Kathmandu Conundrum

Sat, May 10 12:50 AM

For most of the 1980s, and for part of the 1990s too I would imagine, Kathmandu was the place to go to - at least if you lived in Calcutta. The Calcutta non-Marwari elite (the rich Marwaris went to London even then) treated Kathmandu as an exotic foreign destination, full of classy hotels, fancy restaurants, imported cars, glamorous casinos, and a swinging local jet-set.

You could buy foreign goods at a time when they were all unavailable in India and at many Calcutta dinners you would be served such gourmet foods of that era as cubes of Kraft cheese and Mars bars, all procured during your hosts' last visit to the Nepalese capital. It was a crisis that first took me to Kathmandu in 1989.

The government of India was fighting with the Nepalese king, and had barricaded many entry points to Nepal. As the country is landlocked, even smugglers were dependant on Indian routes.

And with only one entry point open, Kathmandu was desperately short of everything. So I didn't quite get to see the foreign-goods-filled Kathmandu my Bengali friends had raved about.

The city was running out of petrol. Shops had bare shelves.

The roads were empty. And anti-Indian feeling was in the air.

But I did not miss the Indian tourists and their lust for 'phoren'. In 1989, hippie Kathmandu was fading but there was enough of it still around to remind you of the 1960s.

I discovered Thamel, a network of small lanes, full of hippies and backpackers where the restaurants served strange Western food (banana pancakes and buffalo steaks) and played old rock tapes. At every street corner, somebody would peddle hash though, alas, as a non-smoker, this was of little use to me.

And non-Indian Kathmandu seemed peaceful and charming. There were Korean barbecue places.

Japanese restaurants built around open-air lotus ponds and Austrian delicatessens. It was certainly more international than any Indian city seemed at the time.

The 'aesthetic' decline I went back to Kathmandu twice after that, each time in the midst of some crisis (an annual occurrence in modern Nepal) and every trip demonstrated how much the city was changing. The Nepalese government was throwing the hippies out.

Low-budget Indian tourists (from Delhi now, rather than Calcutta) were arriving by the planeload; the Japanese and Korean restaurants were closing; at every street corner, you could hear singers belting out dodgy versions of Hindi film songs from newly-opened Indian restaurants. The casinos - never my favourite part of Kathmandu - seemed to epitomise the worst aspects of the Indian nouveau riche: sweaty, ugly places packed with fat men clutching wads of rupees.

It hardly mattered though. Nepal was lurching from crisis to crisis anyway, and the aesthetic decline of Kathmandu was the least of the country's problems.

Little Janpath in Thamel Back there this week to write about the current Nepal crisis, I was struck by how the Kathmandu of the 1980s had now almost disappeared. The shops of New Road, so favoured by Bengalis hunting for foreign goods, had gone 'upmarket' so that they were no longer little shacks with colourful doors but big tube-lit emporia straight out of any north Indian small town.

Thamel was more or less hippie-less, full of shops selling Janpath-type merchandise. The traffic was unbearable largely because of the number of commercial vehicles.

I always use the nature of traffic jams as an indication of a city's wealth. At a jam in Delhi, three-fourths of the vehicles will be private cars.

In Calcutta, over half will be trucks, tempos, taxis, vans etc. In Kathmandu, 80 per cent of the traffic will be commercial vehicles.

Only 20 per cent will be private cars. Nepal has always been poor (the Bengali perception of Kathmandu's glamour notwithstanding) but driving around the city I had a sense that India's economic miracle of the last decade has passed its nearest neighbour by.

There are rich people in Kathmandu, but the city seems both poor and run-down. IC-814, redux? But here's the thing: flights and hotels are full.

Nepalese authorities report that tourism from India is down by 20 per cent but you wouldn't think it judging by the packed flights. Plus, Kathmandu has become a conference destination for Europeans.

At the hotel where I stayed, a convention of German doctors had taken over the place. And Dhaka - which you could argue is now where Calcutta was 20 years ago - has discovered Kathmandu.

Arrivals from Bangladesh are up by 60 per cent and you can hear Bengali (of a different kind perhaps) on the streets again. But I have to say I'm looking forward to going back.

Partly of course it's the continuing thrill of the Nepal story. But it's also because, despite all the changes, I still have enormous affection for Kathmandu.

And the Nepalese are a friendly, likeable people. Sadly, with the country in the grips of a crisis, nobody worries about the rule of law.

At Kathmandu International Airport, the security check consisted of one cop who waved all the foreigners ahead but stopped every Indian. He asked us to open our wallets and if he found any Rs 500 or Rs 1,000 notes (which you can't take out of India), he asked for a bribe, failing which he would confiscate the notes.

He did this in full public view and nobody dared complain for fear of being detained. I don't mind that the Nepalese police are crooks.

It's the attitude to security that worries me. A corrupt security man will happily take bribes to let terrorists on to planes.

Remember: it is this crowd that allowed IC-814 to be hijacked. And frankly, judging by their attitude, it could well happen again.

So perhaps my next Urban Gypsy will be filed from Kandahar.

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