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Esmerelda Weatherwax
Pali
I see what you mean, especially about the eyes. Their textiles have a Balkan look about them as well.
Thanks
Pali
Esmerelda
Here is a good set of pictures of the Kalash from flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=kalash
Pali
Basically, this community only exists in this part of Pakistan, however in the mountain areas of India, Himachal Pradesh and elsewhere, you see echoes of the same kind of ancient mountain religion and culture. The most amazing thing about the Kalash, just like their counterparts in the north-west Himalaya region of India, is their appearance. Light skinned, many of them can pass for southern European, and most entrancing of all, the green, hazel and blue eyes. Once, visiting the hills I fell in love with every second mountain woman who walked past, some of them with brown hair, and the most vivid hypnotic blazing eyes you will ever see in your life. The people of the mountains are very different from the people from the plains. Their customs and Hinduism is touched with a local kind of nature worship. They are the same gentle people the Buddha and his disciples would have found most gentle and receptive to their message.
Esmerelda Weatherwax
And if they were Amazonian rain forest people facing loss of homeland and squashing of culture Sting and his like would be most vociferous.
Are they only in Pakistan or do they cross the Kush into India?
Pali
They are known as kafirs – infidels – to most Pakistanis, but call themselves Kalasha.
If that sentence doesn't fill you with horror, sadness, sympathy and disgust, nothing will.
This is one of the most wicked aspects of Islam -- that it labels all other people, even harmless people like the Kalash, with degrading and insulting names to express essential inferiority.
Pali
They are a legendary tribe of the Indian sub-continent. Pre-Islamic, maybe even pre-Buddhist and pre-Hindu, or at least living so isolated from the rivers and oceans of thought and religion they developed their own path and ways.
It makes me terribly sad to think that this people will be decimated in the next few generations, by Islamic settlers and Islamic dawah bigotry. Something inexpressibly beautiful, an expression of the land and place, spontaneous, of the valleys and mountains, from the nature of the place, thousands of years old, something beautiful and colourful and celebratory, will drown into non-existence, the contrast with the austere, foreign, Arab horror snuffing out what remained of indigenous joy in this part of Pakistan.
Hugh Fitzgerald
He's on K2, cramponning like crazy, following in the 1938 footsteps of Bob Bates.
Climb every mountain, ford every stream/But never let go of your dream.
Why K2?
Because it's there.