Changes

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Kathmandu is changing. The first few weeks of my stay the city seemed to stay the same, but now some transformations are taking place. First, it has stopped raining regularly, signaling the end of the monsoon season. More people are out on the streets, and the weather is slowly becoming cooler. The end of the monsoon also brings the start of tourist season; the streets of Thamel are now packed with dred-locked, tie-dyed travelers, and Gore-Tex performance clad trekkers. Some of the billboards around town have changed, and there are new movie posters up around town. A couple of upcoming Nepali movies: ‘Mero euta saathi chha’ (my only friend), and ‘The Gorkha Protector’ (a martial arts movie). One of my friends did the English voice-overs for ‘The Gorkha Protector’.

Kathmandu is also preparing for its huge annual festival of Dashain. An internet search will give you all of the academic information about Dashain: it lasts for 15 days, it stems from a mythic battle in the Ramayana when good triumphed over evil, it involves family rituals and animal sacrifices, etc. What it means for the city is that for a week people frantically shop for gifts, similar to Christmas in the States, and all of the markets are packed silly with Dashain shoppers. Advertisements for Dashain specials and discounts abound—clothes prices go down, but prices for everything else are way up. Nepali employees are given an extra month’s salary for Dashain, but still people go into debt over the festivities. Family patriarchs traditionally give each member of the family a new outfit, people need to buy goats to sacrifice (and eat afterwards), families need to make hundreds of the traditional butter-lamp candles, and people need to travel back to their traditional homes in villages scattered throughout the country. This builds to a frenzy until the holiday starts, and then public spaces mellow out—people stay at home to celebrate with family, and many are with their families outside of Kathmandu. Again, just like Christmas in the States. I have been invited to celebrate Dashain with some musicians in their home village between Kathmandu and Pokhara, and I’m excited to be able to experience this holiday with Nepalis who know what they’re doing.

In the past few days I’ve collected some more research for my project; on Wednesday after I posted the previous entry I attended a professional Nepal culture show. It was held at the auditorium in the Russian Culture Center, and it featured songs and dances from many different parts of Nepal, performed by professional musicians and dancers. It started with about an hour of speeches describing how important culture is to Nepal, and how important music and dance are to culture. I didn’t understand most of the words (though I did catch some of them!), but I made an audio recording of the whole show. The dances were fantastic—very high-spirited, athletic, and exciting. The dances illustrated different stories; one was about pumping up Gurkha soldiers before battle with the British, one was about a group of guys trying to connect with a group of girls (there were actually a few on that particular subject…), and a few were specific to the Dashain season. Between dance numbers were instrumental and vocal songs: regular rhythms with roll-off transitions, elaborate folk melodies with lots of ornamentations, the occasional bamboo flute fill, and all with excellent combined effect. The show, much like the grade school culture show, was wildly popular, and lasted for 3 hours. The experience and the material from the speeches will be great for illustrating the place of traditional Nepali culture within present-day Kathmandu. At the event I also met a Nepali film actor: Sunil Thapa.

Directly after the culture show I went back to the grade school that hosted the festival last Saturday. It was the last night for a very nice French girl who had been helping out at the school, and I was invited to help commemorate the event. The celebration was held at the hostel, run by the school, for orphans and students who come from far away, and the sun had already gone down when I arrived. I met some very nice Nepali guys who are about my age, talked at length with the students, the principal, and his wife, played some music, danced, taught a little salsa dance to the students, and generally had a great time. I got to speak for quite a while with the school principal, so I asked him some questions related to my project. He runs a small private school of about 300-500 students, grades 1-10. His school is very young, and he is not satisfied with its current facilities. Being so young, it hasn’t established any kind of reputation for itself, so he can’t be picky about the students he accepts. Being so small, it doesn’t earn very much money, so he can’t afford to hire the best, most established teachers, either. Naturally the principal is very worried about the upcoming SLC government tests. The school teaches government curriculum, but it is an English-medium school, making it more desirable than Nepali-medium government schools. In all my private school interviews so far I’ve heard only bad things about government schools—they don’t have enough money for anything, they teach in Nepali, the teachers don’t work hard, etc. I am now very interested in visiting a government school. When asked about music, the answer was fairly predictable: “we can’t afford to hire a regular part-time music teacher.” He told me that sometimes before parents’ day he’ll hire a teacher to come in for a month to teach the kids songs for a program, but he can only hire new and unknown music teachers—well-known established ones are too expensive. Students at this school generally need to learn music elsewhere. This does happen, however—the students at the hostel all knew a repertoire of Nepali folk tunes and dances (they sang and danced and had a great time while I was there), and the guys my age told me that they knew the same songs and dances when they were young. I’m getting closer and closer to identifying this group of national songs that everybody seems to know—similar to the National Anthem, America, America the Beautiful, God Bless America, Oh Susanna, Home on the Range, etc. in the US. So far the Nepali ones I know are Resham Firiri and Fulko Aka-ma. The students at the hostel learned informally from older students during free time after school, and from volunteers and chaperones. Aside from the Nepali dances, we listened and danced to Hindi movie tunes. The principal told me also that there is an Education Board that oversees the operation of all the schools in Kathmandu, public and private, and has the power to shut schools down when they don’t meet certain criteria. He wasn’t clear about what the criteria are, but I’ll be able to ask again in the future. He advertises his school locally (in the neighborhood), but he can’t put out a city-wide ad because it’s expensive, and because he can’t provide services for kids across town (like buses). During my visit to the school and hostel the principal and his wife were the only administrators that I was ever aware of—they seemingly oversee the all of the school’s operations by themselves, and they live in the hostel and take care of the hostel kids all by themselves. Despite all of the challenges of such an enormous job, he and his wife were models of kindness and hospitality, and his students were incredibly friendly and well-adjusted—evidence of excellent people-skills and attitude education. After the fun, games, and interviews, the sad, teary-eyed goodbye speeches commenced, and lasted for over an hour. The goodbyes lasted until after midnight, and we adults didn’t eat dinner until about 12:30, at which time I had a heaping plate of daal bhat, tea, meat chunks, and some syrupy sweet balls. By this time it was understood that I would stay the night in the hostel, so I spent the next few hours talking to the French girl and a Nepali friend of the school. Upon waking the next morning I went back to my apartment and made plans to visit the school again.

On Friday I went to another classical music concert with my tabla teacher. This one was at Patan Dhoka, and featured a singer and a bamboo flute player. My tabla teacher accompanied the bamboo flute player. I’m really starting to become an Eastern classical music aficionado—I can now identify the parts of the raag, the beat cycle (tala), and sometimes the raag scale that’s being played. I look forward to many future classical music concerts, and to widening my understanding of the classical system.

Friday after the concert I rushed to the Lazimpat Gallery Café to play the final half-hour of a gig with my guitar friend. Most of my friends were there—Gallery Café gigs inevitably turn into parties. Saturday night my guitar friend and I played a more serious gig at a place called Comfort Zone in Thamel. It’s a rooftop restaurant and bar that serves authentic Korean food. For the first time I had a microphone all to myself. Unfortunately the place didn’t fill up like we would have hoped, but a few of my friends and fellow Fulbrighters came out to watch. Hopefully this will turn into a regular gig. I also met a Korean girl who’s interested in taking clarinet lessons. She still needs to buy a clarinet here, and reeds, and that may be more difficult than she thinks.

Kathmandu hosted the South Asian Documentary Film Festival this weekend, showing 3 days full of local documentaries on two different screens. Tickets were very cheap, and it turned into a wildly popular and successful event (in my opinion). I watched four different documentaries: One about Bangladeshi shipbreakers, one about the Bhutanese refugees in Nepal, one about a film-maker in the Indian town of Malegaon making a spoof of Superman, and one about the situation of Nepali laborers in the Arabian Gulf nations. The Nepali laborers documentary was the best, in my opinion, and was so popular that it was screened twice. Called “In Search of Riyal,” it began with Nepalis in Kathmandu preparing for their time abroad, followed them to Qatar, described effects of the situation both in Nepal and abroad, worries, problems, things that go right, what families have to go through, some motivations for going abroad, opinions from Nepalis who have been abroad, are currently abroad, want to go abroad, etc. It was in the making for about 2 years, and the filmmakers captured over 180 hours of footage. A close second was the Malegaon Superman documentary, I believed called “The Supermen of Malegaon,” an excellent film that combined the seriousness of the poor living situation of people in the town with the comedy of making a Hollywood spoof.

In between all of these activities I’ve gotten sick, called the internet office about 5 times to fix a problem, eaten at bakeries, walked around the city, practiced Nepali, met friends in the street, welcomed new Fulbrighters, and, perpetually, practiced my new instruments. ‘Ta’ and ‘tin’ are my current tabla challenges.

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