Contact is taking a holiday!

Early days at Khana Nirvana community café
Photo : Dara Ackerman

Mark Moore, Dara Ackerman, Dave Bloom, and I opened up the Khana Nirvana restaurant around the time of Losar of 1997 with the hope of creating a space where you could find good, safe vegetarian and vegan food and learn about how to get and stay connected to the local community. I don’t remember who first voiced the idea of having a newsletter, but it took a number of people working very hard to get it off the ground. Big Joe, an ex-pat who had been living in McLeod Ganj for a year or so was crucial in getting local businesses to buy advertising space in the magazine, and Tashi Wangdu (and later Lobsang Rabsel) jumped right in to help assemble and edit Contact, along with Mark and Dave providing a lot of technical and editorial support.

McLeod Ganj is an incredibly diverse community, and from the outset, trying to include as many voices as possible in the newsletter was a great challenge! I feel like we were in a boot camp for cultural sensitivity that prepared me very well for the current conversations about Critical Race Theory and intersectionalism. Looking over some old issues that I saved, I think we did a decent job of it. We covered everything from reviews of Japanese post-Butoh dance performances to the psychology of street cows. We looked at global events like the Junta in Myanmar, and on the next page discussed global warming and the ubiquitous trash fires on the hillsides of town. We published the stories of former political prisoners in Tibet as well as the poems of heartbroken travellers. We explained the local culture (what to do about street dogs, how to dress and behave with respect to local norms, the significance of Losar) and interviewed city officials. We helped each other learn how to use our voices.

It’s really hard to measure the impact we made on the people who read the newsletter, but I can say that all of us involved in the making of it were transformed by the experience. Through the newspaper, we got to wrestle with the vital questions of how one really shows up for their community, how to negotiate conflicting viewpoints and agendas, and most importantly, we had the privilege of creating something bigger than any one of us.