Cultural Imperialism and Ladakh

We're so used to having access to the Internet in our homes and schools, and now thanks to the iPhone, I can even go online without a computer. Because everyone in this nation has Internet access, it's really hard for us to imagine "the outside world" where people have to walk 3 hours to an Internet Cafe, and pay his or her whole month salary to use the Internet.

It sounds unbelievable? But that's what I saw in Ladakh, a province of India that is located near the Himalayas and the border with China. The capital city of this province is called Leh, and that was the only place that I could possibly get Internet access. Aside from Leh, every other villages were separated by mountains. In the American way of thinking, you might think every household has a car. However, it was not happening in Ladakh. Cars were usually too expensive for a typical Ladakhi family, so they either walk for hours or sometimes even days to go to Leh, or they had to take the bus which was available only once a day, or for some areas, once in a couple of days.

The incomes of local Ladakhis are very low. They are probably not as poor as the migrant workers in China, but having the Internet access is definitely out of what they can afford. The younger generations might have seen computers a few times in schools, but many old Ladakhis have never seen a computer in their entire life. This comes to a question of whether or not people from the developed countries like us should offer them some devices to eliminate the digital divide.

As a person who lived there for weeks and adopted their way of living while living there, I say we should not force them to change the way they live. We might think we have more money, we have the Internet access, and we can go online and search for whatever we want to know. But before we claim that helping them to have better lives is the responsibility of us, the rich people from the rich country, how many of us have ever thought of what they really want?

When I lived in the local temple with many of my little lama students, I realized we can never judge other people and their culture by the standard we have in the US. They may not be as rich, they may not know what Google is, or they may not even heard of the term World Wide Web, but they are just as happy as we are, or even happier and more satisfied with their lives because they are not as greedy as many of the Americans.