Holiday You?: Random Notes on Cross-Pollinization

(Darin is reporting on his travels in India and Tibet)

Random Notes on Cross-Pollinization
Holiday You?

We're in Dharamsala/McLeod Ganj right now. The area defined by these two towns is renowned as the home of the Tibetan govt. in exile. Back in 1959, after years of increasing repression of Tibetans and pressure on their leaders, the Dalai Lama had to flee for his life. The government of India offered Dharamsala as a place of asylum. (Tibet History) It's refreshing to stay among the less hectic Tibetans. They've created a small, mountain oasis of Buddhist restraint amid Indian boisterousness. One shortcoming about the setting, though: Dharamsala sits at about 6000 ft. on a ridge at the southern edge of the Himalayas. During July and August, the Indian monsoon bumps up against the mountains and the clouds pour rain down incessantly. I read in the paper that this area received 1450mm (~58 inches) in July alone. That's almost double San Francisco's annual rainfall. Very damp....and I have the nasty cold to prove it. I noticed today that much of our gear is starting to mold. It's time to move on....

Both the native and traveler populations have adapted well to the inclement weather here in Dharamsala. There are lots of activities to do indoors out of the rain. They have meditation and yoga classes, lots of restaurants, internet cafes and movie houses, among others. For the first time since we left San Francisco, we've jumped into movie watching since it's A) cheap [about $.70 a movie] and B) dry inside the theaters. By theater, I mean a small, ramshackle room that will seat about 20 or 30 people with the movie shown on a wide screen TV. We've focused more on Tibetan documentaries since we're going there in a few months and these films are a good source of information. However, since the subject matter of these films, reflecting actual Tibetan events, is unfailingly sad, we see the odd Hollywood flick, as well. The moguls in Los Angeles would be disappointed to know that we can watch the same films you do within days of their US release. I'd heard about the practice for some time, but Dharamsala is the first place I've seen the end result. Someone out there in "first-release land" (the US) uses a video camera inside a theater to illicitly record the movie as it's shown. They then load the pirated film onto a computer and put it on the Internet for other people to download and burn into a DVD. Somehow it feels appropriate that the first film we saw that was an obvious copy was the new"Pirates of the Caribbean". We could tell it was pirated because the dialogue was out of synch and the sound and image quality, generally, were terrible. The clear give away were the sub-titles (English, in this case, for those in the audience who didn't understand 'pirate talk'). A non-English speaker sitting at a PC must have quickly slapped up whatever dialogue seemed to "sound right" as a "translation" and the results were often funnier than the film. Example: Something like, "I don't know where he is." became the sub-title, "It's wireless." Silly.

To Read the Rest of the Post