Off the Record 047: The aesthetics of excess
Issue 047 • 01 April 2022
It’s April 1, 2022, and you’re reading Off the Record, the weekly newsletter from The Record. We are an independent, ad-free, digital news publication out of Kathmandu, Nepal.
I’m Pranaya Rana, editor of The Record, and in this newsletter, we’ll stop, take a deep breath, and dive into one singular issue that defined the past week.
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Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening from April fool’s Kathmandu. Even the weather in Kathmandu appears to be playing a joke on us. Air pollution has turned what was supposed to be a bright, sunny time into dreary grey days of overcast skies. This past week, the pollution in Kathmandu reached unhealthy levels with the air quality index (AQI) well above 100, landing the city once again on the list of most polluted cities in the world. Unfortunately, air quality has been this way for most of March. The increased amounts of smoke, haze, and particulate matter in the air have been attributed to a dry spring with little rainfall or heavy winds, along with increased pollution from vehicles, brick kilns, and burning of garbage.
Unfortunately, meteorologists warn that the worst is yet to come. Pollution has not yet reached hazardous levels, despite the quantity of PM2.5 in the air being 10 times above the World Health Organization’s air quality guidelines. Meteorologists say that air quality will likely get worse in the days to come as farmers begin burning crop residue. The best bet for us Valley residents is to stay inside with the windows closed and wear a mask whenever venturing outdoors.
Speaking of air, many had hoped that Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi would clear the air, so to speak, during his time in Kathmandu, especially regarding China’s misgivings on the United States-led Millenium Challenge Corporation (MCC). Wang wrapped up his three-day visit to Kathmandu on Sunday with not much to show. Sure, agreements were signed and courtesy calls paid. There was reportedly much talk about the Belt and Road Initiative but none, surprisingly, about the MCC. It appears that the Chinese have decided to pointedly ignore the US and the MCC for the moment and focus on enhancing their own footprint here.
This was most evident in the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s statement after Wang’s meeting with his counterpart, Narayan Khadka. The Chinese have a penchant for literary allusions and symbolic language and true to form, Wang expounded on China’s ‘three supports’ for Nepal:
China supports Nepal in blazing a development path suited to its national conditions.
China supports Nepal in pursuing independent domestic and foreign policies.
China supports Nepal in participating in Belt and Road cooperation to a greater extent.
The second ‘support’ further elaborates:
China always holds that all countries, big or small, are equal, and always respects the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all countries. China believes that the affairs of Nepal should be decided by the Nepali people themselves. China opposes attempts to undermine Nepal's sovereignty and independence, interfere in Nepal's internal affairs, and play geopolitical games in Nepal.
This is clearly meant as a jab towards the Americans and the MCC and also as a reinstatement of Nepal’s own adherence to the ‘One China’ policy, something that Nepali officials never forget to mention in statements and that Chinese media never omit in their own reporting. Indeed, a press release from Nepal’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs after the meeting between Wang and Khadka stated:
Foreign Minister Hon. Dr. Khadka reiterated Nepal’s commitment to One China policy and not to allow any activity against China in Nepali territory. Both sides reaffirmed their support for sovereignty, territorial integrity, and national independence of each other.
Territorial integrity. That is what is most important to China, as it encompasses and reiterates the Chinese claim to Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The Chinese insistence on this shows that Tibet continues to be a primary issue of concern to the Chinese and will perhaps always remain so.
Besides these formal declarations, Wang also signed nine agreements on a variety of issues, including technical assistance for a feasibility study for the Nepal-China cross-border railway, another feasibility study for a cross-border power grid connection, and more Covid-19 vaccines. The railway feasibility study is the only agreement that is linked to the nine projects Nepal has identified for financing under the Belt and Road Initiative and that too, is just technical assistance, not sole financing of the study by China. For all of the reporting on how Wang stressed the importance of the BRI, there appears to have been no movement at all on taking those nine projects forward.
It looks like Wang was in Kathmandu to read the room and get a sense of where Nepal stood vis-a-vis China and the United States. His meetings with Pushpa Kamal Dahal and KP Sharma Oli both underscore the importance that China still attributes to Nepal’s communist parties, despite its repeated insistence on ‘democracy’ in its official statements. Aneka Rajbhandari pointed out in Nepali Times that Wang told Oli that he was an “old friend to the Chinese people”, underscoring the importance that Oli holds in Chinese minds, perhaps signaling that Dahal’s position as closest to China has now been usurped by Oli.
My own assessment of Wang’s visit is that it was boilerplate. Nothing much to see and not much to read between the lines. It was certainly symbolic but that’s about it really. I know that many journalists and ‘experts’ see much more here but I don’t know if that’s just wishful thinking or self-delusion. Whispers in corridors don’t necessarily translate into foreign policy concerns. Then again, I’m no foreign policy expert so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
I believe that Wang’s visit had one more purpose — to gauge the possibility of reviving the communist behemoth that was the Nepal Communist Party (NCP). China wants a stable communist force that it can cultivate in Nepal, not a handful of squabbling parties that never seem to get anything done. By pushing for unification between Dahal’s Maoists and Oli’s UML, China had accomplished just that — the creation of the largest communist force in Nepal’s history. Unfortunately, even China learned that it cannot manage the egos of Nepal’s top political actors. The NCP might have fallen apart but there’s no reason it cannot be put back together, or so the Chinese think. I don’t know what Wang concluded but it can’t have been positive, given the animosity between Dahal and Oli.
To prevent the communists from uniting again, the Nepali Congress too has offered an olive branch. Dahal had been harrumphing around town about the Congress not offering an electoral alliance for the upcoming local elections, signaling that he would approach Oli for a tie-up instead. But the Congress has now formally decided to enter into alliances with coalition partners the Maoists, Madhav Kumar Nepal’s Unified Socialists and the Janata Samajbadi Party wherever necessary. This could help counteract the UML’s stranglehold on local governments, or so the Congress hopes. It seems like the Congress is quite confident in its ability to win, given how its biggest opponent — the UML — recently suffered a split and is weaker now than it was in 2017. The Congress is probably right, but it is taking no chances.
We are now in April and elections are just over a month away. There is still some time before all the candidates are announced but purse strings are already loosening. And that brings us to this week’s discussion into an age-old question, something Plato himself grappled with — what is good and what is beautiful.
The deep dive: The aesthetics of excess
There is a pox that is currently afflicting Nepal and no, I’m not talking about Covid-19. This plague is not borne by pathogens and cannot be attributed to dirt, squalor, or poverty. It doesn’t quite affect the body as much as the eyes and especially the mind. It is a blight on the land, affecting every region equally. It is fuelled by ready cash that comes from us, the taxpayers, and it is presented to us as an offering, a sign of the times, development, progress, etc etc.
I speak, of course, of the plague that is the ‘view tower’, a mass of concrete and steel that is now ubiquitous. Every hillock, every elevated height is now adorned with a phallus, born out of a seemingly impotent desire to do something, anything.
On Monday, Pushpa Kamal Dahal inaugurated this monstrosity in Rolpa:
And this in the heartland of the Maoist insurgency where schools, hospitals, and other public infrastructure are still under-resourced and under-staffed. This view tower, this eyesore, was reportedly built for Rs 60 million.
On Tuesday, KP Sharma Oli inaugurated another view tower, this time in Rupandehi’s Tilotamma Municipality. That tower reportedly cost between Rs 110-140 million and this is what it looks like:
Dozens of such towers have sprouted across the country in the past few years. They might differ slightly in style but aesthetically, they are all the same — ugly concrete structures that mar the natural beauty of the land. Local governments say they are for tourism promotion but locals say they are simply an easy means for local representatives and their cronies to pocket millions while constructing these pointless blemishes.
On Wednesday, March 30, Kantipur daily published a great piece titled ‘भ्यु टावरबाट देखिने दृश्य’ or ‘The view from the view tower’. Using its formidable resources, Kantipur has collated view towers from across the country, outlining their cost, location, and whether they’ve been of any use at all. Tellingly, the report points out where the millions used to construct these ugly blots on the landscape could’ve gone instead.
In Rolpa, the Rs 60 million could’ve gone towards ensuring a proper water supply for the school that the view tower overlooks. Teachers have been filling and handing out jerrycans of water to students because the school doesn’t have a ready water supply. According to the municipality’s budget, only Rs 13 million went towards education.
In Tilotamma, the Rs 100+ million could’ve gone towards irrigation facilities for hundreds of farmers. Instead, more than a hundred trees were cut down to build that concrete deformity.
In Damak, over a hundred squatter families live in the shadow of an 18-story view tower, also inaugurated by Oli. The squatters say they feel mocked by the tower where the view is of their misery. To add insult to injury, a dozen squatter families, reports Kantipur, were chased away from their homes by local authorities who wanted to build a shopping complex.
These are all relevant issues and with elections approaching, they must be discussed in the public sphere. After all, no local government should be investing millions in a tower that few will climb when local residents lack basic amenities. Locals must be angry, and they must display their anger at the polls. Those who built these towers must be voted out. That is the only real way to affect change.
But beyond corruption and local politics, what do these view towers really symbolize in their aesthetics? They’re butt ugly, that’s a given, but what else? What, in the deep reptilian subconscious recesses of the brains of local representatives, is driving this building spree?
To me, the impulse comes from Kathmandu. As with most things, Kathmandu remains the model around which all other cities and municipalities attempt to model themselves. Kathmandu has the Dharahara, the progenitor of the view tower in Nepal. And since Kathmandu had a giant phallus, everyone else decided that they too must have a giant phalli (or is it phalluses?).
But the Dharahara itself is representative of power and excess. When the rulers of old built towers, they did so to maintain a certain hegemony over the hoi-polloi. After all, the rulers were always ‘above’ the public, literally and metaphorically. Elevation implies importance and we can still see this in many political and cultural programs where the ‘chief guest’ is almost always accorded a place that is on a raised platform. Barring a platform, even a stool will suffice.
Height affords a bird’s eye view, a view privileged by city planners and by the elite. Looking down is not just an aesthetic pleasure; it is a hegemonic impulse born out of a desire to have an all-encompassing view while separating oneself from the lived realities of the people on the ground. The individual on a tower sees but is themselves not seen.
Towers are not built by regular people. Dharahara itself was built by Bhimsen Thapa. The ‘original’ view tower was a symbol of power. It was never meant to be an aspiration of the people and why would it? The people do not aspire to have a view tower, especially when they have much more pressing needs like water and housing. By aping the Dharahara, municipalities and local units across the country are imposing their own will upon the desires of the people. Despite being duly elected, the compulsion to build a tower comes from the representative’s belief that they know what is best, and by extension, are superior to those they preside over.
But in building these towers, the process becomes less of an imitation and more of a pastiche. Imitation is flattery; it attempts at least to retain some of the impulses of the original. In these view towers we see sprouting up everywhere, there is little attention paid to architecture or aesthetics. These are structures completely devoid from any kind of aesthetic sensibility. They are pastiches in the extreme sense of the word — these buildings just exist, separated completely from their surroundings not just by height but also by architecture. As Frederic Jameson writes in his seminal wide-ranging essay, Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism:
Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs: it is to parody what that other interesting and historically original modern thing, the practice of a kind of blank irony…
The only real logic here is excess. It is an attempt to build upwards, rather than outwards. And it is hubristic. These towers are often built on top of hills, which already provide a natural vantage point. The towers are supposed to be better than that, providing a better view, a wider view, while removing the viewer from the space they are canvassing. Jameson further writes:
…this latest mutation in space—postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.
When looking out from a view tower, the individual is isolated from the space that surrounds them. They are no longer part of the human scale that defines the every day. Instead, for the minutes they are up in the tower, they can sample excess, that feeling of being above it all, unaffected by the petty trials and tribulations. Those who requisitioned these towers might not be conscious of these impulses but they remain and are reproduced.
Like I said before, these impulses are inherited from Kathmandu, especially those politicians who locate themselves in Kathmandu. After all, politicians from the mofussil learn from what politicians at the center have been doing and where their priorities are. But beyond just the mimicry, there is also the glaring lack of any kind of aesthetic. I mean, even if they had to build the tower, the least they could’ve done is make it beautiful. Every tower doesn’t have to be garish; it doesn’t have to be all steel beams and ugly concrete. This isn’t the baseness of Brutalism or even the bewildering spectacle of postmodernism. Architecturally and aesthetically, this is just excess.
And in order to glimpse the aesthetics of excess, we just have to look at this:
(Photo: RSS)
I don’t even know where to begin. The garish, floral patterns on the couches? Or the gold-rimmed armrests? Or those gold curtains? Maybe the gold-framed mirror in the back? Or those gold faux candleholders?
The above image is of a room in the presidential palace, Sheetal Niwas. But it could very well be an executive suite in a Trump hotel. The gold, the indulgence, the excess, the lack of subtlety. It is enough to make my eyes bleed. The decor of the presidential palace is ostentatious and alien, much like the view towers that stick out like middle fingers to the rest of the landscape. They might be on opposite ends of the federal spectrum but they both scratch the same itch.
In the end, this isn’t really about money but about excess and aesthetics. Let me end this screed with a passage from Kamal Malla, writing about the mansions of the Ranas, but could very well have been talking about new landed gentry that taken hold of Nepali polity:
By the twilight hours of the Rana regime the architects of the dynasty had succeeded in erecting monumental day-dreams of mimicry—each a monstrous monument to the idea of mimicry…
In Kathmandu the Ranas, on the contrary, refused even to communicate with the rest of society except for money and cheap labour. They turned their backs upon the traditional Nepalese arts, crafts and architecture. There is not a single building which shows the regime’s patronage of the homespun style. A Rana palace is not only a depressive monument to the Western mimicry: it is also convincing evidence of a collective schizophrenia. After all, the Ranas were the rulers; they ought to feel different from the ruled; they must live differently in dream-castles inaccessible to the vulgar herd.
On The Record this past week:
Prasansha Rimal provides an update on Nepal’s current Covid-19 situation
Prashanta Khanal on how writing is like cooking
Jag Bahadur Budha on how Nepalis in Darchula cross the border to Dharchula every day for work
Shuvam Rizal on how Kathmandu’s perpetual air pollution is partly a result of key policy failures
Happenings this week:
Sunday - Chinese Foreign Minister and State Councilor Wang Yi wrapped up his three-day visit to Kathmandu. He signed nine agreements, spoke about the Belt and Road Initiative with government officials and top politicians, and left Kathmandu journalists with enough fodder to produce endless analyses of what his visit portends.
Monday - A Setopati journalist on a scooter was struck by a blue-plated UN vehicle in Lalitpur, causing multiple injuries to her extremities. The UN acknowledged that one of its vehicles, assigned to the Cooperative Marketing Development Programme (CMDP) by the United Nations Development Programme, had been involved in an accident. A CMDP representative promised to bear all treatment costs.
Tuesday - The Gaddi Baithak, another garish neocolonial Rana palace, opened its doors to the public for the first time since the 2015 earthquakes. The United States had funded the reconstruction of the building, which was completed and inaugurated by then prime minister KP Sharma Oli in 2018. The Gaddi Baithak exemplifies the aesthetic of excess that I discussed above.
Wednesday - A new report by the United Nations Population Fund found that nearly half of all pregnancies in the world are unintended and nearly 60 percent of them result in abortions. However, it also said that “a recent study of pregnant women who were or had been married in six South Asian nations — Afghanistan, Bangladesh,
India, Maldives, Nepal and Pakistan — fully 90 per cent of women and girls aged 15 to 19 years classified their pregnancies as intended, more than any other age group, seemingly refuting the assumption that this age group would have a large number of unintended pregnancies.”
Thursday - A record five wickets from Karan KC sent Nepal into the finals of the Tri-Nation T20I currently being in Kathmandu. Nepal beat Papua New Guinea after beating Malaysia on Wednesday and will once again face Malaysia on Saturday.
Friday - Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba left for New Delhi. In the Indian capital, he met with top politicians from the Bharatiya Janata Party and Foreign Minister S Jaishankar on Friday. He will be meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday before departing for Varanasi.
Article of the week:
‘Dammed if we do, dammed if we don’t’ — Prience Shrestha on how Nepal’s many hydroelectric projects are impacting aquatic biodiversity, especially fish.
That’s all for this week. Off the Record will be back in your inboxes next Friday. I shall see you then, in your emails, for the next edition of Off the Record.
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