Forum (Spotlight Weekly)

The Nepalese Conflict and the Mickey Mouse Topi

By Frank-Christoph Sinn

March 2004. A weekend in Dhampus, a village in Annapurna. It is evening and the sun is low above the small village. At the entrance of Dhampus you find the nice Lodge called “Raju Gurung Hotel”. Through the both blue colored open doors you see an old man sitting in front of a TV. His head is covered by a Topi, the typical Nepalese hat. The back light reduces his shape to a black figure. The sun sets and harsh neon light illuminates the lodge. The Topi of the old man now releases its design. Instead of the typical pattern you recognize two Mickey Mice laughing from his head and his bended body is clothed by a fake tricot of the German football club FC Bayern Munich. The old man is waiting now for the evening news. A sudden power breakdown. The TV goes out, the old man keeps sitting. Taking no notice of the about 40 Maoists passing his house. They are armed and they are in battle, but somehow it seems to be in relation to the TV picture of a conflict region. In Dhampus nothing is burning, nothing is exploding and nobody runs crying through the streets. It is just calm and dark in Dhampus, till the electricity comes back in the power supply lines. Lamps light up the houses and the TV restarts work. Now the bomb in Iraq is closer than the group of Maoist that arrives Photana soon.

In this short description you can see what happened in the last years through the introduction of mass media like TV. Media opens a new dimension, which is neither good nor bad. They are “machines of social cross-linking” how the German media scientist Hartmut Winkler called them. We get informed around the world without leaving our houses. We learn about other cultures, religions and different ways of life. Sometimes we adopt things from other countries. The old man for example has exchanged his traditional clothes with a Western interpretation. On the other hand eastern comic culture like Mangas invades the Western States. Media have many attributes. They inform, entertain and they always deal with interchange.

The interchange takes place on the level of the contents and on the level of the media themselves. The Canadian author Marshall McLuhan affirmed “the medium is the message”. The medium has influence to our life. The 8 o’clock news on TV became an inherent part in our everyday life. This is a phenomenon in Nepal and in Germany. It is interesting to become aware of how fast the new media have soaked in the Nepali culture. Even elder people have an open mind for that electronic stuff. In Germany it took a much longer time till the older people gave up their reservation against the new media. Since about 10 years the Internet exists in Germany, but only today the older people start learning the contact with it.

In any case media open a “window”. It is not a Nepalese phenomenon but an international one that the new view we have got arouses our interest for other cultures. But don’t forget that media can just highlight smallest parts of the whole reality. What we see is media effective and not objective, just a kind of objectivity simulation. The pictures on the TV taken from conflict regions like Iraq always show the same scenario. Through the repetitions of the “media reality” we create a stereotype of war zones. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard maintains that today simulation substitutes reality. We became blind for everything that does not fit in that stereotype schema. I wouldn’t assume this for the old man, but sometimes I wonder how superficially relaxed some Nepali people react about the current situation. Maybe some people supersede this conflict and some people don’t accept the conflict as a conflict, because it is media deficit. In Germany you neither hear nor see anything about the Nepalese conflict. Maybe the Germans are less concerned because Nepal is too far away or maybe they cannot understand the extreme political situation. They are not familiar with opinions like those of Maoists and Royalists. This conspicuous lack can be removed by objective mass media without a propaganda background. In this way mass media in Germany watch over and control the political powers, inform people and connect people with the political authorities. It is not easy for mass media to fulfill their work in that sense, but at the beginning of each Mickey Mouse story nobody can image that it will finish with a happy end.

(The author is an internee at the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung)