Video Night in Kathmandu (2010)
“The Cold War had everyone thinking in binary terms, and for many people much of Asia still seemed as distant, as exotic, as Shangri-La. Thailand had yet to go global—pad thai and panang curry were hardly known outside of Southeast Asia—and as for Tibet, it seemed no closer to most of us than a scratchy old copy of Lost Horizon. China had scarcely emerged from behind its historic walls, and Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam were all more or less forbidden lands. To the young in those places, California wa...s at best an image glimpsed occasionally on screen.
Now, of course, all that has changed, and many cultures seem to have gone from isolation to connectedness in what feels like days. The remotest points now—Luang Prabang, or Ulan Bator—are just a click away from anywhere, and East and West are almost obsolete terms, when they are not irrelevant ones. I often think that I was lucky to get to see Asia at a time when the process had only just begun to accelerate, and young travelers who were contemporaries of the jumbo jet and the small screen were first beginning to visit the places that their parents had only dreamed of (and that had only dreamed of them).MoreLess
Now, of course, all that has changed, and many cultures seem to have gone from isolation to connectedness in what feels like days. The remotest points now—Luang Prabang, or Ulan Bator—are just a click away from anywhere, and East and West are almost obsolete terms, when they are not irrelevant ones. I often think that I was lucky to get to see Asia at a time when the process had only just begun to accelerate, and young travelers who were contemporaries of the jumbo jet and the small screen were first beginning to visit the places that their parents had only dreamed of (and that had only dreamed of them).MoreLess
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