society understands that after long, hard and frustrating military service and before integrating into society, Israeli youngsters need avenues to let off steam and to challenge accepted norms. Instead of having them do this it in Israel, they are sent to India."

Ah, cheaper and more effective than mass psychotherapy. Sow your wild oats and float on ye wild grasses in yon Himalayas. Come back a little more civilized!?

Well, as long as we can all live and let live. It's in the best interest of Israelis to be a little better behaved. Or the party may well get wound up... I mean, even Al Qaeda has taken note of the Israeli fancy for India. Although so far - thankfully - there have been just empty threats.

Let me conclude by saying that I have the greatest regard for Israel and the Israeli people. I would love to visit the country one day... Despite a horrific encounter with a snake shaped bread calld 'ziva' on Anjuna beach. I am sure it was about as authentic a representation of Israeli food as 'balti' cuisine is of India.

Until then, I shall continue chatting up Israeli backpackers, in part awe and part envy of their year long drifting voyage. To places in my own country I have never seen. But hope to find time to visit - someday.

And hey, if questions about the eradiaction of slums come up, I'll be ready with an inquiry into the resettlement of Palestinians... Peace be with you all. Shalom.