Posts Tagged ‘Kathmandu’
A Nation Hanging by the Thread, A Travel Entry [Part Six]
With the advent of cheap wireless service, everyone and their dog these days seems to have an annoying ringtone ready to clamour from beneath the pockets and abruptly cut any conversation short. It sinks to an especially disconcerting level when you see monks and nuns thoroughly engaged in texting SMS messages or talking and configuring their cellphones while doing their rounds around the stupa. Gone are the days of crowding around in amazement as a bemused tourist toggled around with an FM radio receiver. There is a sense that people in Kathmandu nowadays project an aura of artificial engagement, as if they were as competent a multi-tasker as traders from Wall Street.
A Nation Hanging by the Thread, A Travel Entry [Part Five]
The sprawling stupa of Boudhanath, one of the largest in the world, is an important site for the millions of Buddhists in the valley. Located on the north-eastern flank of the valley, at about eleven kilometers from the city centre, the town of Boudhanath has also served as an historic trading spot for the traders from Tibet and the areas around it. Tamangs – from the Tibetan words ‘ta’ & ‘mang’: the former meaning horse, and the latter for war; they are said to have descended from the horseman warriors of an ancient Tibetan lineage – predominantly inhabit this bustling tourist area, along with a healthy population of Tibetan settlers who have prospered with the wide appeal of Tibetan rugs and Tibetan Buddhism.
A Nation Hanging by the Thread, A Travel Entry [Part Four]
There has always been an air – the thinnest of it, but still there nonetheless – of loathing between the pahaadis (folks from the hilly areas) and the ones who live in the plain (terai in Nepali) regions of Nepal. Although Nepal’s record in multi-ethnic harmony and cohabitation is commendable, the seams of contempt and distrust have always been there and it is more complex in a large, central city such as Kathmandu.
A Nation Hanging by the Thread, A Travel Entry [Part Three]
Winter in Nepal is a muggy and cooped up affair. Due to the temperate weather with which they’re used to for most of the year, Nepalis (at least in Kathmandu and further south) aren’t quite adept at dealing with the two-three months of cold that passes by. They bundle up in as many layers as they can, and they hunch their shoulders and bring their limbs close to their bodies. They tend to look like they’re consoling themselves of some regrettable thoughts. People on the side of the streets, those invariably cursed with a need of busyness and blessed with a generous heap of idle time, huddle around makeshift warming spots served by no less than empty, tossed out garbage bags. Jokes and grievances are exchanged around the smell of burning plastic and cardboard boxes, as children and street dogs caper about to brush the cold off of them. The sun shines with a relative ferocity (for the time), and in some cases, even forces those under it to retreat to the shade, wherein they right away shiver and console themselves back again under the forceful embrace of the heat. Insulated houses are a privileged exception, so most people have to make do with blankets or hazardous indoor heaters powered by kerosene to keep themselves warm in the freezing evenings.
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A Nation Hanging by the Thread, A Travel Entry [Part Two]
Part: One
The valley of Kathmandu, at once mystical and modern, when viewed from atop any of the hills that surround it, seems as if it is filled with a placid lake of smog and dust. Where once it was indeed a gigantic lake, in bygone eras before it dried up and civilization slowly encroached and left its uniquely Newari sculptures and durbar squares, and folks danced in innumerable festivals and revolutions swept along the streets as stubborn and as muddled as the rivers Bagmati, Vishnumati and the rest. When once Manjushri, the Buddha of Wisdom, was said to have laid his omniscient eyes on the sprawling body of water before him, and in a swift motion of his mighty, prescient sword – the one that slew ignorance from beings instead of the beings themselves – cut the hill of Chobar and made it into a pass where the water drained out, and the nagas and various other numinous ancestors withered or adapted to the hilly and fertile grounds of Kathmandu Valley.
A Nation Hanging by the Thread, A Travel Entry [Part One]
The view from my window inside the jet plane as it descended on the runway of Tribhuvan International Airport was pitch darkness. Illuminating the tarmac, like neatly lined prayer lights of some massive, interplanetary shrine, were generator-powered torches. This all seemed a little ominous and quirky to me. Great, I thought. My first night back in Nepal and already I felt like I’m not quite prepared for this reunion affair.
Around the World in Seven Years
Picture a zit-faced sixteen year-old landing on the famous stretch of the JFK airport: mouth agape, wide-eyed and tired from the cross-Atlantic voyage; laden with a carnival full of luggage, his thick hair bristling at the sting of the late Fall chill of the East Coast; barely managing to keep up with the whizzing blurs of airport signs, announcements, electronic message boards; heavy, dragging commuters and busy, irritable multi-taskers; lazy limos and impatient custom officers — all of them converging into the sort of noisome, bored and alive impersonality that only America can epitomize.
Now this once sixteen but still zit-face, a little wiser but more wayward Tibetan boy from Kathmandu will be completing one round trip around the world. His eyes are tired from arguing that they rest, joints aching with the fervour of indignant nerves, mind strangely removed from the actualities — inert and impassive as a team of researchers behind a wall of plexiglass observing a chimp fiddling with a rubik’s cube. No one is quite sure what the experiment is about, but they’re fairly certain that it is at least amusing, and someone else is paying for their time anyways.
The hour draws nearer, closing in with the blunt insistence of time — the mechanics of forward-motion progressing duly and which in this particular case will peculiarly revisit a once-life, a once-neighbourhood, and once-memories.
Drained with caffeine; numb with anticipation.
A round trip, an infinite samsara and a straight line meeting inexplicably inside the perpetually filled and emptied tank of memories and age. A story awaits on the other side — nervous and coy. And she insists on taking pictures.
