I am disgusted.
We arrived in Bangkok early yesterday morning, and have spent the last 24 hours moving from air-conditioned car to air-conditioned hotel to air-conditioned sky train to air-conditioned shopping malls. I could be in Singapore. Really, everything is exactly the same here as it is there -- full of Western-branded stores. Mango, the Body Shop, BeBe, KFC, McDonald's, Boots drugstores. My god... what have we done to the world? We all worship at the altar of modernization, which really means commercialization. Shopping malls and hotels are where people meet, hang out, eat, see movies, go clubbing. It's all so generic and sterile.
This was one of the amazing surprises of India. It seems to have escaped being flattened by the bulldozer of "globalization."
The women still dress in fantastically colorful saris and wear their hair in a single long braid down their backs. For real -- not for show, not to earn more money as they sell their wares to Westerners in markets -- but as everday attire. Almost all the cars on Indian roads are Indian, similar to classic UK taxi-style vehicles. We saw only one Pizza Hut in Agra, no other American fast food chains anywhere. Even the brands sold at the stores were almost entirely local, except for the ubiquitous bottles of Coke and Pepsi. In fact, it cracked us up that the one American product we could regularly find were Kit Kat bars. And of course there's the Bollywood phenomenon: No Western films! Kids who don't know who Tom Cruise is. Just imagine that!
Well, at least until we arrived in Mumbai (Bombay), that is. There, it is clear that the Borgification of India has already begun to take hold... A chain of Starbucks-like coffee shops called Barista. Pizza Huts, KFCs, and even McDonald's (though it has carefully altered it's menu to consist almost entirely of chicken and fish with one mutton burger, since Indians don't eat beef.) Treadmills lined up against a window of an upscale gym. Women dressed in jeans with stylish tops and hair cut into fashionable bobs. SUVs cruising through the streets still crowded with pushcarts and auto rickshaws and the occassional cow.
Where do we go from here? What will we do when the world is really one big air-conditioned shopping mall selling all the same products? When we all eat the same food, see the same movies, and listen to the same music? Visiting places like Paris and San Francisco will be like going to Disneyland.
Or perhaps we'll fight back. Perhaps we already are. Groups in the US and Europe have certainly made strides in protecting historic neighborhoods. UNESCO establishes World Heritage Sites such as the picturesque town of Lijiang in China (which we visited in 2000), and the perfectly-preserved Medieval walled city of Urbino in Northern Italy. I just read in the Bangkok paper this morning that the government had proposed levelling the entire old quarter of town in order to replace it with modern high rises. But the citizens are fighting back, blocking the initiative. The article mocked the current Prime Minister/CEO's "grand vision of the New Perfect Thailand." Maybe there's hope.
Are you and yours okay? Word of the 8.9 magnitude Earthquake just hit the US, 800 miles from Bangkok, with thousands reprted dead, 200 in Thailand.
Posted by: BobR | December 26, 2004 at 07:14 AM
Happy Birthday Little Brother! We love you! Come home!!!
Posted by: Donna Grabert | December 24, 2004 at 10:52 AM