Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Kathmandu Tomorrows

This is the world today: I sit in a Tibetan cafe on a little street a few twists and turns off Kathmandu's main tourist area of Thamel. Out on the road two men play a serious game of chess, taunting each other in English, while Christmas hymns and late 90s pop floods the street from a shop selling bootleg movies and CDs. I sip at my momo soup and read a 1930s manual of efficient study techniques on the small but pleasant screen of my iPod. Most stationary stores in Kalimpong had a variety of Indian and American business and self-help books, but here hotel libraries are paperbacked alcoves full of used travel guides and German translations of John Grisham novels. I poke into little bookshops and browse their haphazard shelves more out of habit than anything else. It is always interesting to see what books end up in these tiny shops, but why bother buying when a lifetime's reading of classics and creative commons awaits, free and weightless, wherever there is a trickle of bandwidth.

On the loosely crowded streets I dodge invitations to examine exquisite shawls and jewelry, for rickshaws and taxi rides, and for discreet purchases of marijuana. At a tall and beautiful stupa, a short tout in a North Face fleece urges me to inspect a shop full of detailed thanka paintings. He doesn't even bother to take the headphones out of his ears, and instead plays the dial from one cricket game to another. A colorfully and, I assume, traditionally dressed and painted old man strokes his beard and demands that I take his picture for twenty rupees. I resist the compulsion to punch him. These sorts of guys run a slightly more aggressive version of the Hollywood Darth Vader/gorilla suit gimick, except instead of appealing to people's love of movies they play off tourists' desire to experience exotic cultures. Nothing wrong with wanting to make a buck, but they belittle the sacred aesthetics of their own culture in a way that sets my jaw to grind.

I meet a woman in the internet cafe across from my hotel, and together we grumble about how slow my email is sending/her pictures are uploading. "E Daai! Ekdham bistaari bhayo," I say. "Hajur, ajaa chitto hunchha ki hudaina?" she says. I think we are both a little surprised that the other speaks Nepali, and after a minute of chat I find out that fifteen years ago she was on the same program that I just finished. When she finishes updating her daughter's kindergarten class's blog, she takes me across the street and through a short, stooping hallway to a blooming little courtyard. She points out her house, introduces me to her Nepali husband, and invites me to come by sometime for tea.

In Thamel and Jhochhe (Freak Street to us Lonely Planet clutching masses), westerners abound. In restaurants their eyes glaze over, and they huddle together, mumbling in German or Dutch or Russian or something. A few sit alone, nose buried in their Rough Guide and scribbling in little orange waterproof notebooks that I read on the internet last month were becoming hipper than the ubiquitous black Moleskine. At internet cafes they come in and demand calls to Europe or Australia, wandering out dejected when it doesn't work. On the streets they avoid each other's gaze as they tentatively prod at silk and spice shops. After a while the white people blur together, all in dreadlocks and knitted hippie jackets, trekking fleeces and backpack covers. I shiver at the thought of participating in their cliched sameness and long for a three-piece suit.

I follow a rack of rugged looking leather bags inside, and the shopkeeper, Ravi, is delighted to find that I speak Nepali. More even than in Kalimpong, everyone, including those reasonably fluent in English, seems really happy---even grateful---that I know more of their language than the crude spattering of phrasebook memorization. I introduce myself with my Nepali name and Ravi's grin widens. He tells me about how he makes the bags and wallets out of tough yak hide, and I am tempted to buy a roughly stitched wallet. In the end I turn it down; it didn't fit my credit cards.

I don't bother with curio shops anymore. All those pretty things of stone, brass, and beads---I know half a dozen places to buy the same things in Manhattan. With one on every street corner, they quickly cease to be curious. In Bhaktapur "student guides" lead us to a Thanka painting school. "Just to look." "To practice their English." Handicrafts is a major industry. I halfheartedly applaud the efforts of shops selling purses and rugs that are organic/fair trade/produced by women's self-help groups, but I don't buy. A deck of playing cards made from homemade paper: that's a bit more interesting. My most prized souvenir is a tiny flashlight that projects Osama bin Laden's face.

Next to me right now a ten-year-old-ish Nepali kid is looking for something on the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City website and playing an in-browser Flash version of the bouncy dirtbike racing game I was addicted to eight years ago.

Something is changing in the way culture works. The old ways of life developed out of necessity, were preserved by lack of options. You sang traditional songs, wore traditional clothes, ate traditional food because that was all there was. Most people couldn't go to other places, didn't participate much outside their family group. Life in the developed world is often full of options, mobility, choice of how to spend your life. More and more of what people do, how they make their living, what they eat, how they dress, what music and art they make or enjoy---all these things that constitute what we usually think of as an individual's "culture" are chosen by personal preference. Those people who dress up like zombies and shamble down Broadway every couple months: that's culture, but there is nothing "traditional" about it, not like what people expect to find here in Nepal.

Tourism is a particularly peculiar manifestation of these changes. It is strange to think that so many people and places are devoting so much of themselves to the amusement of foreigners. I've heard of trekkers who come down after ten days in the mountains and demand to see "traditional dances,"and the locals, often times, are happy to oblige. "If foreigners want to see our dances, our dances must be important," they say. In a way that is inspiring, but what does it mean for the culture that it is being preserved more to satisfy Western curiousity and guilt, or to help people hold on to collective identities that are quickly and quite reasonably becoming obsolete? In India this is compounded by the financial incentives offered to scheduled tribes and groups who can prove that they are "backwards" enough to need them; there is serious competition to be more "tribal" than the next village. But the view of "culture" that we have today is a completely new idea and has very little to do with the changes taking place in the way people live.

We worry so much about lost traditions, dying languages, vanishing tribes, and without a doubt these are aspects of the human experience that deserve to be remembered, that can enrich us with their wisdom and unique perspectives. Is it really fair, however, to expect people to live statically, to conform to practices and preferences that likely wouldn't exist if people had been able to choose otherwise? We worry so much about our civilization becoming a monoculture, and surely no one wants to see all places and people homogenized. But look around, click some links---there is already more out there than any one lifetime could hold. While we might all have access to the same things, will it really be a monoculture if we all choose our own unique paths of immersion, our own voice of ideas and desires? What is becoming is not a chorus but a conversation.

Kathmandu is one of these inbetween places. People sit on ancient, royal steps, listening to mp3 players and sending cellphone txts. Here we are all turning to the incorporeal, immersing ourselves in idea spaces while we trod foot-worn streets and caress rain-smoothed doors. It is a place boiling over with all times: the rough stone monuments to old and weary gods, the markets that service present daily needs, the posters and billboards that tantalize us with tomorrows. But it isn't perfect, and tourism isn't helping. Contrary to popular belief, tourism doesn't destroy traditions (the growth of self-determination does that), but rather preserves them in a shallow, cartoon way. We come to these places wanting to see exotic culture, and they give it to us. They give it to us in a form that we can see in a single afternoon, that we can take him in pictures. They turn it into something they can sell.

The air in Kathmandu these days is harsh and grainy, its aromas now colored more by car exaust than by the incense that burns in flower strewn shrines. The white-snowed mountains that ring Kathmandu are obsured into a hazy gray by the air pollution that sits in the valley like a noxious puddle of a cloud. A good third of the city's inhabitants wear bandanas or cheap face masks. I've been here less than a week, and already my throat is raw, my eyes prone to watering. But, as has been said, "we cannot separate the air that chokes from the air on which wings beat." For each thing that fills my mouth with bile and guilt, I see two things that fascinate and inspire, that gush and glow with vindicated imagination. If this is the world today, I think, imagine what it will be tomorrow.