A recent social media post by senior journalist Bashir Manzar quietly asked a disturbing question: did people once visit Gulmarg to experience Gulmarg itself, but now come only for a Gondola ride?
The question deserves more than a casual reaction. It deserves reflection.
There was a time when Gulmarg Gondola was meant to complement Gulmarg. Today, Gulmarg itself seems to exist merely to feed the Gondola.
And that is where the decline begins.
Earlier, Gulmarg was not consumed. It was absorbed slowly. People walked through wild flowers. They sat silently under pine trees. They hired ponies not for selfies but for journeys. Children rolled down slopes. Families spent entire afternoons doing nothing except breathing mountain air.
Gulmarg was once an experience of softness. Now it is an exercise in movement management.
Vehicles arrive in endless chains. Tourists rush toward ticket counters as if they are entering a stadium before gates close. Entire trips are reduced to one sentence: “Did you do the Gondola?”
The meadow has become a transit corridor between parking slots and boarding points.
Perhaps that is why the sarcastic question no longer sounds exaggerated: should Gulmarg now be renamed “Gondola Marg”?
The tragedy is not tourism. Tourism is essential. The tragedy is one-dimensional tourism.
Kashmir has slowly started replacing experiences with attractions. Instead of making visitors stay longer, walk deeper, understand culture, interact with locals, explore forests, trails, silence and heritage, we are training them to complete mechanical checklists.
One ride. One photograph. One upload. Return home. This is not tourism maturity. It is tourism compression.
Economically too, such tourism creates distortion. A visitor who spends six hours only around the Gondola contributes to congestion far more than to sustainable local livelihoods. The benefits become concentrated around a narrow commercial belt while the wider ecology pays the price.
Meadows get trampled. Plastic rises. Noise multiplies. Local architecture gets replaced by hurried concrete. Even the psychology of tourism changes. Places stop being respected and start being consumed.
The saddest part is that many younger Kashmiris may never know what Gulmarg once emotionally felt like.
They know queues. They know reels. They know snow bikes. They know ticket urgency.
But they may never know the Gulmarg where silence itself was an attraction.
Development is not merely about increasing footfall. Real development is measured by whether a place retains its soul after becoming accessible. If accessibility destroys the very character of a destination, then what grows is not tourism but exhaustion.
The danger is larger than Gulmarg alone.
The same model is slowly consuming Kashmir’s lakes, springs, meadows and hill stations. Every destination is being pushed toward high-volume visibility instead of low-impact value. We are monetising landscapes without emotionally investing in them.
Perhaps the time has come to ask uncomfortable questions.
- Should Gulmarg have walking circuits instead of endless vehicular movement?
- Should there be strict carrying-capacity regulation?
- Should meadow tourism be separated from commercial zones?
- Should visitors be encouraged to stay two nights instead of two hours?
- Should silence itself become part of Gulmarg’s tourism policy?
Because if Kashmir keeps reducing its destinations into hurried attractions, then one day tourists may still come, revenues may still rise, photographs may still trend — but the Valley itself may quietly disappear beneath the business of showcasing it.
And then, generations later, somebody else may stand in Gulmarg and ask another painful question:
“When exactly did the meadow stop being the destination?”
