A victim of itself...

Kathmandu is a perplexing city, mystifyingly ancient and yet obviously wracked by adolescent growing pains. Pale Buddhist stupas and intricate Hindu temples lurk and loom in every neighbourhood, having survived centuries of South Asia’s famed mix of war, privation, religious upheaval, relentless monsoon weather, arbitrary seismic spitefulness, and a mercilessly thriving tourist trade that (I presume) predates outsized Americans in Tilly hats and cargo pants. Kingdoms have blossomed and withered here with stubborn regularity since before Gautama Buddha went for his long walk, and empires have washed over Nepal like tides, for longer than words have existed to record them. Every iota of this history and prehistory has left marks, and the occasional ugly stain.

But Kathmandu’s most belligerently obvious trait is its unmistakable newness. Nepal’s unsettling rate of population growth and textbook developing-world economic superurbanization have bloated this town far beyond its healthy size, a process greatly accelerated by ten years of moderate-intensity civil war that drove the capable and the fearful to the shelter of the capital. Planning was negligible, pollution controls nonexistent, and the city has a people-to-stoplight ratio somewhere (literally) in excess of a million to one. So now Kathmandu marinates in pollution far greater than wind and rain can alleviate, with demands on the water, electrical, road and sewage infrastructure three times what they were designed (I use the term loosely) to handle. The results are (here’s that peculiar Nepalese poetic incongruity again) both utterly predictable and completely flabbergasting. The street traffic is an extraordinary pandemonium that defeats my capacity for hyperbole. In most districts of the city, the power fails for (a meticulously scheduled) 35+ hours per week, anticipated to leap to 90+ by early December. Odours of genuinely demonic provenance occasionally waft up from… nowhere in particular. Kathmandu is struggling, and thus far failing, to deal with its own explosive growth, and one result among many is that there are a great many conundra here with which someone like me can busy himself.

This will be an interesting year.