Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer

Author:Pico Iyer [Iyer, Pico]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76190-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

AT THE RALLY, as so often in Manila, it was the happiness of the Filipinos that left me saddest.

Carefree and irrepressible to the end, they reminded me finally of one of those beautiful tennis players—Yannick Noah, say, or Vijay Armitraj—who delight their audiences with the sweet fluency of their shots, and light up the court with their grace and daring, and dazzle even themselves with their élan, yet, in the end, are always undone by their own lovely insouciance. It was sad that the Filipinos had been left with nothing to steady themselves except four hundred years of colonialism and the leftover knickknacks of a rock-’n’-roll culture. But sadder by far was the fact that they still had the openness and hopefulness—the happy innocence—to believe that rock ’n’ roll was all they needed to change the world. “We Are the World” was especially popular, I suspected, because it was the ultimate anthem of pop idealism. It suggested that bright tunes could redeem politics; that high spirits and good intentions alone could bring food to the starving; that where there was music, there could not be misery.

And as I sat in the departure lounge of Manila International Airport, waiting to fly away, I heard for the last time, issuing from the sound system, the strains of the country’s favorite anthem, affirming the limitless powers of faith. And I could not help thinking that even as the unguarded, sweet-tempered, friendly Filipinos kept on singing that they were the world, and they were the children, their own world was falling apart and they were too much the world, too much the children to resist.

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