Last night I went to a "bar" out here in Manali, the first true bar I've been to in India. It looked just like any upper-mid range bar in San Francisco, with a big half-circle bar and mirrored glass shelves supporting top shelf liquors. Not surprisingly, the patrons were mostly members of the Yuppie Indian class, exactly the same people I've seen in the same bars in New York. They seem to do everything seriously, which works well in the business world. But there's nothing they take more seriously than their vanity. I thought it was a racist generalization to see rich, perfectly clean cut Indians dancing in the clubs of New York as if every move was a perfect pose, with tight silk shirts and trendy Diesel jeans, moving just carefully enough to hint at how much they've pre-empted every move to make them look the best. It turns out this an invalid generalization of all Indians, but surprisingly accurate for this class of Indians, and since so many of the Indians in America are from this business-centered group of people out there to "make it," it seems to discribe a lot of the Indians in America. But it wasn't American vanity that did it to them, from what I learned last night, they were like that before they left.

There was a Tibetan looking man sitting next to me, with long hair and a distinctly Native American look to him, who was wearing a white shirt with bright red letters spelling "WHERE ALL DA WHITE WOMEN AT?" On one hand, this was the kind of shirt that, in New York, I'd wouldn't be surprised to see on a young uptight Indian businessman "going loose and crazy on Saturday night," but this time it was worn by a stiff looking Tibetan who then "dance-walked" around the dancefloor for the rest of the night with his ultra stiff head-bobbing, foot tapping, and arms twitching. It might have been the joint recently passed to me, but I couldn't help but thinking of where this man came from. What kind of family, from ancient Tibetan traditions, had moved as refugees to India in the past fifty years to raise their son into this head-bobbing product of the new globalized pop culture? It wasn't just him, though. Aside from the slick-back hair silk shirt playboys, a lot of the poorer looking people danced with an anything goes craze I've so far only seen at weddings here. There was a pop song I've heard a lot here (that's apparently been a pop song for as long as I've been traveling) that goes "rakada RAJA RAJA RAJA RAJA RAAAAAAA JAA." When this song came on, all the headbobbers from the corners flooded the dance floor. When it came on a second time, 45 minutes later, everybody went even crazier, into a near epileptic fit with the ferocity of a mosh pit. You might call it the traditional old village happy-as-fuck dance, but here they were moving every part of their body the same way when Ja-Rule came on. Within a year, I bet, they'd be dancing in exactly the same way in front of some elephants and a dressed up groom on a fancy rickshaw.

With all this talk about Dynamic Quality, I completely discarded the fact that I was sitting in the middle of one of the most Dynamic places in the world. Here are millenia-old cultures coming out in the past few decades into the new gobal culture. Fair enough, America might have seen some changes in the past 30 years, but these people were coming from a culture that, presumably, has maintained relatively static over the past several thousand years. And here were its children, going crazy to music from around the world, taking on values that are diametrically opposed to those they were brought up with. Interestingly enough, the Israelis have made a pretty significant impact on the youth out here, as the music in the bar eventually turned to Psytrance... and there's no better gouging rod out here for finding Israelis than to hear psytrance being played way too loud behind some bushes.

Maybe it's all this dynamism that's responsible for the change in traveler culture I noticed in this country. There seems to be two types of travelers I've met so far. There's a 18-24 year old European/American group with an "uncertain" look in their eyes. It seems to be a pretty common thing for high school and college graduates to come out here to "do" India for the summer, only to spend their trip trying to stay alive instead of actually enjoying themselves. It's as if, in their first trip into the third world, they dive straight into the deep water and try to stay afloat for three months. Some come to "find themselves," some come to test themselves, but one way or another they end up having to frantically tread water until their rescue at the end of the summer. The Israelis seem to have built metaphorical party boats on the surface, and can spend their entire vacation eating Israeli food, doing good drugs, and dancing to Psytrance. Then there are the legitimate "cool" people, who've become official travelers (in the Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles discribes a Traveller, as opposed to a Tourist, as someone who no longer associates "home" with his original culture. I'd say that's about right). These people include the Shiva Riders, the Bullet Wallas, expats who're making business here, foreign tour guides, journalists, people legitimately studying yoga or mysticysm, and generally those people who tend to look comfortable out here. They, in the Lake of India metaphor, are the snorkelers or even scuba divers who feel just as comfortable under the water as above it.

If we take this poignant metaphor to its unneccessary end, my problem is not that there's not enough dynamism out here to keep me interested, it's that there's too much. Instead of diving down into its depths, I've had a chance to learn to float comfortably in the sun, or with the motorcycle, "jetski" over its surface. It's so nice up here that I've lost the drive to dive down and explore the dangerous cold waters beneath the thermocline, and the unknown depths are just scary enough for me to see no reason really going down there.

This means it's time for me to go home. When I've lost that drive to dive in head-first into the unknown, I'm no longer a Traveller but a tourist on vacation. I'll spend another week or so in Dharmsala, where the Dalai Llama is absent at the time, then I'll head home. So ends the Asia part of the trip, now the trick will be to start all over again in America. I've still got 3 months left...