The ancient city is landscaped by some wonderful brushstrokes. The pre-rainy season has already colored the trees and groves greener and fresher. The mountains and forest patches look shining and sparkling. By saying this, we are also aware that there is abundance of human efforts to make the city one of the ugliest of South Asian urban spaces. The lanes have obnoxious smell from garbage and vaporizing brooklets, multidirectional noises mock the sleeping babies at homes, and entertainment hubs at night beat the drums on the heads of resting families. There is no respite either in day or in night to ponder over the exquisite locations of the city. There still are horizons rising high to decorate the city with mountains and greenery. Kathmandu is a piece of painting which still wonderfully depicts natural scenes. The major element of the city is mountainscape. Stand by the temples on the banks of the black and murky rivers and look into the direction of Kirtipur, look at Nagarjun hills from the Gongabu bus park, measure the soaring mountain heights in the south west from any Patan home, you still wonder about the brilliant landscaping of the city. The great landscape, however, is frequently obstructed by concrete buildings, perpetual construction zones, vehicles, and crowd. One of the most horrible sites is the thick waters of the inner rivers and brooklets. What do you do with such a contrast? We cannot deurbanize the city and there is no point in imagining any such reversal. The only possible thing which we can do is to organize and negotiate the nature with cultural insights. Since we have done least for nature herself, and have no plans and interest to keep nature as it is, we at least can keep nature for ourselves. We have no other choice to keep nature but from the location of culture. We have tampered so much with nature that we have lost the power to think bio-centrically. We cannot think but through anthropocentric mindsets: We gurgle and vomit our views of nature. Kathmandu as a space of humans is an epitome of such aestheticides. I accept our cultural limitations to gaze nature from our points of view. To urbanize the city with human minds and developmental machines we have demolished the inner-city woodlands, rivers, trees, and any green spots. There still are locations, the dying ones, which are helplessly procrastinating human acts of annihilation. The valley still seems to be landscaped by wonderfully artistic brushstrokes, but the colors are fading, the contrast is gone, the lines are blurred, the texture is lost, the tonality is disappearing, curves are straightened.
A Native American once remarked that for the westerners all nature is dumb. Rather, we all see nature dumb. Since nature is non-human, she is an unthinking object, beautiful but dependent on us. Someone said we at least garden our homes, put flower pots around, and decorate her in whatever ways we can. Someone then laughed at the gardener and said that you have ruined her so much for so long that now you are shamelessly buying earthen pots made out of belching factories and making drawing-room-sense of the vast empire of nature. Kathmandu is losing her sense of being a valley. The valley is now the other of the city, the city does not belong to the valley. The city has systematically exterminated the limbs of the ancient space: First the caves and caverns, swamps and marshes, then precious rivers and brooks, then the grooves, then the trees and its inhabitants, the water sprouts, the mounds, and tiny patches of bottomlands. There is a dialectical tension between nature and culture and hence between the valley and the city. Dialectical because which is true of the location called Kathmandu— the city or the valley? Which one is dominant? Is it the city or is it the valley? These two spaces are no more reconciled into an ideal called Kathmandu valley. The one dominates the other and hence the relationship is uneven; the culture dominates the nature. The city dominates the valley: the two terms are not the metaphors of the other. Hence in this dialectical tension to find the truth of the valley, the valley is alienated. The valley still seems to be landscaped by wonderfully artistic brushstrokes, but the colors are fading, the contrast is gone, the lines are blurred, the texture is lost, the tonality is disappearing, curves are straightened. I wonder how young artists like Sujan and Chirag will still be able to catch the silver rain drops and hold the brushes to hold the wonders of the valley! The city is pushed to its limits and that is why the terminological significance of the valley is becoming meaningless. The geographical term is weak: The word is losing its semantic nuances. By the generosity of the poets and artists, the valley is still beautiful. A school kid still sees the valley beautiful and she paints a colorful picture of Kathmandu. She is happy and innocent that is why she sees the valley, or better yet, she is a fool who represents the essence of the valley but not the valley as it is! The teacher should punish her for not being realistic. She landscapes the valley with her imagination and when she grows up, she will find herself distraught by her own landscaping.
ARUN GUPTO