Video Night in Kathmandu

I read Video Night in Kathmandu when I was travelling in India the first time around. It was an education in East-West relations and opened my eyes to travel being a huge privilege. I also learned to arrive in a new place with, as far as possible, no expectations. Pico Iyer is incredibly insightful and draws attention to the fluidity of culture. He acknowledges his Indian roots and how your own cultural heritage can’t help but colour your experience of a place: something to be mindful of. The video mentioned in the title is Rambo, rammed full of western… show more.

Only one segment of this travel classic is about Nepal, but Pico Iyer’s exploration of 1980s South and Southeast Asia throws a candid eye on a rapidly globalising world. Before social media and smartphones, foreign travelers and locals talked to one another and the results make for illuminating and elegant reading about the Lonely Planet generation and how it was received and perceived in the Far East.

It is hard to pick one of Pico Iyer’s many great books for this list, but Video Nights is the one that put him on the map (so to speak). He was writing for Time magazine at the time, covering global business, and this book represents his more personal experiences of those years, when Rambo and Madonna were the cultural front of economic globalization. Like the kids, he describes with Mohawk hairdos in Nepal and Hong Kong, the exotic, for him, lies not just indifference, but in sameness: he is fascinated by the Genghis Kahn-era temples in Ulan Bataar, but… show more.