Specially written for Vikalp Sangam
19th December 2025, was a surprisingly warm winter day in Ladakh. But it wasn’t an ordinary day. It was Metho, the last day of the Ladakhi calendar. Metho is arguably my favourite festive day of the year. In the high mountains of Ladakh when the mercury starts dropping way below zero, the day to day life slows down significantly. The tourists are sparse if any. Most of the shops in the market are shut. As the evenings start approaching sooner, families – kids and elders alike – huddle up in the chantsa1 and gather around the bukhari2, basking in its warmth, spending the rest of their day together. This is how humans made the most remote and the most harsh places of the world their home. In the warmth of togetherness.
Summers in Ladakh are becoming increasingly busy every year. With modernisation and development arriving in full force, people are out there to find their place in it. It is exciting and chaotic at the same time. It is arriving in all its forms, the good and the bad. While tourism dominates the conversation around it, larger projects are slowly starting to creep into the narrative too. Some are more democratic, community driven, bettering everyone’s lives. While others are consolidating power into the hands of a few while marginalising others.
But winters here are not dominated by this change. They are more primal, bringing out the most intimate human tendencies. Community dominates the lives of people, families take the centre stage. People seek closeness and social lives flourish in pockets. People prefer staying indoors and when kids play outside, the bell of their cycle or the stroke of their cricket bat is often the loudest sound in the area. One cannot understate the importance of community in such times. It is also perhaps quite evident by the number of festivals that fall during these cold months. People have, for centuries, come together in the name of festivals to celebrate our shared human experience. These community gatherings, these family reunions are probably how we’ve flourished in the harshest conditions.
This is why I am so excited for Metho every year. It starts like any other winter day. But as the sun sets, people come out of the solitude of their home and take to the streets. The energy in the air is palpable. There is no way to try and describe it and do it justice. People burn balls of fire, the size of a football, tie it to a rope and swing it around. It is meant to wade off evil spirits and bad omen before the start of the new year. It happens everywhere you go. You turn the corner of the street and you end up walking into a crowd playing with fire like they own it. But my favourite place to be on Metho is the main Leh market. As the skies turn dark and the mercury drops, you see the crowd gather in the market. There are more people in the square than you’d probably come across in the entire month of December combined. They’re all here for the same thing. The community has come together one last time for the year. And soon you hear the sound of drums from the puzzling streets leading to the market. And as they enter the market, they’re followed by men, swinging around these fireballs, as they’re summoned by huge roars from the crowd. It is loud, it is chaotic, it is almost uncontrollable. The adrenaline is through the roof. There are firecrackers going off out of nowhere, in the air, 10 feet away from you, next to your leg. People are dodging fireballs, they’re screaming, the crowd is often moving in waves. The roar of the people is a constant baseline over which the rest of the music builds. It’s an act of complete surrender as you become part of the crowd. Metho in the Leh market is an event that you would not forget. To an untrained eye, it feels like it is constantly on the verge of turning into a riot. It is a moshpit with fire. It is people coming together in the coldest evenings, one last time, to bid the year goodbye. And they do it with style. And they do it like no other.
But this year was different. We’re all aware of the unfortunate events that took place this black year of Lonak3. So many things have conspired in just the past few months that we tend to forget that we’re still in the same year where India and Pakistan went into war, blanketing all the border regions in blackouts, insecurity and fear. But what truly shook Ladakh from its foundation are the protests of September and the events that followed. Four people lost their lives from the same bullets that were meant to protect them, while many others were left injured. What followed was an unhinged crackdown on the masses by the state in the name of the age old ironic excuse of maintaining peace. Dozens of people were locked up, calls were tapped, if you were caught with the videos from the protest, you were made to delete the video or face the consequences. Occasionally both. People who were detained or arrested prayed for judicial custody since police custody often meant undocumented beatings and other forms of torture. The state doesn’t sanitise its actions in front of the people they’re subjugating. That only happens for the rest of the country. Perhaps it is by design. To hone down the point that they’d leave no leaf unturned to achieve what they want. So you better give up. The authorities were given complete freedom with one uncompromisable goal, curb the people’s asks and their demands once and for all. And they did it with finesse, with the efficiency that our country learnt from our colonisers and perfected in the past 78 years. India’s greatest gift to the world: non-violent resistance4, the weapon that fought back against the strongest colonial power to ever exist, is no longer effective in its own nation. And it is systematically destroyed using the same techniques of our colonisers. The subject has now become its greatest master.
This year as I walked into the market on Metho, I knew that it would probably be a bit different from the rest of the years. But my naive gyagar pa5 mind had assumed that most of the people of Ladakh were way past the incidents of September and had moved on. After all, the businesses were back open and people were going about their daily life. Little did I know that it was less about, “lets keep it past us and carry on” and more about, “we have no other choice but to carry on”. As I entered the market, I could see that the crowd was significantly less than previous years. The skeleton of the rest of the evening stayed the same as every other year. There were firecrackers, there were drums, there were people swinging fireballs and there were crowds screaming. But for someone who has been here before, the loudest part of the evening was the hollowness of it. When someone from the crowd shouted “Kiki Soso Lhargyalo”6, the rest of the crowd could barely muster the voice to shout it back. When the drums rolled in, there was no baseline of the crowd’s roar. The men that entered swinging fireballs were few and the flames were not strong enough to light up the market. But it was bright enough to shine light on the wounds of the people that lay hidden within the woollen sweaters. In all honesty, the evening felt like a heart being kept alive by a pacemaker. The event felt manufactured, the chaos performative. Had Metho turned into another gimmick for the tourism industry and asked to smile for the camera? After all there was no shortage of travel influencers there to capture the “moment”. I wonder where their cameras were for the past few months. Probably in places without a lockdown.
Metho showed me something that I was too naive to acknowledge. That Ladakh is deeply hurt. And they’ve no idea if there is any help coming. Most are hopeless that help exists at all. What they’re left with is their demands and an acute awareness that striving to achieve them will only make their matters worse. When I stood there amongst the crowd and the blazing fireballs, it became abundantly clear that the most prominent thing of the evening was its silence. And the silence was deafening. It formed a lump in my throat that I could not swallow. Ladakh is carrying on its open scars. And the status quo is being solidified. Right now all hope feels lost. The government is moving swiftly and people who can cash in are cashing in. I hope I am wrong.
In fact, many people are banking on the hope that narratives like mine are wrong. The Leh Apex Body and the Kargil Democratic Alliance have submitted a 29 page document last November for their ask of statehood and 6th Schedule. The fight to release Sonam Wangchuk, one of the vocal voices from Ladakh who was able to get the attention of the country at large towards the cause, from his current detention under NSA is actively being pursued in the Supreme Court. The people in the judiciary, especially the lawyers in Leh, have all come together as one to provide justice to the people who were detained, arrested and/or suffered losses due to the protests.
There is a real sense of camaraderie in their work, that’s not new to Ladakh. It is probably as ancient as the first people who arrived here. Seeing them reminds me of walking into a village in Sham7 and being invited over for tea every time you ask someone for directions. It even gives a cynic like me some sense of hope. The sense of community in Ladakh taught me how to put my guards down and embrace life. Whether you’re living here or just visiting, if you sit with the people here, you’re always treated with love and an unlimited supply of chang8.
This sense of community is also their strongest weapon. While the government, as always, resorts to demonizing the people they’re trying to silence, the innocence of the people here is rendering this technique useless. Innocence is something we’ve been taught to consider naive growing up in the cities. Where the sense of community was so systematically erased, that the idea of trust and friendliness as being our default mode was considered foolish from the day we could make sense of the world around us. This is what I see this entire ordeal as. A community trying to just preserve their land and culture. Not with the intention to keep the rest of the world out, but the opposite. By inviting them with love and grace and the fragility that this region deserves. The environmental importance of this region is not lost on anyone, especially the people of this land. It does seem to be lost on the government and all their friends. They seem to be more willing to exploit the land and stress it to the point that an ecology like this can’t handle, the effects of which would be far reaching. They would rather keep the doors open for their friends with big pockets than to trust the people, who have preserved this land for centuries, with their own rights.
The question now stands is, whether what I, like everyone else, was taught in school about the ideals of our nation, has a leg to stand on? Was the nation truly designed for the people or to subjugate the people? The more I look back, the harder it is to be optimistic. Luckily there are people out there who have more faith than I do. The question is, will the system prove me wrong or fail its people once again?
1 Chantsa is a traditional ladakhi kitchen cum living cum dining. It’s a place where the entire family gathers in the evening by the fire. Mainly consists of low table and seating and the kitchen also has a display space for copper, stone and mud utensils.
2 Bukhari is a small indoor enclosed fireplace in the middle of the room, used to warm the room and to occasionally cook and warm up food and water.
3 The last Ladakhi year (and the ongoing Tibetan year, as the Tibetan calendar is yet to end as of 7th January 2026) is considered to be “Lonak” or black year, also referred to as the “year of obstacles”.
4 Roy, Arundhati. “Ahimsa.”, June 12, 2002. https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/ahimsa-by-arundhati-roy/
5 Gyagar Pa is the common term used to refer to people from mainland India.
6 Kiki Soso Lhargyalo is a common phrase for celebration and war cry meaning “Victory to the Gods”.
7 Sham valley is a region in Leh district. “Sham” translates to “lower”, signifying the comparatively lower altitude of the Sham region compared to the rest of Leh.
8 Ladakhi beer, made of barley.
About the author
Originally from Mumbai, I moved to Ladakh in late 2023 to work on water conservation projects. An engineer by qualifications, I make sense of the world around me by writing about it. As I spent more time with the villagers here, sipping butter tea in the high valleys, my stories started becoming a derivative of theirs. With that came the need to get these stories out.
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