some difficult adjustments:

*nodding my head up-and-down instead of wagging it side-to-side like a slinky pet
*driving a car that holds together more than 10 mph down a road that holds together and not using the horn to try and chat amiably with every other vehicle on the road. driving my own car at all. driving on a particular side of the road (actually, no trouble there so far)
*eating not rice. eating not rice with sharp metal implements.
*placing garbage in the proper receptacle
*respecting/comprehending others' sense of personal space on public transportation (not such an issue here in Vermont)

other than these minor points, i'm doing just fine, thank you. actually, i've just realized my approach to being back from nepal is to try and bring nepal to where i am, often with hilarious results. last week i had my best friend and his dad attempting to scoop rice up with their fingers, while their womenfolk looked on with undisguised, abject horror. it was priceless.

there's a Gary Snyder poem I oughtta quote, if I can locate it . . . or failing that, here's the relevant line: "America, I could almost love you again . . ." Yeah, almost.

(top) No more of this for a while: A yearly Buddhist dance at the Bhutanese Gomba in Pedong, Darjeeling District, India. They ended up pelting those paper-mache penises at the crowd--apparently part of the idea behind this day-long, absurdist spectacle is to remind the monks and lay community alike not to take the trappings of the religion too seriously. Spring, 2005.

(second from top) Or this: Kanchenjunga Himal (3rd highest peak on earth) seen from Darjeeling.

8 July '09

Here's a novel setting for an illwind entry: the slick, frankly bewildering Changi airport in Singapore. It's full of features you'd never find in Nepal, including moving sidewalks ('travelators') and the free (if time-limited) internet I'm taking advantage of now while waiting for a 4 AM flight to Tokyo. In another 24 hours, with any luck, I'll be back where I started 10 months ago: New York City, in my mother's cushy, slightly funky Upper West Side apartment. With a whole lot of digesting to do.

The last month in Nepal was a whirlwind. It's full of stories, naturally, including at least one I haven't figured out how to tell. This last month also included a 2-week trek in the Annapurna region, blissfully deserted thanks to the monsoon (which hadn't actually hit yet when we were there). Photos, and maybe some of those stories, should be forthcoming here. For now, some poems I scribbled out in the airport bar . . .

Transit Zone

Airport bar, the tropics.
“Singapore’s Favorite,” reads the dubious banner. This place
could be anywhere.
Amidst the manicured cactus garden
low murmur of transiters’ chitchat
under jet engines’ hypnotic whine
A place to kill time. In ones and twos,
the international sippers and smokers
percolate through.
A dozen inflections of English
Different strengths of Marlboros,
various dilutions of alcohol. Skies clear
above the nighttime city glow.

Every traveler a capsule of history,
a story waiting to be told. I picture
cartoon-style thought bubbles
hovering over every insular head.
Or at least give us signs with some basic information:
port of departure _____
final destination _____
We owe each other that much.


Dakshinkali, Fourth of July, 2009

The photos shows two naked white backs
bent low, heads down, side by side,
next to three clothed ones. White limbs
and brown are sunk ankle, wrist-deep
in glistening muck dotted with fluorescent shoots
of paddy, the pattern of which is being extended
to fill the oblong terrace.

An image that seems to beg post-hoc captioning
but here’s how it came about:
a shout of “dhaan ropna aaunupardaina?”
from across the fields, aimed at
the presumably oblivious tourists.
shouldn’t you/mustn’t we come plant some rice?
A. called back, “ma dhaan ropna aau?”
Shall I come plant rice?
“ropna aau!” come plant!
We slipped off our rubber sandals,
ubiquitous footwear of the foothills
and vast plains stretching away south,
and there we were.

It would have been as simple as that
to become adopted. Had we stayed 5 minutes more
we’d have shared the family’s mid-afternoon meal,
beaten rice and potatoes one can guess;
stayed ‘til dark and we’d have found ourselves
put up for the night. No way we could have left
before the next morning’s rice meal, and after that
escape would have been impossible.

Instead I fled the lush hills
back down into the Valley’s grind and haze
and on to shiny unfathomable places
like the one I come from, like this one.

In four months our rice will mature.

The Rains
For Ben Ayers

i.
Perched on the roof, book in hand
He never heard the kite
Until she was upon him
Apparition from the gaping blue
That, taking him perhaps for a hitchhiker,
Latched her talons onto his extended thumb
the message clear as skies
after a hard rain: come on
relinquish your mass
So that when he failed to wing up out
Of his chair, off mortal ground
The brown bird wheeled around
Hovering on steady wingbeats
Not a dozen feet away
And fixed him with her yellow gaze.

ii.
The girl finds playing cards. Bustling down
Market Street, she can’t help but find
The Jack of Hearts wedged under a standpipe.
Not two days later it’s an ace, clubs this time,
Followed shortly by a diamond four. No fool
To ignore such signs, key plot twists in The Story
She quietly stoops to collect the winking red and black
And white faces. Tucks them neatly into her wallet.
For--future reference? routine inference?
A source of some distress, then, to come here
And find entire decks strewn carelessly
Cards face up and down, soaked and tattered,
Wasted bits of storyline,
Sheer potential overwhelmed
With wantonness. By early afternoon
The rains come and wash the evidence away.

iii.
In second grade mother’s mother died
Leaving a grandmother-shaped hole.
Genny knew. She would stir
Her pots of black beans and collards
Magic dishes I can’t stop tasting
Head wrapped in clean white cloth
She scrubbed the floors of our long apartment
Like no one has before or since
Never learning the name of our second,
Terrified cat: Proust’s Morel and Charlus
Scarred products of a lab and a Bronx deli
Portuguese’d to Moralio and the white one.
Stirring heavy, fragrant pots she absorbed
The news from mother with, I imagine,
Barely a nod. I know, dear. Sound of rainfall.
City noises. She passed me in the hall.

Endangered Species of Ayurved

Top image: Bishunath Karmacharya, traditional baidya and head of the Banepa Ayurveda Sangh (association). He wants to pass the tradition on and is willing to teach anyone willing to learn, at no cost. On the floor in front of him is a box of Yarchagumba.

Lower image: Keshab Baidya, a traditional Ayurvedic doctor/pharmacist in Banepa, Nepal. With his son pursuing a different career, Keshab is the last of his lineage. Above his right shoulder, a jar of shuddha paro, purified mercury, is visible.



Yesterday I took a long-overdue trip to Banepa, a sleepy Newar town slowly transforming itself into a modern city. In other words, it’s a lot like what Kathmandu must have been like in the seventies. The main strip, all that most tourists ever see of the place, is all traffic and bustle, with the usual assortment of shops, fruit peddlers, pan-spitters, etc. But head ten yards off this long, straight, dusty thoroughfare and you’re in another world of quiet brick-paved streets and brick-and-woodwork houses. Ducks puttering around the streets, and women scrubbing sudsy clothes just outside their doorways.
My mission was to meet with a couple of the old-timer Baidyas I’d met once or twice before, men who still practice (or if not, still know how to practice) rasa shastra. They work with minerals, metals, and animal parts like deer musk glands and conch shells as well as countless herbs from India and from the Himalayas. They are clinicians, too, but what separates them from so many other practitioners is their skill and knowledge of medicine-making. The first baidya I sought was Keshab Baidya (his last name indicating that his family have been Ayurvedic doctors for generations). I’d spent a wonderful couple of days with him during the winter watching him make medicine and tend to the few patients who came into his pharmacy-room, crowded with hundreds of jars of raw ingredients and finished compounds. This time I went straight up the back way to his herb room and got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach when I saw it was cleaned up, practically empty. Could he have fallen ill and died so suddenly in a few short months . . .? A possibility that seemed all the more real and disturbing because of the recent, sudden passing of another old man I had loved, on the other side of the world. But going around to the main entrance of his house, I was greeted by his daughter-in-law who explained the herb room had just been moved down a few flights. My worries weren’t entirely unfounded, though: Keshab-ji wasn’t well. He was suffering from a failing heart. The move was to make it easier to access his work without having to climb up flights of stairs. Just now he was resting, and I sat amongst the hundreds, thousands of plastic jars and waited for him to appear. When he finally did I barely recognized him. It was his presence more than any specific physical characteristic that had changed: he seemed such a thinner, slighter figure than the engaged, lively man I remembered. After exchanging 'namaste's we just sat there, not exactly looking at each other but acutely aware of each others' presence, for a good 5 minutes. Something in the man’s eyes had changed, too—instead of a lively sparkle there was a dull sadness, a sense of resignation. It wasn’t hard to guess what this might be about. Finally he broke the silence by asking me, in his typical style, 'what would you give for hepatitis B?' I'm never sure when he does this if he's quizzing me or if he’s genuinely curious what herbs a foreign ‘baidya’ would use. But somehow, that's what I seem to be both to him and to another, salty baidya I’ve been hanging out with. Not a peer, really, but in some sense one of their own. The salty baidya, Shyam Man Shrestha, referred to me recently as a 'kaviraj,' an almost embarrassingly high compliment meaning something like 'king of doctors.' Then yesterday dear old Keshab Baidya said in Newari, when another old Newari man came in gestured at me, grunting a question, that I was an "American who knows everything about herbs." This is hardly true either, but the thing that really struck me yesterday is I may be the closest these old baidyas have to an apprentice, someone to carry on the tradition. And i'm very far from that, really. But in Keshab's case it's so clear that that is what's missing, the next generation. That’s what’s behind the dullness in his gaze, the resignation in his movements. Eventually I broached the subject with him by asking if the boy I'd seen once helping him by grinding some herbs was still coming. Nope, not really . . . all of sudden he said straight out, “after I go, my kids'll wait a few years maybe and then they'll say, ‘look at this mess, we could put this room to a better use . . . and they’ll throw it all away. All this tens of laakhs worth of medicine.’” There’s no one to carry it on.
One of the reasons i'd come back was to buy some bhasmas and other medicines from him to bring home. I didn't want to suddenly start talking business, but I brought it up by asking what he thought the most important bhasmas and non-perishable medicines were. We compiled a list of 10 or so things (shankha, abhrak and mandur bhasmas, shilajit, some guggulus . . .), and I said I would like to buy them from him. He told me to give him a week before I come and pick up what he puts together for me. Leaving his place, having arranged this, I felt some of the weight of tradition settle on my shoulders, and let me tell you it was a strange feeling. I have a chance to carry on parts of their lineage, in however small a way. Later, at the Nawaranga guest house in Dhulikhel amongst people who feel after 8 months like old friends, thinking about the whole scene with Keshab brought a tear to my eye. I could feel the pain of this old man, bearer of such a proud and venerable tradition, watching it come to a dead end.
Of course Ayurveda is not in danger of dying. By some estimations it may be more popular than ever. But it’s losing it’s old-growth, it’s deepest-rooted lineages, as the younger generation pursues easier, more lucrative and more prestigious occupations. In flirting with the New Age it is in danger of severing its links with the past.
For my Ayurvedic student friends: there is still an opportunity in Banepa to come and learn the techniques of classical rasa shastra hands-on. Bishunath Karmacharya, a first-rate baidya, is willing to teach whoever wants to learn, for free. The catch is that he has no longer has a workshop. An interested group of students, though, could come to Nepal and study medicine-making intensively for months with a rare teacher for little more than the cost of building a rudimentary workshop/lodging (plus food and airfare of course). If anyone is interested in such a possibility, contact me!

final day of panchakarma--
blessed and decked out with a massive mala (flower garland), tika, and bhadgaole topi (bhatapur-style cap), i'm thanking Roma didi, who cooked almost every meal for me for 25 days

surrendering to verse

is a fair description. having caught the poetry bug (from the likes of my mother, I suspect--a hereditary susceptibility) I find myself uninterested, for the time being, in prose.


Rainy morning in Sipadol

In this monsoon deferred, hard to avoid the feeling
It should have rained harder, or not at all.
Not wrong to look for drama in the weather
And scorn the steady drizzle that breeds
Fibonacci series of cups of milkless tea
and games of scrabble.

Pole of this place, the towering Pipal
Danced to the tune of the breaking storm
Creaking bows flash-illumined in violet
Greeting my sleep-muzzled head at 6:00.
Like an egg from the heavens it should have exploded,
this 'weather event', in a goo of white and yolk, shard of shell.
Messy little encapsulation of life & death
And the embryo-smudge shades between.
Instead I sip my tea, hot and gingery
As the albumin drips down, static, numb
Onto the village spared and cheated of
The fecund violence, its due.


What gods

soft, dusty feet find their way
to a shrine in the woods
what gods of this place
I know not
simple stones massively tika’d
stick of incense wedged between old bricks
a naked lightbulb miraculously lit
its wire snaking away through the trees
bells and vermillion


Kathmandu scenes

An unearthly blossoming
Purple of play-doh or steaming entrails
On tree after urban tree
Makes me question my vision:
Maybe a sensory fuse is blown
And the grass isn’t really
That flat green, either—an improbable color.
And sky? Shell grey?
I doubt.

But less likely things have happened
Here in Kathmandu. Just last week
I merged with an orange crowd
Everyone dusted with the fine powder
by mid-morning
ringing in the new year
and taking the gods out for a stroll on careening palanquins
under twirling parasols ornate as tiny lawn mushrooms
and stealing my wallet.

Not long ago I glimpsed, from the corner of my eye,
An old woman, wrinkled and browned
Sitting implacably on the sidewalk
Trimming her toenails with a buck-knife.
Really? This is double-take material, after all
And I look again, or never stop looking,
Until my foot finds a foot-sized hole in the street
My right leg vanishes to the thigh
Into the Baluwa Tar gutter.
Unsheathing myself from the gunky trap
I’m missing some shin-skin
(Traded in for grit-shit).
But I get to keep the fish-shaped scar,
Memento of the time this inscrutable city
Tried to swallow me.


The Pines

The pines were calling. Too many words.

I strode, rubber-shod, up the dirt track
Past sprouting maize and cucumber trellises
Awaiting tendrils’ curl

Past the quiet rhythmic work
Of threshing grain

Past cud-chewing cattle

To the dusty road etched into the hillside
Remnants of field terraces still discernible
A vertical labyrinth blanketed in long, rusty pine needles
Slippery underfoot
And smelling sweetly of decay

Perched on that dry-slippery slope
I squatted, dug in my heels

There’s nothing to tell:
Wind and sun
And thoughts like doves
Quiet but insistent
Taking flight

I came down from that high place
Past cabbages and incipient beans
Rubber sandals in hand
Dust between my toes
Still trailing words.


Three Ayurvedic Riddles

Ojas

The essence
Lube of life
White-gold as ghee
Sweet as honey
Fragrant as paddy
Eight drops only


Tejas

Finest fire’s
Subtle refiner
Keeper’s finder
Luster-miner


Prana

Flash
without sound
Signal
no ground
Breath
all around

Official Disclaimer

Due to a juicy new tidbit of U.S. policy, I have been prompted to make the following clarification with regard to the nature of this weblog:

*that contrary to all appearances, Ill Wind is not a U.S. Department of State or Fulbright Program website.

*that any similarity in content between the views expressed here and official U.S. Government foreign policy is purely coincidental.

*that all views expressed here are my own, except where attributed to others or vaguely plagiarized from the cybermind stream of consciousness to which I may be susceptible.

I hope this clears up any confusion that may have been plaguing the hearts and minds of my readers.

Of Pickpockets, Oil baths and Gundruk

This entry should have started with a nice big photo: the terraces and brick-makers’ yards on the path up to Sipadole, maybe, or the local polyculture of wheat and marijuana that I captured so nicely on film (well, silicon) the other day. For the last week I’ve been staying in Sipadole, a village on the Valley rim, a rural place despite its five-stones’-throw proximity to Bhaktapur’s moderate bustle. I’m there to do Panchakarma, the Ayurvedic cleansing regimen, and have only descended from my sequestration to restock reading material and attend a wedding on one of my designated ‘rest’ days. Rest means no massages or other intensely relaxing treatments. Rest, in this case, means plunging back into the grit and noise of the city and being pick-pocketed. It wasn’t my money this time: no, my mind’s eye was practically tucked into my pocket after having my wallet lifted in a crowd just a few weeks back at a Nepali New Year celebration. It was my digital camera, full of all the images I wanted to spread to the four winds. Gone from my backpack, whose outside pocket I found flapping open when I stepped off a micro ten minutes ago. I’d been busy with the shutter lately, and I was particularly excited about the images I’d taken of the puja to mark the beginning of my Panchakarma. Well, mark it up to the khuire (whitey) tax, the all-but-inevitable result of hundreds of pairs of eyes focusing on me and one or two probing hands seeing what I’m worth. I estimate I’ve been small-timed to the tune of 10% of my Fulbright stipend, counting the value of the camera. Of course, it’s not the money that bothers me the most—the thieves are probably justifying their actions with just this thought, that a few thousand rupees means little to me—but the blow to my respect for my fellow humans. I look back on this afternoon now through a glaze of mistrust: is that why the young couple on the microbus were laughing so hard, because they watched someone unzip my bag and lift out the compact piece of hardware? Was that part of what the little crowd that gathered as I kneeled on the street to have my palm read was up to? But it’s gone, along with my feeble but trusty headlamp. I hope they enjoy the photos of wild rose bushes and of Dr. Shrestha worshipping Dhanwantari and blessing my medicated ghee.

But I was going to write about Panchakarma. In Ayurveda all treatment can be divided into shamana and shodhana. Shamana is palliation, basically soothing the aggravated humors. Pacifying the yapping dog at the door. If you’ve got high Pitta, too much fire, ice cream might do the trick. Too much dryness as a result of Vata, wind, and grounding therapy like meditation or lying under weighted blankets can help. Heavy, damp kapha can be lightened up with vigorous exercise or spicy flavors. Ayurvedic thinking is quite literal. Shodhana, on the other hand, is about actually eliminating the doshas (humors) from the body--banishing them completely. Wind tends to collect in the colon first, as gas. To remove it, go to the source: do an oily enema. Pitta can take the form of hyperacidic gastric secretions, so purgation with laxatives dispels it. Kapha accumulates as phlegm in the chest region and stomach, and can be expelled by therapeutic vomiting. Panchakarma, which means ‘five actions,’ is a systematic combination of these three therapies, plus nasal administration and (in theory, at least) blood-letting.
But as Dr. Vasant Lad says, “you can’t squeeze the juice out of an unripe mango.” Before the elimination can begin, the body has to be properly prepared. In this preparatory stage, the doshas (vitiated humors; impurities) are coaxed from wherever they may be lodged in the tissues back into the mahasrotas (“great channel”), the digestive tract. This is accomplished largely by lubricating the body inside and out: the simple diet of khichari is augmented with lots of ghee (pure, clarified butterfat), and the daily regimen includes a full-body oil massage. This is the stage I have undergone recently, and after a few days of oiling people started to comment on my glow. Like an oil lamp, I thought. My tissues are softened and made supple, and I can picture the impurities slip-sliding their way back to the GI tract. They hardly know what’s coming. (Yesterday it came: kapha-annihilating vamana (vomiting) brought on by drinking a liter and half of salted sugarcane juice in about two minutes.)
In addition to the massage, there are two other oily therapies. One is netra basti, a sort of eyeball bath with ghee. A ring of wheat flour dough is formed around each eye-socket, and warm, melted ghee is spooned onto each eyelid. Then you start to blink, so that the eyeball itself is swimming in the golden ghee. It’s a strange but pleasant feeling, not at all uncomfortable. In theory, at least, the ghee is able to penetrate to the optic nerve and thus nourish the nervous system directly. The other therapy is shirodhara (“head stream”). Here a stream of warm sesame oil is directed at the forehead, in the region of the ‘third eye.’ You simply lie there under the stream, having the seat of your cosmic consciousness tickled with the nourishing oil. Twice during this procedure I’ve slipped into a sort of half-sleep, an almost hypnotic state. When it was over (after a totally indeterminate length of time) I found my arms tingling pleasantly and my face completely relaxed of its usual patterns of expression or stress. I’m sure shirodhara works wonders in insomnia cases, amongst other neuro/psychological disorders, and I can’t think of a more blissful treatment. As long as you don’t mind a head soaked with oil.

The way Panchakarma is practiced these days, it’s essentially a retreat from the world and into oneself. As such it’s an activity necessarily limited to those who have the means to opt out of the workaday world for weeks at a time and be cared for, cooked for, rubbed and riled and retched. Here in Nepal, virtually everyone receiving Panchakarma is a foreigner; in Kerala (the coastal Southwest Indian state), it’s the explicit purpose of much tourism. But despite its touristic incarnation, the treatments themselves go back some few thousand years to the time of Caraka, the legendary physician who lends his name to the oldest extant complete Ayurvedic treatise, the Caraka Samhita. It’s nice to know that hundreds of generations of guinea-pigs have gone before. Where do people get off talking about the need to test traditional methods for safety and efficacy . . .?

My experience so far is like a cross between a stay at a sanatorium and an artist colony. Besides my treatments, I do little other than eat, sleep, take short walks, and read and write. In the mornings I attend to my meditation and yoga practice, and when I need some company besides books I stop in at a local house, accept a glass of fresh milk or some newly-dug potatoes to take home, chat with an old Newari woman sitting on her step, slowly sorting baby mustard greens. Roots and stems for the goats, leafy bits for gundruk (a way of preserving greens involving first fermentation and then sun-drying). To augment my simple diet I might walk a little further, to a virgin patch of golden Himalayan raspberries where I can gorge myself in splendid isolation.
Sipadole is really a village, sleepy as they come, so anywhere I go I make more of splash than I’d like. But after the first week, now, the families along my wandering routes have gotten used to me. Some of the kids have worked up the nerve to approach and talk to me instead of shouting at me after I pass. Fed up with the manners of some of these I wrote these lines one day after returning to my room:

so what if I like the trees here
better than the children?
bands of tiny hooligans
versus gnarled, majestic sentinels
pipals sprouting leaflets pink and translucent
as grapeskins—no contest. The kids kick dust
shout ‘hallo’s and satirical ‘namashtay’s at your back
beg for rupees, chocolate, a pen.
trees ask for nothing but your exhalation
though they’ll suck up your minerals in the end
turn your bones into bark and root
for the kids to clamber on
worship with grubby feet.
later, grown, they’ll honor you
with rice grains and vermillion
deck you out with mirrors
make a temple of your trunk.
everything and nothing is sacred.
just ask the schoolboys at the burning ghat
watching porn on a cellphone screen
while their friends mother, a suicide,
incinerates atop her pyre
of silent wood.

That last image borrowed from Alden, who witnessed such a scene at a cremation.
From panchakarma to pickpockets—I’m amazed at humanity all over again. Maanche ta je pani garcha . . . people will do just about anything. Everything. Selah.

Contemplating Collapse

I wanted to put this reward at the end of my rant . . . a Pipal tree (an incarnation of Vishnu) in Calcutta

"The connection between the inability to goose up oil production beyond some already icecap-melting number, and the immediate trotting out of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, is not immediately obvious. But apparently the U.S. economy is a sort of pyramid scheme, based on nothing more than faith in its growth potential, and can only continue to exist while it continues to expand, by sucking in ever more resources, particularly energy. Even a small energy shortage is enough to undermine it. So Peak Oil is hardly the problem – it is the foolish notion that infinite economic growth on a finite planet is possible. Collapse can be triggered when any one of many other physical limits is exceeded - drinkable water, breathable air, arable land, and so on – and so the limit to sustained oil production is only one of many physical limits to growth."

- Dmitri Orlov http://cluborlov.blogspot.com


Often I think people miss an obvious point when discussing sustainability: if a particular practice or society or anything is unsustainable, that means by definition that it can’t continue forever. Sooner or later the shift to sustainable practices will happen in the way a pot that’s boiling over will settle down to a lower level of liquid. It would be nice to make some of the changes consciously, however. We can at least try to slow down instead of keeping our foot on the accelerator as the brick wall approaches (and—good timing—as we run of gas). It would be nice to have some soup left in the pot once we manage to turn off the flame. We can limit the damage and ease the transition to the sort of lifestyles we will have to live in a world where oil is no longer cheap and plentiful and our sprawling suburban communities with their tidy, barren front lawns is no longer feasible. Where there is not enough water to go around. Where credit is worthless, and wealth is increasingly measured in useful, tangible goods and services.
As the collapse-prophet James Howard Kunstler has written on his popular doomsday blog “Clusterfuck Nation,” (http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com)it is president Obama’s task to first recognize our predicament and then to act accordingly: to mobilize the country to build new, smaller-scale systems that work in place of the large and failing ones now teetering awfully close to the brink. How depressingly ironic that for all his talk of change, so far Obama is scrambling to prop up the tattered canvas of the status quo against the howling winds of change. Obama and Americans in general are justifiably scared of change, now that it’s clear that we’re facing changes we can’t control. Who wants to stand up in front of the nation and explain that the era of America as we know it, of rampant consumption and credit card debt, is in its death throws? That we can’t live the lifestyles we’ve become accustomed to any more, can’t live in gated communities and depend on cheap fuel to drive to work everyday and expect cheap food to be there on the supermarket shelves at the end of the day.
But as many (including Noam Chomsky and the beautiful Ms. Waverly Lutz) have pointed out, Obama is not a mass movement. What he’s beginning to look like is the face of a highly successful mass marketing campaign engineered to sell us more of the same in a revolutionary new package.
We all want to like him—we voted for him, didn’t we?—but all his intelligence and eloquence and the good intentions I’m still willing to credit him with add up to nothing in the face of the machine in which the president is a rather small (though highly visible) cog. I’m talking about global capitalism and the corporate and financial mafia that enforce it. . . the ideology that’s doing an astoundingly efficient job of consuming the world.

‘So what, in the context of this madness, does life look like on the ground in Nepal these days?’ perhaps you ask. Well.

The capital, Kathmandu, has all but gone dry under the pressures of expanding population and sub-normal rainfall. At the public taps throughout the city, steady streams have turned into trickles or stopped altogether. People line up at the still-running taps for hours, their empty water containers snaking out into the streets.
Ever since the Koshi flood calamity in the Terai there’s been a power shortage, but now that problem too is reaching absurd proportions. There’s power for about 6 hours out of 24, businesses are folding left and right, industry is crippled. Intermittently, severe cooking gas and petrol shortages crop up, and auto fuel when available is notoriously mixed with foul-burning kerosene. (I’ll refrain here from getting into the corruption and dysfunctionality of Nepali politics.)
The city is clogged by traffic and the whole valley brimming with smog from all the cars and the burgeoning brick factories. The last rural parts of the valley are filling in with unplanned sprawl, as land prices shoot through the roof and more and more traditional farmers decide to sell their plots. In short, Kathmandu is looking more and more like Los Angeles.

And yet Kathmandu continues to grow. There is money to be made here, and things to spend the money on. More than any other it is this fact--Kathmandu’s involvement in the global economy--that keeps attracting young people from the countryside. This is the paradox, for as the city grows and the traditional urban centers meld into an endless suburban mess, one would expect Nepali village life to look more and more appealing to those who have roots outside the Valley. The beloved gaon (village), subject of so many folk songs, where the rhododendrons bloom and water flows clear. The gaon, where Maoist thugs create terror and set precedents of violent grab-what-you-can politics, where food security is marginal at best and public health issues abound. At its heart, perhaps the real issue is lack of access to the global economy and the standard of living that goes with it. Most rural Nepalis don’t live within easy access of a motorable road, let alone a hospital or college. While fifty years these would have been non-issues, today the West looms so large in people’s minds that traditional values are largely skewed. Village elders may cling to the old ways of living, but in most rural communities the chances are high that anyone under 30 desperately wants a one-way ticket out. Kathmandu is the portal to the outer world of boundless economic opportunity. Who, having escaped the dead-end drudgery of village and reached the promised land, is willing to return? It seems the village everywhere is a site first to be escaped and then nostalgically longed for.

The examples I mentioned, access to modern healthcare and higher education, are tricky issues: as a highly privileged American I can’t very well waltz into a village and say, ‘You guys don’t need higher education or modern healthcare! Keep going to the local shaman/herbalist! What do you want to study economics or English for?’ (Post)modernity has arrived, and simply shutting the doors on it is not an option. And yet these institutions are not necessarily the essential foundations of ‘civilized society’ that we tend to take them for. A great deal of the hardship of village life these days has to do with the manpower and brain-drain currently afflicting it; in times past, I imagine, intact communities were much better able to make do with their local resources their economies. Somehow or other, Nepal, like developed and developing countries worldwide, needs to find ways to revitalize its countless villages and small towns, where lifestyles that tread lightly on the earth are the norm and regional self-determination possible.

In any case, it looks like Nepal and other parts of the so-called “third-world” are facing the issues that the rest of the world can’t avoid for much longer. The difference is that here there is little insulation against reality: no insurance companies to absorb the shock of a bad fire or a drought, no self-interested corporations willing and able to provide (say) a desert like Arizona or Vegas or LA with water while aquifers dry up. If there’s not enough water to go around, people will know it instantly. The distance between action and reaction is simply shorter here, with fewer complex systems to create illusions of abundance while hidden costs pile up. This connection to reality means that Nepal, for all its tribulations, will never be able to swing itself as far out of line as the West has. With our recipe of neoliberal ideology, our celebrated work ethic, and financial voodoo that I will never fully understand, we in America have managed to build a teetering edifice, glory of the world, on a porous, shifty foundation. Nepal may never presume to reach so high, but it sure has less of a ways to fall. Of course there’s one glaring exception: Kathmandu, which as I implied is vulnerable to collapse in the same way Los Angeles is. Two generations ago the valley was all but self-sufficient in food and construction materials, with supplementation coming primarily with trade (e.g. in salt) with Tibet. Today its hyper-condensed, largely landless population is subject to shortages of essentials every time a bandh closes the few roads leading to and from the valley. There’s another reason Kathmandu is a ticking time bomb: it sits on a major tectonic faultline. The last time a major earthquake hit, in 1934, damage was severe, but at that time there was no concrete jungle.

How to close such a gloomy entry? First by saying that this kind of bitter medicine is essential to wake us up and mobilize us so we can start finding sustainable solutions before they are forced on us. That’s not much consolation, maybe. What we need here are stories, visions of a brighter future to raise our spirits and give us something to strive towards. Well I’m no bard. But check out Ursula LeGuin's novel Always Coming Home for some of that good old-time inspiration. If no one protests I might even post more about this remarkable book, ‘cause it too is good medicine for our times.