Noopur Raval is a student of Masters in Arts & Aesthetics, JNU, a photographer, blogger and interesting character! In her first post she writes about her favorite travel read – Video Night In Kathmandu by Pico Iyer, on HappyReading Blog:

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If I were traveling and wanted to read a book along and not get depressed as I moved and be able to put that book/travelogue’s perspective onto my own travels, which book would I pick? This is the question I would ask myself over and over, ending up carrying a Naipaul or Theroux or worse Dalrymple. Worse not because I don’t enjoy Dalrymple, but a book like ‘The last Mughal’ will knit you into its own, not a parallel trajectory to the travel. Same with Naipaul, spanning across the subcontinent and further, the observations so critical, they take the joy out of my travels. But, who then? Well, call that my glass ceiling, but I found a perfect travel partner in Pico Iyer. Many would agree, its a good start. My first book was ‘Video night in Kathmandu’. Dealing with academic writing mostly, I had read Iyer’s essay ‘Why we travel’. It seemed modest and reinforced the thrill of travel as a physical/outward journey and an equally inward process. From hereon, to those who know not, I will briefly touch upon Iyer and this particular book. Not only has Iyer been associated with names like Harper’s, Eton, Oxford and Harvard, he is also as widely traveled, from North Korea to Easter Island, Paraguay to Ethiopia. He settled in Japan for a while and wrote his third book there. This is just the background to a very fresh, contemporary travelogue that translates into ‘Video night in Kathmandu’. This book takes you across a landscape made fairly familiar by the media, from Bali, Tibet, Nepal, China, to the Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, India, Thailand, and Japan. What hooked me was his chapter on Mcdonalds, moving on to King Kong, the film, as consumed by South East Asian population and the widespread impact of tourism on these countries that has led to certain caricatured, ironic images of the natives as well as the Western traveler who enthusiastically reinvents the wheel (by re-conquering these lands over and over). Also, his accounts of China and its bling culture, in transit, generates a few quirky laughs. I won’t say more, because to say means not to read while traveling.
This is my perfect book to carry on a fifteen day journey. I started seeing paralled to the McDonald culture as I moved from one town to another, munching on falafels and drinking peach iced tea from Gokarna to Hampi and Goa to Pushkar.

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HappyReading Team
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