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Synopsis Parvez Dewan can send you to sleep about Ladakh. If anyone has the Ultimate Dossier on this land, it is he, after years of running about India’s northernmost region, administering and adventuring his way around its desert plains, passes and lakes. Along the way, he discovered that Kargil and Leh had large Buddhas carved into the mountainside, noticed that the world’s purest Aryans’, the Drokpas, weren’t amused by suggestions that there was mass kissing at their festival, and taught himself polo on the endless Kargyak Plains – the highest inhabited place in the world. Parvez started the Ladakh festival, threw open to tourists seven thitherto ‘forbidden’ areas (but got bounced back from Siachen), developed an admiration for the history, culture and people of the occupied Gilgit-Baltistan-Hunza region, introduced the Suru Valley and Goshan-Murad Bagh to the international media, and waited for weeks to sight the snow leaopard. He was luckier with the wild ass, Brahmini ducks and black necked cranes, though. The first officer of India’s elite civil service, the IAS, to be posted in Zanskar, Parvez Dewan’s innings in Ladakh started on a note that was to bind him to the culture of this exciting land. On his third day in Zanskar, on a tour of the Char gorge, he found himself trapped in a huge snowstorm (in a comfortable house, though). He spet that week learning the Bodhi (Ladakh) alphabet. This later led to his writing Ladakhi-English and Ladakhi-German phrasebooks and translating a Ladakhi epic. In this first-of-its-kind encyclpaedic three volume set on Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, one on each region, Parvez Dewan shares in detail, his interest and excitement in the fabled land that has been the arena of his adult life: an up-to-date yet timeless guide to the magical trinity of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh that crowns the sub-continent of India.