There is such a thing called an alternative
Never mind exactly where it comes from, but Discovery channel comes from somewhere in the West. This much is easy to find out. There is a travel program, which I do not watch, but see regularly whenever the television is on. When the anchors who do this program go to Mexico city, they spend almost 20 minutes doing an interview with an Austrian lady who sells her works of art in Mexico city.

Interviewing an Austrian for a programme on Mexico City? So you think that is bad.

The highlight of the programme is this nice Caucasian man who discovers that Mexican chillie is too hot for him. He spends the rest of the programme crying and sweating, trying all kinds of chillie in a marathon melodramatic swoon.

The programme, made from New York or wherever it may be in North America, treats the rest of the world as quaint and ripe for exploration by one man and two women - Charlie and his two angels if you will.

If this programme was discussed at a seminar in our sub-continent, they would have come up with the right word for this type of travelling. They would have said the rest of the world is "alternative.'' It is worth remembering that all seminars in this part of the world are funded from somewhere in the West as well.

So it is that chillie came to be "alternative'' to cheese-burghers and Coca Cola. So it is that life in Mexico City became "alternative'' to the life of an Austrian woman. It is true that life in Mexico City is probably "alternative'' to an Austrian woman. But why does the rest of the world always have to watch vicariously through the blue eyes of an Austrian woman? Because this is how Discovery discovers life.

In these days in particular, when the World Cup soccer tournament is being played in Korea, the Western media is scurrying to present the rest of the world to its viewers. For one month, they are talking of the Koreans and their problems about whether to eat or not to eat dog meat. Brazil is being defined, as it happens every four years, by women fans in shorts.

Basically, the world is divided into two kinds of places. Places that are so quaint that people who live there deserve to be treated as anthropological curiosities. Such as Mexico City for example.

Then of course, there are the world's trouble spots. Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Mindanao - these places have ceased to be quaint because they have begun to occupy the Western radar in a different way.

There is only one rule of thumb. Basically, every place is good to explore - unless of course, it is close to explode.

Lifestyles which have been mainstream lifestyles in places such as Mexico city, are re-packaged and sold in seminars on alternatives to people all over the world, sometimes Mexicans themselves. This is how mainstream remedies or mainstream values such as community based housing programmes suddenly become "sustainable alternatives.''

Suddenly, people from Mexico realize that all time they have only been living "alternative'' lives. This comes as a major cultural shock.

Imagine discovering one fine day that the life that you have been leading from childhood is only, after all, "an alternative.'' For a Sri Lankan, hoppers and pittu and rice and curry with dry-fish becomes an alternative. Dry fish is after all, an alternative source of protein. Good old family values and systems of cradle to grave care all become alternative in a minute.

You may ask why you have not been showcased in Discovery in that case? It is only because there is war here - so do not ask stupid questions.

There are supposed to be certain types of news services, which do try to present the news in a different way. They are called alternative news services such as Panos and Inter Press Service, and they employ nice kinds of "alternative'' people who typically smoke John Player but wear pony tails, unlike those who typically work for Reuters.

These news agencies do a lot in terms of making local lifestyles alternative and chic. With the World Cup however, some of these realities are getting disturbed, even though momentarily. But even a momentary disturbance is a great problem because it jars the world's mainstream lifestyle.

These days they showcase the entire rest of the world, and the world comes up as a place that is full of colorful people who lead lifestyles that are opposed to those of the West - even though they play football. This is very disturbing because the world was hitherto only a place where Caucasians explored, or where bombs exploded. This has hurt the American sensibilities so much, and the Americans are saying already "we will get interested in the world cup the day we win it.''

There is a very real stake for the world's mainstream culture to keep all non-mainstream cultures and lifestyles "alternative'' so that the mainstream culture gets its sustenance from trying to subsume all alternative cultures. In places such as Sri Lanka, we have for the most part bought the proposition that the mainstream lifestyles that have been handed down by our ancestors are only alternative lifestyles, as opposed to the one mainstream lifestyle that is beamed to us via the tube or comes to us regularly in various forms such as cans, tubes and lotions. This proposition cannot be disturbed even for a week - be it world cup, or world war.

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