Gangtok youngsters

In Gangtok I got surprised by the number of young people around. In comparison with Darjeeling and Kalimpong, full of pupils and elderly people, Gangtok was a truly youthful town. Westernized aspirations of the new generation no-how restricted by the traditional considerations (as elsewhere in India) were sufficiently fulfilled by the affordable clothes brought from so-closeby China. Jeans, sweatshirts, sneakers, ballerina shoes, boots, fancy bags were all wearable essentials for the youngsters. And there was a notable difference between the sort of clothes people wore here and the cheap quazi-Western clothes that at times you find in India when girls and boys wear these T-shirts with the print phrases bizarrely constructed of the Latin letters the Chinese designer happened to know and the jeans made of what some people think jeans fabric is. I could not help myself and pulled Nele into a shop where I jokingly tried a pair of clearly fake DKNY jeans and having discovered an amazing fit that no Levi’s would ever give me I bought them for 580 Rs (roughly 10 Euro)

Particularly, I got amazed by the young guys (all below 25 y.o.) who worked at the hostel where we were staying (very much recommended by the guidebook, yet a bit disappointing – at least off-season – Modern Central Lodge on Tiben Road). They all had this cool Western clothes (well, Chinese version of it, but so what?) and by the Delhi standard it automatically described them as upper middle, upper class (western equals rich, a rule of thumb in India). Yet here in the North East it works differently: they themselves were doing all sort of work in the hostel – cleaning, cooking, doing dishes, wiping floors, waitressing etc. The notion of a cooking man made me cry in principle. First, when he announced it was him who cooked here I thought it was a sort of bravado people demonstrate here at times (e.g., all those shop-keepers who claim they themselves make the stuff (by the way, standard for many shops) they sell). Yet, later I got to chat with him and he told me how he had been working as a porter and a cook in Darjeeling, Gangtok, Nepal etc. I cried second time when later I was eating Sikkemese soup he cooked – so yum it was… The other guys of this lot were those working in the travel agency we tied up with for our trip to Tsomgso lake. Again, the very guy who we were discussing the deal with and a friend of him were our guide and driver respectively. I was totally impressed with these chaps so concerned about being cool yet not avoiding any sort of work.