Archive for April 27th, 2006
TSARA TOWNSHIP, Tibet - The muffled thud of hooves on thick grass provided an echo of Tibet’s distant warrior past.
For a few hours, as the people of Tsara on Sunday gathered for their annual horse racing festival, the traditional image of Tibetans as peace-loving Buddhists was put to the test.
Eleven horse riders, each representing one of the township’s villages, participated in a fiercely contested race which showed that for some Tibetans, a horse is as natural a means of transport as a bicycle in other nations.
“Everyone here knows how to ride a horse,” said Dzuqi, a Tsara resident, who was wearing the uniform of a civilian security unit.
The 11 horse riders, dressed in starkly colored black, white and red costumes, strode confidently among the spectators as they prepared for the event, posing proudly for photos.
When they mounted their horses, their dexterity was a reminder that the Tibetans were fierce warriors feared by their neighbors until they devoted themselves to the peaceful pursuit of Buddhism in the 9th century.
Even today, the best of Tibet’s horse riders are celebrated as local heroes, much like football or baseball stars in the West. As the day’s program culminated, each of the contestants took turns galloping at great speed down a 200-meter (660-feet) track, picking up long pieces of white linen, known as khatags, which were scattered along the way.
Khatags, also frequently referred to as “friendship scarves” by the Tibetans, have deep symbolic meaning here.
“Khatags are for good fortune, for all good things,” said a woman from the Tibetan capital Lhasa 70 kilometers (43 miles) away, who was watching the event with the detached interest of a field anthropologist among alien tribes.
“If an honored guest arrives, you give him a khatag. If someone in your family embarks on a long journey, you also give him a khatag,” she said.
The Horse Racing Festival, originally an ancient Tibetan harvest festival, is celebrated in large parts of the Himalayan region, showing that despite 50 years of Chinese rule parts of Tibet’s cultural identity remain.
For communities like Tsara township, it is the second-most important event of the calendar after the New Year.
A festive, carnival-like atmosphere reigned as a humming crowd gathered along the track, displaying a variety of headgear from American-style cowboy hats to traditional red tassels tied into the hair.
Vendors had set up shops selling everything from beer and cigarettes to children’s toys.
The lengthy breaks in between the main events were greeted with great patience by the audience, although a mood of anticipation could be clearly discerned.
“We haven’t got the results yet,” said Tsamla, a 24-year-old peasant woman from Dyigye village, hugging her 18-month-old son. “Of course, I hope my village will come out on top.”
There was more than just local pride involved for the spectators, many of whom had traveled for hours to attend the festival.
The horse riders received two yuan (24 cents) for each khatag they picked up, but they had to hand over the prizes to their village heads, who in turn were expected to distribute the money to the local communities.
April 27th, 2006
DHARAMSALA, India, March 31, 2006 - Tibetans living in exile in India gathered in this picturesque northern Indian hill resort Friday to seek blessings from the Dalai Lama before the start of a vibrant Tibetan festival.
About 2,000 Tibetan exiles and tourists sat in the sun to catch a glimpse of the Dalai Lama, before enjoying traditional operas that mark the Shoton festival, one of the biggest on the Tibetan calendar.
The nine-day festival celebrates “the rich cultural heritage of Tibet,” said Kelsang Youdon, a festival organiser and director of the Tibetan Institute of the Performing Arts.
Also known as the yoghurt festival, it originated in the 17th century at the Drepung Monastery in Tibet’s capital Lhasa where nomads and farmers offered yoghurt, which was abundant at the time, to monks ending their annual summer meditation retreat.
Lhamo or opera was later added to the festival because of its popularity.
This year eight groups of Tibetans based in India and Nepal are taking part in the festival which will showcase Tibetan traditions.
Mingma, a 79-year-old Tibetan exile living in Nepal described Shoton as a “dying culture” which “we must teach our youngsters to preserve and promote.”
“It is heartening to see more young people taking (an) interest now,” he said as yoghurt was being handed out to the crowds.
Before China’s occupation of Tibet in 1950, Shoton was held at Drepung Monastery and the Norbulinka, the summer palace of the Dalai Lama near Lhasa.
“The Shoton festival is being held in present day Tibet, but under strict Chinese supervision,” said Tenzin Lhaksam, project coordinator at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts.
“They (Chinese) allow Shoton and some other Tibetan festivals for propaganda purposes only,” Lhaksam said.
Dharamsala is home to thousands of Tibetan refugees who set up their government-in-exile after fleeing to India in 1959 following a failed uprising against Chinese rule in Tibet.
April 27th, 2006
In the late 1980s, author Pico Iyer embarked on an Asian journey with the purpose of discovering to what extent Western - and especially American - culture had impinged on the cultures of the newly opened and revitalized East. During this time several Asian nations were undergoing unprecedented economic growth; the historic Nixon visit to China and the market reforms of Deng Xiaoping were beginning to drag China out of the darkness of Maoism; and Southeast Asia, after years of wars and insurgencies, was more or less at peace. Pundits, even Iyer himself, spoke of an Asian century to come, and no one could have foreseen that in less than a decade the Thai economy would tank, Japan’s would stall, or that authors would suddenly be writing premature obituaries for the People’s Republic.
In those intoxicating times, Iyer concluded that fears of Western hegemony over the East are unfounded, and that indeed the converse is more likely. He found that Asian cultures could easily absorb, refuse, or painstakingly select things Western. And moreover, that Eastern things were insinuating themselves into the West with astonishing subtlety and speed - from yoga and Thai restaurants, to feng shui and gamelan music, not to mention Japanese electronics or Indian software engineers. As I write this, a Western woman wearing a salwar kameez and dupatta sits down nearby and starts speaking fluent Thai.
Iyer visits several countries, one province (Bali), and one colony (Hong Kong) soon to be eaten by its rightful owner. In each he addresses a particular theme: Bali (spoliation of a once idyllic island), Tibet (masochism of travelers in search of Shangri-La), Nepal (hippie-haven becoming trekker-tractor-beam), China (xenophobia then and now), the Philippines (exuberant music and ghastly poverty), Burma (social Rip Van Winklism), Hong Kong (the vapidity of expatriate life), India (lights! camera! action!), Japan (Japanese baseball as metaphor for Japanese Westernization), and Thailand (take a wild guess).
Yes, alas, in Thailand Iyer addresses virtually nothing but bars and bar girls - a fact for which he has lately, in a review of John Burdett’s sordid novel Bangkok 8, shown repentance. But his past obsession is hardly surprising, given that he followed the usual tourist’s circuit: Bangkok, Chiang Mai, trek. But he seems helpless to avert his jaundiced eyes from the capital city, and all but a few paragraphs of his 30-page essay are dedicated to it. “Thailand offered a good deal more, of course, than just the sex trade,” writes Iyer. Three paragraphs more, to be exact. He saw “almost no sightseers, no scholars, no hippies from Oregon or honeymooning couples from Manhattan”. In other words, he did not see Sukhothai, a university, Pai, or Phuket.
As a teetotaler and seeming prude, he is “outraged” by the City of Sin - a common enough reaction, initially. But eventually he undergoes the usual cardiac flip-flop: “So why find shame in enjoyment,” he asks, “and why take enjoyment in shame?” Why indeed. But perhaps it might be better to ask: Why identify a 700-year-old country of 60 million people with a few girls Iyer met on Soi Cowboy?
To be fair, Iyer is guilty of crimes common to all travel writers, myself included - namely, ignorance and presumption. They can observe and record, but they generalize at their peril. And even appearances can sometimes be misleading. Consider Iyer’s slant on Burma. He seems to confuse the country’s leadership - which has ruthlessly kept its people ignorant, scared, and poor - and its people, who (if the nullified results of the 1990 elections are to be believed) are quite fed up with their leadership.
“Burma is the dotty eccentric of Asia,” he writes, “the queer maiden aunt who lives alone and whom the maid has forgotten to visit.” This is but one example of Iyer’s purple passages getting the better of his perceptions. Burma, he says happily, “was content to mind its own business and go its own way.” Burma was “at peace.” So, in a similar sense, was Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, which also prevented tourists from visiting unsightly labor camps, imprisoned dissidents, war zones. Fortunately, a diplomat finally strips Iyer of his saffron-colored glasses, his celebration of “cultural innocence and integrity”, and by the essay’s end Iyer concedes that Burma is dying a “slow and terrible death”.
Iyer’s optimism distinguishes him from other popular travel writers, from the perennially truculent Paul Theroux, to the thoroughly humorless V.S. Naipaul. He is willing to portray people as ridiculous, but seldom as stupid or evil. His laughter comes at humanity’s, and not any individual’s expense. But sometimes his attempts at levity fall flat (as in his description of Orwellian Burma as a “queer maiden aunt”.) Calling tourists collectively Homo touristicus is another example, as is saying that “Kathmandu seemed a Shantih-town” (shantih being his transliteration of the Sanskrit word for peace.) At one point he even mentions the “fast-and-Luce rhetoric” of India Today, a Time lookalike, and I doubt whether most readers will know that he is referring to Henry Luce, the latter magazine’s founder, a fanatic son of missionaries who sought the wholesale conversion of China to Christianity.
But if sometimes Iyer is too clever by half, his eye for the telling detail or the mot juste is extraordinary. He notes that Thai hookers commonly - poignantly - adorn their rooms with “three-foot-tall stuffed animals, with cartoony faces and silly smiles”, and that many of them lie to their parents about their occupations, a contrite pragmatism for which they seldom get any credit. Though describing China, Iyer could be describing any country subjected to the inhuman urban planning of Communism when he writes: “In front of me in the bright afternoon was a vast square, ringed by giant billboards and graying skyscrapers. Beside me, extending for block after block after gray, gray block, was the main body of the station….All around was vastness and great vacancy.” To convey the common pathos of Asians trying to impress Westerners with their stylishness, he shows Chinese youth screaming “Disco!” and “Break dance!” at him while “turning themselves into human spaghetti”; and Filipinos singing, with John Denver, about going home to West Virginia and their mountain mamas. (Thais do this too.) Singapore? “McCity,” says Iyer. And he correctly identifies “the sound track of Indian life” as “the shrill, squeaky lilt of a woman’s voice delivering movie songs”.
In a veritable paroxysm of clichi, a critic for the New York Times has apparently called Iyer’s book a “magical mystery tour through the brave new world of Asia.” But I wonder how magical, mysterious, or indeed new this Asia is. Hindi films have been around for decades, as have Chinese xenophobia, ruined Bali, poor Burma, Thai brothels, and Hong Kong Brits sipping gin and disparaging their (increasingly Filipino) maids. East-West cross-pollination is older than Pico Iyer. It is older than Marco Polo. And how old it is all depends upon what you mean by East and West.
The Greek Herodotus wrote about India in the 5th century BC. Okay, so he said that the semen of Indians was black and that they were plagued by ants “bigger than foxes”, but he also noted their distaste for killing animals and their preference for solitary deaths in the wilderness - traditionally, the last stage of an orthodox Hindu’s life. Iyer implies that Thais are licentious (”‘Everyone makes love,’ cooed sweet-smiling Nitya”) and he writes that the “Burmese seemed an uncommonly jolly and guileless people, not veiled or stealthy as other Southeast Asians could be”. In such statements it is easy to recognize a similar mixture of half-truth and Orientalism (”veiled”, “stealthy”) that prompted Herodotus to say that all Indians “mate together in the open like the brute beasts” or that none of them “has the least concern for the sick or the dead.”
Where the ‘twain too often meet is in mutual misunderstanding. But one must take what understanding one can get, and there are far worse guides through our globalized inferno than Pico Iyer - polyglot, polymath, occasional Polyanna.
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Review of Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East, Vintage Departures, 1989.
Books by Pico Iyer
By Kenneth Champeon
April 27th, 2006
Indonesia uses more fuel than it produces, which is a shame for an oil rich country. Indonesians are heavily dependent on diesel, petrol and kerosene for cooking. The recent world price rises in oil put pressure on the Indonesian government, as they had to import expensive oil, and subsidize people for using it.
Petrol prices doubled a while ago and people dealt with it. Now the government plans to restrict petrol use, in public and private vehicles,to save further money. It will be interesting to see how the government goes about implementing the petrol restrictions. Maybe we can revert back to a system like in Europe after the war, when you had to have ration vouchers, as well as the cash. Indonesia will then truly become a nation going in reverse.
April 27th, 2006