The region of Ladakh is an integral part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, which was open to extremely limited initiatives of modern education and improvement in communications. Since 1970 Ladakh was finally opened to tourism, making it the focus of intense scrutiny on a global scale. Until then, whatever was known of the region came from travel accounts and the studies of the Tibetan borderlands made by European scholars and Indian pundits. The author lived in the Ladakhi kingdom for two years. She found in Ladakh the noticeable absence of cultural and social markers that connect it to India being distinctive; physically, linguistically and culturally. Through an account of the author