Deepak's Diary

Moving to a New Website

2010-11-15T08:04:00.002+05:30

Dear visitor,

It's been fun using blogspot and interacting with you here. But now's the time to move. I've launched my new website Deepak Adhikari.

Now on, I will post my blogs and other pieces there. So, please visit the site and do provide links to mine in your sites/blogs. I will try to reciprocate.

Thanks a lot!

Nepal's First President VS Last King

2010-10-20T21:54:00.000+05:30

This appeared in TIME:

Deepak Adhikari/Kathmandu

It was during Indra Jatra, the festival that marks the end of monsoon and honors the rain god Indra, that Prithvinarayan Shah attacked a bowl-shaped valley and expanded his kingdom to form what would eventually become modern-day Nepal. That was 1768, and in keeping with the local custom of the now-famous Nepali institution of Kumari — the worshipping of young girls believed to be incarnations of the Hindu deity Taleju — the new king went on to get blessings from the living goddess.

The last king of Shah's dynasty, however, wasn't as lucky. Last month, the site of the yearly celebration of Indra Jatra in Kathmandu's ancient Durbar Square became the latest frontline in a battle being waged between Nepal's ousted king and the nation's young government. When former king Gyanendra Shah, who left his post after the government voted to become a republic on May 28, 2008, attempted to pay homage to nine former royal Kumaris in the square, government supporters gathered to protest the former king's visit, and he was physically prevented from his visit. The government cited security reasons for the interruption, but one local news commentator said that the tussle amounted to nothing less than a battle between the old and new Nepal.

A Nepali Actress in Australia

2010-10-01T10:14:00.002+05:30

Suesha Rana is a Nepali-origin Australia-based theater actress. In late August she responded to my questions about her life, career and what it means to be an Asian artist in Australia. A profile based on the interview was published in Hello Shukrabar, a Kantipur Daily supplement on youth and lifestyle.

Q: Can you tell me about your childhood? Where were you born, what did your parents do for living etc.

A: I had a pretty normal childhood growing up, I was born in Kathmandu and went to a few schools there. I also went to school in Jaipur, India during primary school. But, I settled in Perth, Western Australia when I was 9 years old. My father was Sahadev Rana, he was the managing director of Hotel de'l Annapurna and my mother was a full time mom.

What drove you towards acting?

Acting was something that came quite naturally to me and always really enjoyed. I've always been a bit of an entertainer, being a clown and loving the attention. I've always enjoyed exploring characters, I use it as an escape from the monotony of life every now and then.

Which was your first play? Can you share your experiences of that moment?

My first play was The King and I, and it was a school play. I loved being on stage, especially the adrenaline of being in front of so many people and being appreciated for what I was doing which was entertaining.

When did you feel that you will be a full time actor?

I'm hoping to fully launch into acting next year when I have finished my bachelors degree in commerce. Also, living in Western Australia there is very little opportunity for work in terms of acting, therefore I have decided to go to L.A next year to study more acting and pursue a career there.

What is it like acting in Australia? Can you give a sense of what it is like to be acting in that country?

Acting in Western Australia is a very good starting point. It's great in terms of gaining experience. There is definitely more work available in the eastern state of Australia, however I find there is very little jobs available for Asians.

What is your biggest achievement so far? Any awards, recognitions for any role?

My biggest achievement so far would be having the opportunity to work with Melanie Rodriga who is a very well known director in Australia.

What types of role do you do? When and how did you get your first break in Australian movie?

I like many different roles. The more different the better, as this really expands your versatility as an actor. I like characters that need a lot of thought, it's exciting to delve into the minds of complex characters. I'm still waiting for a big break in Australian movie as I originally started as a theatre actress.

Do you also do stereotypical roles that the non-white actors in a predominantly white country often do?

Definitely, especially when starting out its always the stereotypical characters.

You have mentioned in you bio that you've acted in movies like My Past My Present, Music etc. What were your roles? What was your experience like?

My past My present was a great experience, I got to understand the film world as I originally started as a theater actress. My role was a supporting role of a self fish young well established woman.

What is your next goal/movie/theater act? Do you plan to enter Hollywood?

I'm a pretty easy going person, I'm thankful for any role that comes my way. I'm keen to do more film and television rather than theater and next year I plan to do so in L.A if all goes according to plan

Have you watched Nepali films? If yes, what are they?

I left Nepal when I was really young and Nepali movies don't really make their way into the western world. The only one I remember is Prempind and that was a very very long time ago.

What is your dream role? Who is your dream director? What is your most favorite movie? Actor/actress?

My dream role would be a someone like Angelina Jolie's character in the movie Girl Interrupted and my dream director would be Tim Burton and Sophia Cappola. Favourite actor would be Johhny Depp and favorite actress would be Sandra Bullock

Anything you would like to say (that I haven't asked)?

I always tell people to dream big and go for it no matter what it takes. The universe always brings to you what you ask of it.

Also check my interview with Nepali writers: Samrat Upadhyay and Ravi Thapaliya.

Sex Trafficking by Siddharth Kara

2010-09-27T21:34:00.009+05:30

In the autumn of 2008, I and a friend working with an NGO run by sex-trafficking victims embarked on a research of sex trade in Kathmandu. Having previously worked on the subject for a cover story at Nepal Weekly magazine in 2004, I had some understanding of the subject. But my second attempt at exploring the dark side of this gruesome trade would prove to be a difficult experience. I met a girl, barely 14, who was trafficked from Dang and was forced to work in a run-down Gongabu restaurant that doubled as a brothel.

After listening to the girl’s harrowing story at a nearby shelter, my friend and I visited the restaurant where the waiters seemed laidback and the tea arrived after much delay. As we sipped our tea and scrutinised the place, the modus operandi started to unravel itself. A young woman who was applying lipstick and carelessly grooming herself seemed to eye us as prospective clients. Pin-ups of scantily clad models adorned the walls. Sitting there, I wondered about the misery the young girl had told us about.

I was reminded of this while reading Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery by Siddharth Kara, the first fellow on human trafficking at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Kara came face to face with the horrors of slavery in mid-1990s when he visited a refugee camp in Slovenia where he saw first hand the refugees living in limbo, and in utter despair. The Slovenian sojourn left an indelible impression on him.

Haunted by that, in 2000 he resolved to put aside his job as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch and began his life’s mission: to unveil the workings of sex trafficking. He visited brothels, massage parlours, sex clubs and met all those involved in this trade. After traversing 18 countries and interviewing more than 500 victims, he has produced a very compelling book.

Sex Trafficking provides answer to one of the world’s most appalling (some would say the oldest) trades: selling sex. The book—which covers India, Nepal, Europe and Africa—analyses in detail the economic aspect of sex trafficking. “Sex slavery is primarily a crime of economic benefit,” he writes. According to Kara, the origin of sex trafficking can be traced to a few phenomena: collapse of the Soviet Union, spread of globalisation and capitalism. “The supply of slave erupted in 1990s concurrently with the havoc wreaked by economic globalisation,” he writes. He suggests: sex trafficking is the most profitable industry because the labour cost is very cheap.

The book opens with the story of Maya, “a gaunt and distressed” 19-year-old from Sindhupalchowk, who spent “four years as sex slave in each of Mumbai’s two main red-light districts, Kamathipura and Falkland Road.” Maya was duped with the promise of a job at a carpet factory in Kathmandu. Once in the Indian brothel, she was raped, tortured, starved and even drugged. Finally, she fled, but only to discover that she was infected with HIV. Even returning home was fraught with stigma. “They (the rescuers) helped me contact my father, but he told me not to come home. He said I can never be married because I have HIV. I can only bring shame,” she tells the author. She had come out of the brothel in Kamathipura that was established in the 17th century for the service of British troops.

Globally, 500,000 to 600,000 women are trafficked every year. The reasons outlined by the author are poverty, bias against the gender or particular ethnicity, lawlessness, military conflict, social instability, and above all, disparities in economic opportunity. Along the shady edge of the huge movement of people and demand for sex and money, sex trafficking thrives.

Kara says factors such as corruption in law enforcement, border control and judicial system allow traffickers to conduct their business with minimal consequences. When he says “police take bribes in every country I visited to allow sex-slaves establishments to operate” it sounds like he is talking about Nepal. “Lack of coordination among origin and destination countries also hampers prosecution of trafficking crimes,” he writes, “…The absence of political will to enforce the law, as well as endemic corruption, allows trafficking…”

At one point, a victim’s mother laments: “So many bad men are hurting young girls. How can we stop them? Is there any end to the suffering of women?” Kara suggests a number of ways to control the trafficking. He urges the UN to create an international slavery and trafficking inspection force; targeted and proactive raids against establishments that have sex-slaves; forming fast-track courts to prosecute trafficking crimes; and imposing stringent laws with massive penalties for traffickers.

As a work of narrative journalism, Sex Trafficking is gripping. It’s erudite, evocative and above all an engaging read. No other work has dealt with the subject as comprehensively. The book deserves a wide readership.

First appeared at The Kathmandu Post.

Also check my review of Sold, a novel about a Nepali girl trafficked to India.

Koirala's Legacy

2010-09-18T12:39:00.004+05:30

With Nepali Congress, Nepal's Grand Old Party, engaged in the search of the leader who would fill the late GPK's shoes, below I've published an obit of the late leader, written just after his death:

With the death in March 20 of Girija Prasad Koirala, the five-time Prime Minister of Nepal who helped bring the underground Maoist rebels to mainstream politics and oversaw the end of Nepal’s 240-year-old monarchy, the Himalayan nation’s fragile peace process has suffered a severe blow. Koirala was at the helm until his death at 85.

As an architect of the peace process, the octogenarian leader had died in the thick of the things, leaving behind several unfinished tasks, the key among them the drafting of constitution through 601–member Constituent Assembly (CA) elected in April 10, 2008.

Though Koirala’s absence will be felt throughout the nation, it is nowhere more acute than within his party. When the three senior most leaders of Nepali Congress (NC), former Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, Acting Chairman Sushil Koirala and NC’s parliamentary leader, Ram Chandra Paudel, were seen waving to the crowd from the cortege in the funeral procession, it reminded many of the NC troika: Ganesh Man Singh, Krishna Prasad Bhattarai and Girija Prasad Koirala. The three leaders had led the grand old party till mid 1990s. But even before the late leader’s ashes are buried throughout the country, fissures among the top three have begun to surface.

Many believe this is Koirala’s own making, for he never nurtured the second generation leaders. Instead, in recent years, he was keen to promote his daughter, Sujata Koirala, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister in current cabinet, as his successor. Criticized for promoting nepotism and forming a coterie around him, Koirala was Nepali Congress president for nearly 15 years.

A man of action and conviction, Koirala is largely credited for bringing the war-ravaged country back from the brink. Born in Bihar, India in 1925 in a politically active family of Krishna Prasad Koirala who was in exile for defying the autocratic, hereditary Rana regime, he started his political career with a worker's strike in eastern town of Biratnagar in March 1947.

He honed his political skills fighting autocratic regimes. First it was Rana regime that collapsed in 1951 after the joint struggle by King Tribhuvan and NC which was led by his elder brother BP Koirala. Till then, Nepal was a medieval kingdom, closed to the outside world. Parliamentary democracy was established and BP Koirala became Nepal’s first elected Prime Minister in 1958. However, Tribhuvan’s son Mahendra usurped the executive power and imposed partyless Panchyat system that ruled Nepal for three decades. Koirala remained in his elder brother’s shadow till the latter’s death in 1983.

Eventhough Koirala’s political career paralleled that of Nepal’s tryst with modernity, it was only after 1990 that he was at the forefront of the country’s politics. A stubborn person by nature, he was schooled in his brother’s socialist ideology, but he drifted away from it and became conservative. However, as a politician at the helm in democratic Nepal, he was instrumental in ushering the country into an era of liberalization in post 1990s.

A tireless organizer, he was a man of few words but had a strong determination. He lacked his brother’s erudition; nevertheless he was a pragmatic person. After the restoration of democracy in 1990, he was entrusted with leading Nepal to prosperity. But he could not institutionalize the democracy. In the decade that followed, he faced several corruption charges. His opponents have accused him of political deception.

Koirala was prime minister when the palace massacre occurred on June 1, 2001. According to the findings of the two-member investigation committee, Crown Prince Dipendra, upset by his mother’s refusal to let him marry his girlfriend, killed King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya, his brother, a sister, an aunt, two uncles and two cousins; he later shot himself dead. Koirala was kept in dark for many hours about the massacre. With Gyanendra’s ascent to the throne, he grew disillusioned with the palace.

Over a year into his reign, Gyanedra, a former businessman who was never meant to be a king, started a gradual weakening of democracy. In October 2002, he sacked Prime Minister Deuba, who had succeeded Koirala, on the grounds of incompetence and failure to conduct mid-term polls.

Koirala had resigned from Prime Minister following his difference in July 2001 with Nepal Army, long a bastion of monarchy. Once out of power, Koirala started the secret negotiations with the Maoists whose ideologue Dr. Baburam Bhattarai had proposed a joint struggle against the king.

Former king Gyanendra Shah’s bloodless coup in early 2005 brought the best in Koirala. He unwaveringly stuck to his demand of reinstatement of the parliament, which was dissolved by the former king. In the meantime, the negotiations spearheaded by Koirala with the Maoists culminated in the 12-point agreement in New Delhi in November 2005 at the behest of

India

. This paved the way for the peaceful pro-democracy protests in spring of 2006. He even midwifed the Maoist rebels’ transition from a guerilla force to the government office bearers in Singhadarbar, the seat of power in capital Kathmandu.

Koirala died at a time when the peace process was at a crossroads. The Maoists are now in opposition and a disparate coalition of 22 parties is in the government. Issues like integration of former combatants and the restructuring of the state remain unresolved while the May 28 deadline to draft the constitution inches closer.

After Koirala’s death, every politician across the political spectrum, vowed to work for the realization of his dream of peaceful, democratic, federal and republican Nepal. Indeed, the successful completion of peace process that he led would be a fitting tribute to him. But not many believe that politicians in Nepal will rise above their petty partisan interests. The prominence of the hardliners in the Maoist party who have renewed their threat to stage revolt and the rise of extreme right force that wants to undo the changes, have made things more precarious.

With his death, Nepal has lost a leader who was deft in forming consensus and reaching out to leaders across the party lines. Nepal’s much of the future course hinges on the political leaders’ ability to handle his legacy.

The Unsettling Resettlement of Bhutan’s Refugees

2010-09-15T14:23:00.001+05:30

As resettlement of refugees from Bhutan gains momentum and the UK becomes the eighth country to take them in, leaders in exile wonder if repatriation is now a lost cause, Deepak Adhikari writes for ISN Security Watch.

Swanky and snow-white buses emblazoned with blue IOM (International Organization for Migration) ferry a group of people who seem out of place in Kathmandu's crowd. Led by an IOM escort, the passengers – men, women children and the elderly - queue up in single file at Kathmandu's only international airport.

They are Bhutanese refugees, who after languishing in the sprawling refugee camps in southeastern Nepal, are now heading to western countries, thanks to a 2006 offer floated by the US. In early October that year, Ellen Saurbrey, US Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration, told the UNHCR's executive meeting in Geneva that the US would absorb up to 60,000 refugees over three or four years.

The relocation of Bhutanese refugees (third country resettlement), which began in earnest in November 2007, is largest such project in the world. Read more:

On the Road in Kathmandu

2010-09-11T20:53:00.011+05:30

One afternoon a year ago, I received a call at my office in Kathmandu. The voice at the other end sounded familiar but I could not recognize it. Sensing my anxiety, my friend introduced himself: He was Saroj Thapa, my roommate in early 1990s when both of us were new to the capital city.

Like many young people of our generation, we had moved to Kathmandu to further our studies. I was seventeen and he was a few years older than me. We lived in a dark one room basement apartment at Ghattekulo neighborhood, a ten-minute walk from our college. I relied on a meager monthly stipend sent by my father who taught at a school in eastern hills. His father had left his family. Therefore, Saroj was on his own, studying and eking out a living as a helper in a printing press.

He had chanced upon my piece published in a magazine. I was happy to hear his voice after nearly ten years. "Let's meet some time and talk about these past years," he said. The idea fascinated me and without a second thought, I promised him I would manage time. He hung up.

The time never came. Or, so I thought until one recent day, he called me up and asked if I was free.

In fact, I wasn't. I was giving the final touch to the weekend youth supplement I oversee. I had a tight deadline. The layout person was in the throes of designing the pages. But, I also thought I had lingered too long. I was tired. I badly needed a drink. I also wanted to take some rest. I thought: there's nothing wrong in sneaking away for an hour. A while later, I left for the intersection where my friend would be waiting in his car.

The dusk was falling. I negotiated the potholed road outside my office building. Upon crossing the road, I found myself in the crowd of people heading home or waiting for bus. My friend saw me from a distance and stopped his car.

We drove towards Sinamangal neighborhood near Nepal's only international airpot. I had suggested to him a new restaurant with a good menu and green lawn. The monsoon rain had washed the road clean. The evening felt incredibly lovely. The road had a light traffic.

We found out that the entrance to the restaurant was under construction. My friend, who's been driving for five years, decided to park the car on an empty space beside the road. I suggested him to rethink his decision but he was adamant.

We mostly talked about the time we spent and struggled together. We recalled how we managed to survive the saddest phase of our life. I reminisced how at college I would attend both the day and night classes, how watching a movie was a luxury. I told him how I relished a plate of momo, a Nepali dumpling, which at the time was the most delicious food on earth. .

He recalled his infatuation with a girl who stayed next door to his office. "We used to wax eloquent about our love affairs," he said. We laughed at our naivety. I felt sorry for our humble beginning.

A wave of nostalgia engulfed us as we sipped beer. We concluded that our initial foray into the urban landscape had been pathetic. Past had been unkind to us.

At around eight, we left the restaurant and climbed up to the road. We were still talking, unable to detach ourselves from our terrible past.

A little tipsy, we boarded the car. He was turning it right in order to drop me at my office. Right at that moment, a motorcycle hit the car. All I could hear was a bang! Then, I saw a man thrown up in the air. We looked at each other, trying to figure out the problem. He said: "This is how things end up!" We got off the car and started to assess the damage.

The motorcycle was badly damaged. It's headlight was broken. The car's fender was hit hard, creating a niche. The pillion rider was writhing in pain. A gaggle of passersby gathered in the scene. People silhouetted against the evening's dim light, inquired, "Ke Bhayo? Ke Bhayo?" (What happened? What happened?). Their faces were unrecognizable, lending an eerie feeling. I felt as if I were looking at apparitions.

My friend and I rushed headlong on to take control of the situation. In Kathmandu's accident prone roads, anything can happen. I recalled witnessing incidents in which drivers were beaten up immediately after the accident, without judging whose mistake it was.

A tall, thin, sad-faced traffic police man arrived. He identified the drivers and took their licenses. The motorcycle driver turned out to be heavily injured. But he was very quiet. His friend, who was crying, sounded like he was badly hurt. But he wasn't. Blood was dribbling from the driver's shin. He had another injury in his chin. The helmet's glass might have torn it.

The pillion rider told me he was speaking on his cell phone when the bike hit the car. Later, someone brought back his cell phone which was already battered.

My friend offered to take them to the hospital and pay for their medical bills.

We drove in silence towards Kathmandu Medical College. The driver in his early thirties was admitted to the emergency. I found myself queuing up at the drug store. The injured were returning from a house party. They seemed more drunk than us.

The pillion rider had come to Kathmandu on a business trip. The driver ran a small grocery on the outskirts of Kathmandu. It turned out that all of us came from the same region in eastern Nepal. Even though there appeared a chasm between us--the two on an old bike and we on a four-wheel--an unlikely camaraderie formed inside the hospital.

The Disappeared in Nepal: Living in the Shadows

2010-08-28T08:28:00.009+05:30

This piece appeared in The Kathmandu Post to mark the international day for the disappeared (Aug 30).

The missing
DEEPAK ADHIKARI

KATHMANDU, AUG 28 - A retired school teacher, Resham Bahadur Panta shouldn’t have to be doing this. From Gaikhur village in Gorkha, 70-year-old Panta should have been happily spending his twilight years, instead of looking for his son, Dipendra, who has been missing for the last seven years. Wearing a dhaka topi and daura suruwal, he sits in a corner, his knees drawn to his chest.

A student of Science at Amrit Science Campus, Dipendra was picked up by Nepal Army soldiers, according to eyewitnesses, from Kathmandu on Oct. 13, 2003. As soon as his father found out his son was arrested through the media, he left for Kathmandu where he learnt that his son had joined the student wing of the then-banned Maoists. “We had sent him to study,” Panta rues, “Not to be involved in political activities.”

According to Panta, eyewitnesses told him that army soldiers arrested his 25-year-old son and bundled him into a waiting van. Panta says his son was first taken to Bhairabnath Battalion in Maharajgunj and then shifted to Baireni Ranger Battalion in Dhading after that.

Dipendra seemed to be heading on the right track; before pursuing a Science degree, he wanted to study MBBS and become a doctor. Panta says his son was slightly frustrated when the family could not arrange for the Rs. 700,000 required to get admission to a MBBS course. At one point, according to Panta, his son even competed for the Second Lieutenant’s exam in the Nepal Army.

For years after his son disappeared, Panta traversed various army barracks such as Sundarijal, Bhairabnath and Baireni, but all he heard were rumours. Notwithstanding his quest to find his son, Panta finds it hard to believe that he may still be alive. Still, he hasn’t lost hope. “Every day I live in the hope that I will get some news about my son,” he says, “I hope he is safe; I hope nobody has killed him.” He wants the authorities to either bring his son alive or hand over his dead body for cremation, referring to the oft-repeated phrase “saas ki lash”.

Panta is one of those who have been left invisible by the larger number of casualties of the decade-long Maoist insurgency. It is true that nearly 13,000 people died. But in that same war, at least 1,000 people went missing. These numbers vary from institution to institution. According to the National Human Rights Commission, security forces are responsible for the disappearance of at least 970 persons, while 299 have gone missing at the hands of the Maoists. Similarly, INSEC has recorded that 828 people have been made to “disappear” after they were arrested by security forces and 105 by the Maoists.

According to the International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC), 1,385 people have disappeared between 1996 and 2006. The largest numbers of people have disappeared from Bardia, 212, a fact confirmed by the United Nations human rights body OHCHR, which released a report on the disappeared of Nepal in 2008. The report confirms that most of the disappeared were indigenous Tharus, “many of them civilians”.

In Kathmandu, the Bhairabnath Battalion gained notoriety for a large number of disappearances under its command. In a 2006 report, OHCHR listed the names of 49 individuals who were removed from the barracks during the last weeks of December 2003 and were never seen again. Eighteen months later, OHCHR noted that an officer from the battalion told one former detainee that he should not think about his friends any longer, implying their deaths. The relatives of the missing claim that many of the disappearances followed arrests by security forces.

For the family of the disappeared, the wait goes on. And they suffer silently. According to Bhava Poudyal, a clinical psychologist with the ICRC, the relatives of the disappeared are caught in an ambiguity of loss. He says the relatives find themselves in a situation where they can neither be sure of the person’s existence nor can they obtain the dead body whereby they can conduct the last rites. According to Poudyal, 90 percent of the missing are men and hence the bread-earner of the families. “The family loses its primary source of income,” he says, “Then the families spend more resources in search of the disappeared.” Indeed, Panta said he has stretched out his resources looking for his son. “I’ve already spent Rs. 200,000 on travel and hotel bills.”

Poudyal says that the wives of the disappeared suffer a double blow of loss. “There is the social stigma,” he says, “And they can be easy targets for sexual approaches.” According to him, in their husbands’ absence, they often complain that they are treated like slaves. Laure Schneeberger, ICRC’s deputy head of delegation in Nepal, says 35 percent of the relatives want an answer. “They want to know whether the person is dead or alive,” she says, “The demand for justice comes after that.” She points out that Nepal lacks the expertise and logistics for exhumation and forensics, a key area in the investigation of the missing (ICRC, according to her, is providing training in this regard).

After the groundbreaking June 1, 2007, decision by the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Peace and Reconstruction has tabled the much-anticipated Disappearance Bill in the Constituent Assembly. But with the entire peace process hanging in the balance following the prolonged political crisis, this issue seems to be the last politicos will ponder over. Moreover, the bill has been criticised by human rights groups for focusing largely on amnesty and reconciliation and not complying with international standards.

According to ICRC’s Schneeberger, the very definition of the missing in the bill is inadequate. “As long as you don’t deal with the issue of the missing,” she says, “You can’t deal with the future.”

Nepal's Disappreared, my piece at The Guardian.

Future of Bhutanese Refugee Movement

2010-08-07T12:50:00.004+05:30

Deepak Adhikari and Pranab Kharel
Nearly two decades ago, the hitherto-tranquil kingdom of Bhutan hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Southern Bhutanese—Lhotsampas (literally, Nepali-speaking people of South)—rose against the establishment, demanding civil rights and democracy. The protests erupted as a response to state policies that aimed at disenfranchisement of the community.

The root cause of the opposition was the 1985 Citizenship Act, an act with a retroactive effect that made it mandatory for Lhotsampas to produce documentary evidence of legal residence in Bhutan before 1958. Based on the Act, the government in 1986 conducted a census in the South of Bhutan, and those who failed to produce the evidence were declared non-citizens. Bhutanese rulers then forced the Lhotsampas to wear the gho and the kira, thick, robe-like national dresses unsuitable for the South’s climate. The state also required them to obtain a ‘No Objection Certificate’ in order to work, to get a license or to attend a school. Moreover, Dzongkha, an underdeveloped Tibetan language, was made the mode of education in schools and colleges, withdrawing the curriculum in Nepali.

By the mid-90’s, nearly 100,000 Lhotsampas were forced to leave the country. The refugees initially spilled into India but ultimately landed in south-eastern Nepal in the seven UNHCR-run camps.

From their camps in Jhapa and Morang, Bhutanese refugees have staged various attempts to go back to their homeland. But none of the attempts have succeeded so far. The closest that they came was in 2007, when the refugees, under the banner of a ‘long march’, tried to cross the Mechi Bridge and enter Bhutan through India—an act that resulted in clashes with Indian security forces, in a which a refugee died.

Since then, not a single attempt has been made in that direction. Instead, Bhutanese refugees are increasingly opting for resettlement in Western countries, thanks to a 2006 offer floated by the international community. In a process described by UNHCR as world’s largest refugee resettlement programme that began in November 2007, European countries and the US have pledged to resettle over 80,000 refugees, with the US alone accepting 60,000.

With over 32,000 of the refugees already resettled, the issue has entered a new phase. A chasm has appeared between the older generation which favours repatriation and the younger generation that has grown up in the camps and is attracted to third-country resettlement.

Where does the Bhutanese refugee movement stand after two decades of failed attempts at repatriation? The first observation analysts make in this direction is the fact that the refugee leadership has not been able to forge a united front. “We have not been able to stay together,” agrees Tek Nath Rizal, a refugee leader. He attributes this disunity to the absence of democratic culture among the leadership, while pointing out that Bhutanese themselves were never exposed to a democratic set-up. “They were socialised in an environment where the king was the final authority and whatever he said was the law of the land,” says Rizal who himself was once a confidant of the king and a Royal Advisory Councillor. A similar sentiment is echoed by Balaram Paudel, President of Bhutan People’s Party, who says that the need to survive forced the leadership to disperse in different directions.

Journalist I.P. Adhikari, who is also a Bhutanese refugee, negates the argument that a united leadership would have enabled the movement to gain momentum. “The leaders lack vision for Bhutan and are unaware of what’s going on inside the country. They still rely on their outdated perceptions of the 90’s,” he says, “Those living inside the country don’t trust them.”

Bilateral talks between Bhutan and Nepal have yielded very little. The closest the Bhutanese side came to resolving the crisis was during the joint verification process in 2003. But the process came to a halt after a dispute occured in the Khudunabari refugee camp and the Bhutanese delegation abruptly left for home. With Nepal plunging into its own political crisis since then, bilateral talks have been pushed to the backburner.

“Our movement has not been able to yield results as expected as we don’t have a significant say in the dealings between the two governments,” agrees Rizal. Paudel argues that by projecting the Bhutanese refugee issue as an ethnic problem and not that of democracy, the media and the international community have not helped their cause.

One of the most important developments in the movement has been the third-country resettlement option that many refugees have chosen. Initial reports suggested leaders like Rizal opposed the move, but he clarifies, “The issue of third country settlement and repatriation to Bhutan should go together.” Adhikari believes resettlement will work in favour of the refugees in a more subtle way. Indeed, the growing activities of advocacy in Western countries in recent times—a shadow report presented in Geneva early this year at the UN’s Universal Periodic Review contradicted the Bhutanese government’s claim of a clean human rights record, while the Bhutanese government-sponsored Gross National Happiness conference in the US saw refugees offering a different narrative of ‘gross suffering’--seem to give credence to Adhikari’s views.

Opinions are currently divided on the issue of resettlement. Rizal says that those opting for the resettlement are younger people, and that it would be difficult for the movement to go on in their absence. But among the refugees themselves, there is little hope that repatriation will happen during their lifetime. Rizal says, “This (repatriation) would be a formidable challenge as the entire society is in exile.” Thinley Penjore, a former Secretary General of Bhutan Chambers of Commerce and Industry and now the head of the Druk National Congress (Democratic), says the Bhutanese movement will have to take a different tack from now. “A physical war is not possible,” he says, “We have to work for reconciliation through peaceful means.”

Despite the differing views on how the movement will shape up, the only thing certain for now is that more and more refugees are opting for resettlement. The Bhutanese government seems highly unkeen to resolve the issue, though Bhutan itself saw a wave of democracy with its first elections in 2008. Even then, those who have opted for resettlement believe their move will ultimately help the movement. Adhikari, for instance, moved to Australia on Wednesday, but still harbours the hope that his country will change. “The more we advocate internationally, the more people inside Bhutan will benefit. They can’t directly raise their voice for reform, so the onus is upon us to do that now.”

This appeared in today's The Kathmandu Post.

Related links:
My piece in Nepali at Blogmandu on World Refugee Day (with pics).
Pieces on resettlement here and here.
On Tenzing Zangpo: here and here.
Review of Tek Nath Rizal's book.
My report from camp on KB Khadka's murder.

Postcard from Nepal

2010-07-31T09:40:00.000+05:30

My piece published at Foreign Policy in Focus:

Nepal is a tiny Himalayan nation sandwiched between two mighty Asian rivals: India and China. New Delhi and Beijing are using Nepal’s territory to wage a proxy war against each other. This interference in Nepal’s internal affairs has contributed to a political crisis that has already claimed one prime minister and threatens to undermine the peace process begun four years ago. Read more:

Adoption in Nepal: Paper Orphans

2010-07-27T11:24:00.004+05:30

Lalitpur, NEPAL--Kishan Sarki's language and gestures suggest that he is a young boy of Catalonia, Spain where he is living now. His English has a Spanish accent. He uses Facebook and helps his mother in arranging spoons and forks in the kitchen. Before this, he wanders by the seaside with his mother, Rosa Mestres. A while later; they enter into a dance party.

But soon, there appears Humla, Jumla, and the rural Karnali of Nepal where Bodoma Sarki, who lives in abject poverty, looks saddened for being separated from her eldest son. A decade ago, she handed her son to the director of Humla Red Cross, Nara Bahadur Rokaya, with ten thousand rupees (Approx 135 US$). Her heart cries now, not just because her son has gone abroad, but to hear him say "mom" to another woman.

These scenes are from Paper Orphans, a documentary film inaugurated at Patan Museum Hall in an evening early March. After the performance by Kutumba, the program attended by several representativesof national and foreign organizations working on children sector, the film was shown. It transported the audience from villages in remote Karnali region to the European countries.

Rosa, a Spain native, waited for three years for permission to adopt Kishan. She took the 6-years-old boy from Balmandir, a government-run child home in Kathmandu to Catalonia in Spain. All along came the responsibility of bringing him up. But, Rosa was surprised when she came to know that Kishan had parents in Nepal. With tears trickling down her eyes, she says: "We were told that he didn't have any parents and relatives." Bodoma Sarki, on other side, who is living a very difficult life in a stone house in the Himalayan foothills, repents: "It would be nice to have my son on my laps." She says Kishan was sent to Kathmandu for education.

The scenes like these are not only heart touching, but Paper Orphans, also has investigative journalism in it. The documentary directed by Marie-Ange Sylvain, is a joint production of Switzerland-based Terre des hommes and UNICEF. According to Joseph Aguettant, Nepal Delegate, Terre des hommes (Tdh), the purpose of making the documentary is to show that there are other ways to deal with children rather than making them paper orphans and supplying them to European countries. He says, "We are not against inter-country adoption per se."

The crew of Image Ark Pvt. Limited, the producer of the film, were able to capture the scenes as wide-ranging as from Spain, France, Humla and children homes in Kathmandu. For example, Dharma Raj Shrestha, member of Central Child Welfare Board, rudely remarks that the children are adopted to Europe because there are more facilities in Europe than in Nepal. Similarly, when Joseph Aguettant and his team reaches Helpless Children Protection Home to know about one child sent abroad, the manager of the center, Sabitri Basnet, says: "This is my organization, this is my home. Please don't be forceful."

According to the joint report released in 2008 by UNICEF and Terre des hommes, 60 per cent of children living in orphanage homes are not orphans. According to another report, 1500 children are missing from Humla district alone. Among them, boys had been taken to orphanage homes in Kathmandu and girls sold in India.

In 2007, Nepal government banned inter-country adoption but it was re-opened in 2009. Organizations like Terre des hommes demand a suspension of inter-country adoption till Nepal follows Hague standards.

The local people of Thehe, remote area in Humla, a 6 hours trek from Simikot, Humla's headquarters, say that Chakra Shahi, member of parliament, took ten thousand rupees per child saying that the children will be placed in an institution for education. In the film, a young man says, "Bal Mandir is like a business organization. Children are selected for sale the way nice he-goats selected from the herd." In one part of the documentary, Joseph says that poverty is not the reason children are trafficked. He says, "Parents send their children for their bright future." The main problem is the lack of public awareness. The documentary is actually well-placed to sensitize the issue. Awareness can be raised in local people of remote areas through this documentary.

Published in Kantipur Daily on March 23, 2010

(Translated by Bidhya Rai for Tdh and edited by myself)

Related article at The Kathmandu Post.

My blog on child trafficking for adoption:

A Sarchop in Bhutanese Jail

2010-07-05T12:16:00.015+05:30

Where is Zangpo?

DEEPAK ADHIKARI

Travelling north on the Mechi Highway, terraced rice fields give way to tea plantations that carpet the foot of the hills. From Happen Chowk, strangely named after the shorts, we head east, driving through a deeply-rutted road penetrating the Burne tea plantation in Jhapa towards the Timai refugee camp.

The Timai camp, one of the seven UNHCR-overseen Bhutanese refugee camps, sits on the edge of the Timai River. About 100 km away from Bhutan, the area adjacent to the hills is as topographically close to the refugees’ homeland as it can get. But for now, home is a small bamboo hut where life is spent just waiting.

Amid the hundreds of huts, we drive towards the end of the sprawling camp. Past the stupas and the settlement of Sarchops, one of the three major ethnic groups of Bhutan and probably the original inhabitants of the country, we come to a hut with a solitary inhabitant. Fifty-year-old Karma Zangpo weaves a sweater while waiting for us. A mother of two, her eyes are rheumy and her words punctuated by sobs. Karma has earned a different epithet inside the camp; she is known as the wife of the most high-profile political prisoner in Bhutan—Tenzing Zangpo.

Fifty five-year-old Zangpo, the general secretary of Druk National Congress-Democratic (DNC-D), a splinter group founded by the Sarchops, was deported to his country by the Indian state of Assam’s police in April last year. On Nov. 10, 2008, he was arrested in Guwahati along with Sabin Boro of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland, a separatist outfit active in northeast India. The Assam Police booked him under the Explosive Substances Act and Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.

But these charges turned out to be false, and after three months, Zangpo was released in April. Karma had deposited bail for her husband in two installments of IRs. 10,000. The court passed a release order on Apr. 3, 2009, but the day he was supposed to be released, he was arrested again. Later, it was confirmed that Zangpo had been handed over to Bhutanese authorities.

I first met Karma in April that year. She was still coming to terms with the fact that her trip to Assam, made in the hope of reuniting with her husband, was shattered in front of her eyes. Short and slender, she appeared to be a demure woman forced into dealing with the complex and often ruthless world of politics involving three countries: Nepal, India and Bhutan.

Zangpo’s case is an example of how India and Bhutan work hand in hand for their interests and how Nepal’s Bhutanese refugees—marked by factionalism and petty interests—are helpless in lobbying for one of its leaders’ release. Though he was a member of the DNC-D when he was arrested, Zangpo had been a member of two more parties earlier: the Bhutan National Democratic Party, and the Bhutan People’s Party. Karma bitterly complains about DNC-D’s failure to demand his release. Referring to the party president Thinley Penjore, she says, “Since he’s our leader, he should have called me. I was not expecting him to feed me.”

Karma has made it a point to establish contacts with her husband and know his whereabouts. She has procured a form from the International Red Cross Committee (ICRC). After submitting it, ICRC will hand it over to Zangpo during one of its monitoring visits, if the jail where he is detained falls under its purview. Apart from legal recourse, Karma has also sought divine intervention through a Lama in Sikkim, who told her that her husband was fine, but it would take time to know all the details.

Still, Karma hasn’t lost hope. She lives mostly in a friend’s house in Birtamod, where she weaves woollen sweaters and shawls for living. She says her husband’s food rations have been slashed, forcing her to rely on the allowances of her two children, 15-year-old daughter Sangey and 10-year-old son Minjure. To add insult to the injury, she has been de-registered from the camp because she wasn’t there to collect her ration card. She is now waiting for the regular UNHCR census to register her case, which is why she is in the camps these days.

Little is known about her husband who is projected as a national threat to his country. Because of his arrest with a separatist leader, he was projected by the Indian media as someone having links with insurgents. In a picture taken immediately after his arrest, he wears a flower-embroidered shirt and looks much thinner than earlier. Bhutanese leaders who worked with him say that he frequently travelled to the North-East where he had good contacts. Zangpo was a rural credit officer in the Agriculture Department in Chukha district before he left Bhutan in 1993. His colleagues describe him as a dedicated refugee leader who was very fluent in English. A vocal opponent of the monarchy and a relentless fighter for the refugees’ right to return, his friends say he was amicable and independent.

For those who think that the refugees consist of only the Lhotsampas (Nepali-speaking south Bhutanese), Zangpo will seem like an oddity. But the Sarchops, the largest ethnic group in Bhutan, has faced suppression and discrimination from the ruling elites of Thimpu dominated by the Ngalongs. As a result, several Sarchop dissidents have fled the kingdom to escape persecution. Rongthong Kunley Dorji, a prominent Sarchop businessman, fled the country in 1993 after being jailed for over a month. He sought asylum in Nepal where a year later he founded Druk National Congress. In 1997, he was arrested in New Delhi and then released a year later with severe restrictions on his movement. In December last year, the Delhi High Court eased the restrictions: he can now travel abroad after obtaining permission from authorities. Thinley Penjore, another Sarchop, now heads DNC-D from Kathmandu. These three prominent Sarchop leaders are now scattered in the three countries.

Where could Zangpo be? Though the Bhutanese regime is extremely secretive about its political prisoners, rumours about his presence in a certain jail continue to float around in the camps. According to a refugee, a few months back, a police personnel saw Zangpo in a Bhutanese jail. Another refugee claims that he’s detained in Chemgang, which is notorious as a death camp. But Chemgang, which has the largest number of political prisoners, is frequently visited by ICRC, and new prisoners will be highlighted by the organisation—which seems unlikely in Zangpo’s case. Balaram Paudel, president of Bhutan People’s Party, says that Zangpo might have been taken to Dradulmakhang, an underground army prison—Bhutanese refugee leader Tek Nath Rizal has described this jail as a place “whose very name evoked fear.” Paudel believes Zangpo was first shifted to Chukha jail after he was deported, where the Bhutanese government had filed a case accusing Zangpo of embezzling 200,000 ngultrum. In 1993, Kuensel, the government mouthpiece, had published a notice of death penalty for him.

In her spartan hut in Timai, Karma recalls the times she spent with her husband. She says he had already predicted his deportation. “He would often worry about the family in case he was arrested and handed over to Bhutan,” she says. Nevertheless, she is sure that Zangpo will return. “I’m waiting for that day,” she says, with a small smile.

Nepal: Descent into Chaos

2010-05-07T11:22:00.000+05:30

This piece, written a few days before the Maoist strike paralyzed the country, was published at the Seattle Post Globe.

KATHMANDU, Nepal – On the afternoon of April 16, I was driving back from my 94-year-old grandma’s house on the outskirts of Kathmandu to my office in the downtown. Driving on the dusty road on the edge of Nepal’s only international airport, I came upon an unusually high number of vehicles. The hitherto empty road was busy with traffic.

My wife, Kabita, who was riding behind me, suspected that something was wrong, saying maybe there’s a strike (called bandh in the local dialect). I dismissed her comment. But as we entered the newly constructed six-lane highway, the situation began to get clearer. The road was a picture of chaos – a blockade had caused a huge back up of traffic. Several vehicles were turning around and many passengers were stranded. In a situation like this, no one can tell you what’s going on. Everyone seems in a hurry either to get beyond the barricade or return to safety.

My office was just a few blocks away. So, I decided to go ahead. Leaving behind other vehicles, I drove on. When I was about to reach the intersection at Koteshwar, a bustling neighborhood in this suburb, a middle aged man who was followed by a bevy of youngsters, stopped my motorcycle and snatched the keys. Within seconds, I grabbed the keys back and asked him why the traffic was stopped. He told me they were protesting the death of a child in a road accident a couple of days back. The dead baby boy's father had driven a motorcycle while his mother and baby on the back when a truck hit the motorcycle. The couple was seriously injured; the infant died on the spot.

I displayed my press ID and explained to him that it was media people like me who often risked their lives to support their cause. It was merely my trick to persuade him to let me go through, though I am always a supporter of peaceful protests against injustice. But I never approve such unruly acts that create disarray for hundreds of travelers. He did allow me to go forward, but, sensing that the unrest could get worse farther ahead, I asked my wife to get off the bike.

An intersection ahead looked like a battlefield, with stone carrying, and visibly angry protesters on the one side and baton wielding policemen on the other. I was sure from my previous experiences that if I could convince one of the protesters, I would be able to safely cross the tense area. But as I drove my bike, a group of protesters started to throw stones at me. Luckily, a police inspector came to rescue me from the attack and escorted me for a few minutes. I left the area unhurt. But the incident shook me in a way I had never experienced.

I’m narrating the incident in detail not only because impromptu protests like these have become common occurrences in Nepal, but also because it shows how angry and frustrated Nepalese are. Also, my hunch is that the fury was directed less at the law enforcement agency that was unable to punish the guilty (in this case the driver) and more at the way the country is (mal) functioning. Indeed, the country is gradually sliding towards anarchy and lawlessness.

Everyone agrees that it’s not easy being Nepal these days. It has a herculean task ahead. In less than a month, the deadline to draft a constitution ends. A 601 member constituent assembly that was elected two years ago is tasked with writing the constitution. A decade-long Maoist insurgency and government counterinsurgency has claimed 13,000 lives with thousands injured and hundreds disappeared. Not a single person (neither from the Army nor from the Maoists) has been punished for numerous wartime crimes. Transitional justice is still only in words not in deeds and a culture of impunity has and is likely to prevail.

Thus, Nepalese have paid a heavy price. And peace seems ever elusive with the former rebels threatening to carry out revolt and the political party leaders upon whom the people have placed high hopes have fallen back on their role of bickering and infighting. Corruption is rampant and unemployment is rising.

The largely mountainous country which is bordered in the north by China and elsewhere by India, both emerging Asian powers, has lagged far behind the rest of the world. It still is one of the poorest countries in the world. While the citizens of our neighboring countries are having what seems like a party (with double digit growth and rapid development), we feel like poor cousins who were uninvited.

But it’s our own making. In Nepal, the hereditary Rana family ruled the country with an iron fist for over a century while India’s infrastructure was laid by the British. Even the end of Rana rule in 1950 could not ensure freedom and democracy, a prerequisite for inclusive growth and overall development. King Mahendra snatched power from a democratically elected government and introduced a party less and autocratic Panchayat system that ruled Nepal for the next 30 years until 1990.

The ruling elite and the Kathmandu bourgeois were the ones who took maximum advantage of those three decades of tyranny. During this period, I grew up in the eastern hills of Nepal, on the margins, reading the regime’s propaganda in the name of text books.

With the reinstitution of democracy in the spring of 1990 came the promise of a new Nepal. But a ‘People’s War’ waged by Maoists in mid-1990s dashed those hopes. The hope was revived after the mass protests in the spring of 2006 that was instrumental in ending both the Maoist insurgency and the 240-year-old monarchy, thereby paving the way for the world’s youngest republic.

But like everything else in Nepal, uncertainty looms large vis-à-vis the dramatic decisions taken during the crucial and transitional period that have had far reaching consequences. The changes have taken place have occurred only as part of negotiations among the various political parties. Therefore, the likelihood of these transformations being retracted (due to lack of commitment and institutionalizing) cannot be fully ruled out. Also, some of the changes are seemingly cosmetic.

And it’s not like Nepal’s lack of social and economic growth can be blamed on a lack of resources. It is, in fact, endowed with immense resources – hydropower, tourism, the export business and agriculture are some of the many untapped sectors. But this is a country whose main exports are human beings. Two million of Nepal’s 28 million people are working on foreign shores. Nepalese migrant workers toil in often sub-human conditions in the Gulf countries and the country’s fragile economy hinges on the remittances they send.

For a country that prides itself in never being colonized when the entire Indian sub-continent was in the grip of the British, its dependence on the international community and the southern neighbor India is an unpleasant fact. So is the fact that one of world’s oldest nation states is grappling with issues like drafting a constitution, restructuring the state and ensuring their deserved place in the new state apparatus to the hitherto marginalized communities.

On that April afternoon, after I arrived at my company office which is the publisher of one of Nepal’s leading dailies, I sat at my desk and gave the incident a hard thought. After a while, I shared my experience – where else? – on my facebook page. Several comments soon popped up with my friends suggesting to me to be careful and play it safe.

Indeed, these are apt suggestions for our leaders and common people alike, in whose hands remain the future of the struggling nation.

Kathmandu Dispatch: A Day in Maoist Strike

2010-05-05T16:46:00.001+05:30

On a balmy morning Monday, the Maoist protesters clogged the main intersection at Koteshwar, Kathmandu, singing and dancing in the ‘revolutionary songs’.

Helmeted battalions of policemen in riot gear were mere bystanders. Kirant Rajya Samiti of Maoists was responsible for overseeing the protests in Koteshwar area, one of 18 such points where Maoist staged protests. Hence, most of the protesters here were from eastern hills of Nepal. Maoist supporters came from districts such as Ramechhap, Khotang, Solukhumbu, Okhaldhunga. Most of the supporters are brought from far flung areas while a few arrived from surrounding districts (but mostly from rural areas). Some were even forced to participate.

Meet Suresh Rai, a 30-year-old member of Kirant State Secretariat. He along with one hundred fifty Maoist supporters arrived in the capital five days back. “We came in 2-3 groups,” he says. “We’ll continue to protest as long as people will support us.” Hailing from a family of farmers, Suresh says it’s tough for them in the hills to feed the hungry bellies of 7 members of his family.

As we speak, music blares from the huge sound boxes–there’s a makeshift stage built on a truck. Incessant singing and dancing is going on. In between, there are poetry recitations. Flags with hammer and sickle are waved, YCL, the notorious youth outfit of Maoists has a distinct air about them: bandana in their heads, some covering the entire body with the flags.

They’ve been sheltered in several places in Kathmandu Valley ranging from the party palaces and under construction buildings to Nepal Law Campus, Ratna Rajya Laxmi Campus, Rastriya Sabha Grisha in the city center.

This has turned out like rural Nepal meeting urban Nepal as most of the village folks have arrived in capital Kathmandu for the first time.

But it’s only natural because Maoists have drawn support largely from marginalized communities such as Dalits (so-called untouchables), janajatis (the ethnic people), Madhesis (the people from plains), among others.

Dil Bahadur Bika, a Dalit from Phulbari village of Okhaldhunga, has come to Kathmandu for the first time. In the village, he runs a grocery store (that also sells cosmetics). But as a sole breadwinner of the family, he had to close it because there’s no one to look after. The 35-year-old, a YCL member, is living with other Maoists in a party palace in Kaushaltar, two kilometer north from Koteshwar.

The protesters’ routine goes thus: they leave for the strike at 6 pm. The lunch time will be from 9 am to 11 am. They observe strict discipline while attending the strike. They stay in the one of 18 points till 3 pm. At 3 pm, they participate in the rally. The evening is the time for torch rally. They finally return home after 6pm. Another cycle of strike and they repeat the routine.
Back to the Koteshwar: A song that is tinged with revolutionary fervor blares from the speakers and Dil Bahadur Bika pirouettes in its music. The song goes:

Arun Tarera Nana Tamar Tarera
Aayaun Hami Birata Ko Gatha Korera

(After Crossing Arun River and Tamor River
We Came Writing the Saga of Bravery)

Similarly, another song evokes the war time nostalgia. It talks about Tyamke village in Khotang, where according to the song; the hills are painted red and are crying (for justice).

The protests despite the initial apprehensions are peaceful. The May Day rally was a huge success but on Day 2, it seems like the protest is waning.

First published at the United We Blog!

A Journey Postponed

2010-04-20T14:28:00.008+05:30

I was supposed to participate in a journalism conference in Geneva, Switzerland on April 22. But I didn't think it wise to go ahead as the news of thousands of stranded passengers from all over the world kept pouring in. I don't want to be the next victim of the crazy volcano!

The 6th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (April 22-25) was supposed to bring together nearly 600 journalists from around the world. But that number now must be dwindling. Three more Alfred Friendly Fellows were supposed to participate but it's not clear whether they will be able to do so.

The keynote speaker of the opening ceremony is veteran Italian investigative journalist Roberto Saviano. Other speakers include American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

In the conference, I was supposed to talk about human trafficking along with three other journalists. I have a longstanding interest in investigative journalism (but I must say, I haven't done much in this regard in past year, except the Time Magazine story on the trafficking of Somali refugees to Nepal). But back in September 2004, I did a story on the trafficking of former Gurkhas and other blue collar workers into the US Army base in Iraq.

Similarly, I have done stories on kidney trade and got the opportunity to be featured in a documentary by Italian film makers. I broke the story of sex trade in Thamel in the August 2004 issue of Nepal magazine following which the police raided the massage parlours (I don’t approve such police actions). Lately, I’ve been focusing on migrant workers issue.

The investigative journalism is an area quite lacking in Nepal’s media sector. There are a few reasons behind it: the big media houses are reluctant to invest on investigative reporting, there are very few journos who are well-trained and interested in this area; Nepal’s politicization of everything and the interdependency among various sectors (for example you can’t probe a company that gives you the advertisements), among others.

Recently, as part of my preparation for the tour, I met a Belgian friend who has also lived in Netherlands in the 1980s for many years. When he knew about the conference, he remarked: “Investigative journalism is an area that’s very urgent in Nepal. You have to expose the wrongdoing, the corruption, the power abuse!” I totally agree with him.

After visiting US in 2008, I was looking forward to the Europe tour and this conference seemed like a perfect opportunity. But owing to the sudden outbreak of the volcano, I am forced to cancel my travel plans.

Kumari of Patan, the Living Goddess

2010-03-20T15:34:00.002+05:30

The Goddess’ exams

Deepak Adhikari

Mar 20 - It’s not easy crossing the fabled Iron Gates of the SLC, even for a goddess.

On a recent afternoon, Chanira Bajracharya, the Kumari of Patan, greeted her visitors with composure and patience very unlike her tender age. For nine years, she has been the Living Goddess of Patan, and now, very soon, she will appear for the School Leaving Certificate Examinations with nearly 400,000 students across Nepal. At that moment, the Goddess will become a mortal, much like any of us.

Sitting on a long sofa, the Kumari answers in monosyllables, preferring English over Nepali. At times, she chuckles, but she is quiet mostly. In between our conversation, she peeks through the latticed window of the four-storey house at Hakhabahal to look at the passer-bys below.

But beneath the veneer of the divine is a girl who has very little exposure of the world outside. Instead, her knowledge comes from books gifted by foreign visitors, books such as Guide to Space, Kingfisher Book of Space, and Atlas of the World. There is a keen sense of curiosity within her, and she says she has read all of them.

The spacious room where devotees pay her a visit today will double as an exam room from March 25. A solitary desk, and two guards—that is all the company she will have in this exam centre.

The Patan Kumari is a student at Bhassara Secondary School in Purnachandi, a ten-minute walk from her house. But she’s never been to the school. Instead, her teachers come home to teach her. Her birth parents have also hired private tutors for her. But it’s difficult knowing about the world, and learning about it from books alone. When her social studies teacher talked about the trafficking of Nepali girls to India, she could not understand what she was talking about. Similarly, when she was given an assignment to write about footpath vendors, she was dumbfounded, for, obviously, she had never seen one or eaten the street-side food that many sell, and many her age relish.

The only friends Chanira has are her two brothers, aged nine and 12. She likes to sketch, a trait she might have inherited from her father, who is also a painter. But being a goddess can be “interesting”, she says. Ornately dressed in her bright-red gown, a very-conspicuous painted third eye in the middle of her forehead is accentuated by kajal on both her eyes.

Chanira replaced Chandrashila Bajracharya, the Kumari of Patan on April 6, 2001. Chanira was only six; the eldest child of Netra Raj Bajracharya and Champa Bajracharya. Two months later, an enraged Crown Prince Dipendra killed his parents, and the downfall of the Shah dynasty had begun. Chanira’s mother recalls the Kumari hadn’t spoken for several days before the massacre—a portent of the misfortune that was to fall on the nation.

The Kumari is believed to be an incarnation of the Goddess Taleju, and the tradition of a Living Goddess has its roots in the 17th century legends surrounding King Jaya Prakash Malla. According to them, Jaya Prakash Malla (in some version it’s Pratap Malla) was playing a game of dice with the Goddess Taleju when the king lusted after the goddess (in yet another version, the king’s wife heard her husband conversing with another woman and entered the room that was barred to all). A furious goddess was then placated by the king, and she vowed to reappear in the body of a virgin girl thereby sending him into a frenetic search of her mortal manifestation.

There are strict rules for the Kumari that have been well-documented in several books. The girl must be a Newar, prepubescent, and endowed with battis lakshan (32 ideal characteristics). These include “a neck like a conch shell, eyelashes like a cow, chest like a lion, voice soft and clear as a duck’s”. While the girl is a Kumari, she should not be seriously ill, and there should not be any loss of blood from her body such as the beginning of her menstrual cycles. This effectively marks the end of her tenure.

The institution of the Kumari is emblematic of the syncretic Hindu-Buddhist culture prevalent in the Valley. While all the three cities of the Valley have a Kumari each, the Kumari of Kathmandu is considered the most important. Patan’s Kumari may not be as famous as her Kathmandu counterpart; nevertheless, she plays an equally important role during festivals such as Indra Jatra, Machchindranath Jatra, and Dashain. She’s allowed to venture out 19 times a year, mostly during festivals. In Kathmandu, the Kumari is chosen from the Shakya clan, whereas in Patan, they come from the Bajracharya clan, the Newar-Buddhist priests.

In recent years, however, the practice has courted controversy, with 2005 lawsuit by Pun Devi Maharjan demanding an end to the tradition, claiming the practice violated child rights. A year later, Chunda Bajracharya, a professor of culture at Tribhuvan University, filed another petition demanding the continuation of the tradition. Though a 2007 committee declared that the tradition doesn’t violate human rights, it also ordered the Kumaris’ parents to educate them.

That is how Chanira came to study. And that is how the Living Goddess is preparing for the toughest exams, studying her course books three hours every day and attending tuitions daily in the mornings and evenings. On one such tuition, Abha Awale, her social studies teacher, asks her to memorise the five development regions of Nepal and prepare a list of UN agencies and organisations. A while later, the Kumari picked up a Creative English Practice book and SLC model questions from a row of her books behind her kept in order.

Leaving behind their past, many Kumaris have opted for a career. Though a few have remained single, many have married contrary to the common notion that marrying an ex-Kumari is fatal. Rashmila Shakya, 28, who was a Royal Kumari from 1984 to 1992, and also co-wrote the 2005 book From Goddess to Mortal, has completed her Bachelor’s degree in information technology and is now a computer software developer in a private IT firm.

Back at the Patan Kumari’s house, I ask her what she plans to do after the SLC. Or, for that matter, her post-Kumari life? Chanira is not very sure what her life would be like when her divine role ends. She wants to study commerce and pursue a career in banking. So maybe, a career switch from being a Living Goddess, to an investment banker is not too far-fetched a dream.

Originally published in The Kathmandu Post. Pic by Shruti Shrestha

Memoir: A Tribute to My Grandfather

2010-02-28T14:14:00.001+05:30

Shortly after I said goodbye to my colleagues at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and reached my apartment, a fifteen-minute-walk from the office in Pittsburgh—a city in the U.S. known both for its three rivers and its industrial past—my wife Kabita called me from Nepal to say that my paternal grandfather had passed away. I paused for a while as her voice became barely audible. It was early June and the sun was just about sinking into the horizon.

I wasn’t shocked to hear the news because when I left Nepal in early March that year in 2008, my 93-year-old grandfather Dhanya Prasad Adhikari was literally on his deathbed. On a freezing January night, he fell down on the floor while on his way to the restroom. His back was badly bruised. When the doctors at a nearby hospital cited his frail health as hazardous for any sort of operation, we reluctantly brought him to my youngest uncle’s house in Jorpati, Kathmandu.

I feel overwhelmingly sad thinking about his final days. He spent the last few evenings of his life in a one-floored concrete house of his youngest son whose family looked after both him and his wife, our grandmother. His youngest daughter, who lived nearby, often visited her ailing parents. He would have never imagined that his last days would be so dismal, so pathetic. Of late, he could not even recognise his offspring, let alone distant relatives. When he turned 93, I had sparked off a talk about celebrating his near-centenary. He was excited about the birthday bash. But I had then headed home in eastern Nepal to celebrate Dashain, and now, I regret my poor planning.

My grandfather had impressed many with his astrological expertise. He was educated in Sanskrit, and used to recite the Bhagwad Gita and the Mahabharata. His life was interwoven with Hindu scriptures that invariably formed his paraphernalia. Even though he was a Hindu priest, my grandfather never complained when I often drifted away from strict Hindu norms—I neither wear the janai, the sacred thread that is worn after bratabandha, nor do I miss a chance to relish on buffalo meat. He knew about this ‘deviation’, but always kept mum.

He had been a man of action, always on the move. He would leave Thumbedin (our ancestral home in the remote hills of north-eastern Nepal) and trek a few days to the southern plains and in turn to Kathmandu. In early 1980s, when we were living in Kuljhoda, an inner plains village near Urlabari in Morang, I accompanied him on one of his travels. Eschewing the east-west highway, we travelled through lush paddy fields along the dirt tracks. We waded though Ratuwa khola and reached Gauradah. It was his typical way of familiarising me with our distant relatives.

He traversed the north-east of India to meet the other Adhikaris there and gather information for his book on the genealogy of Adhikaris, called Adhikari Ko Vanshawali. The book (in Nepali verse) was published in the old letterhead press in late 1980s. He used to carry several books along and distribute to bookstores in the small towns in eastern Nepal. But as he grew old and his health withered, the books remained in his house, undistributed and unused. I still have a tattered copy of the book.

He undertook the excursions all alone, leaving the grandmother to fend for the kids. She had to bear the brunt of raising six sons and three daughters. In addition to that, she would also work in the farm. In his native village, my grandfather was a respected figure. He sent his children to school and they grew up to become teachers, businessmen, and government employees. He always took pride in the education of his children and encouraged village folks to follow the suit, an unorthodox notion at that time.

I’m now worried about my grandmother who has been shoved into solitude, without the intimacy of the person she loved all her life. I wonder how she copes as she often wished that she would die earlier. They had been together through thick and thin for nearly 75 years of their lives.

The most inspiring thing to me has been his unwavering support for my decision to pursue journalism. My family was skeptical when I chose journalism as my career. They did not think of it as a worthy profession (that is very true in terms of monetary gain). But my grandfather would be delighted to talk about my small accomplishments. He would encourage me when I was working hard to establish myself as a journalist. He would love to see my name printed in a newspaper or a magazine. Even in his twilight years, he would ask me whether I had brought a copy of Nepal Weekly, the Nepali language magazine I worked for. He would flip through the pages and ask me about the topics I had covered. With his big old eyes, his body leaning against a pillow, he would search for my name. He always loved words.

Besides his book on the Adhikari lineage, he was in the process of publishing a second book on astronomical aspects of the consummation of marriage. He showed me the manuscript. It was fine but book publishing is still not profitable in Nepal. He somehow wanted it to be published. He had asked me to find a publisher, because he thought that since I worked at a news publication, I would be able to help him. Me, I kept on promising, albeit knowing that I could not be of any help. My job and life’s other obligations kept me busy from pursuing a publisher. I am sorry that he could not see the book being published in his lifetime. Now, the manuscript is gathering dust in Jorpati.

This originally appeared in The Kathmandu Post on Saturday.

Why Are Nepali Workers Dying Abroad?

2010-02-21T12:53:00.002+05:30

This appeared in The Kathmandu Post on Saturday.

A Casket of Dreams

Deepak Adhikari

KATHMANDU—One drizzly afternoon in early 2008, Karuna Subba of Chandragadhi, Jhapa was listlessly squatting on her haunches outside the Tribhuvan International Airport’s Arrival terminal. Dozens of migrant workers, each of them rolling trolleys laden with heavy luggage, strode past her. Karuna steadfastly waited; she wasn’t there to greet a living relative.

After the flow of passengers from Saudi Arabia died out, a casket was brought out--with the body of Karuna’s husband, Mani Kumar Subba, inside it.

There were no tears to greet her husband. Mani Kumar had died in Saudi Arabia in September the previous year. Karuna had cried her heart out then, at what seemed like a cruel joke: The day before he died, Mani Kumar had called her to say from a friend’s birthday party to tell her that he would be coming home two weeks later.

In the four months since Mani Kumar’s death, Karuna ran from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the employment agency that had hired her husband. She was told that her husband was found dead in a swimming pool, and that it would take a while for the body to be brought back. No more questions were asked.

Scenes such as these are played out daily at the international airport. On an average, each day, two dead Nepalis return in coffins from the much-vaunted destinations for economic migrations. In 2009 alone, at least 600 Nepalis died in the Gulf countries, and in Malaysia. Unfortunately, for the families left behind in Nepal, it is an agonizingly long wait. They run from pillar to post to bring the bodies of their loved ones back, a process which at times takes up to six months.

Why are migrant workers, lauded as the bedrock of Nepal’s fragile, remittance-dependent economy, dying in such huge numbers? Pushpa Bhattarai, section officer at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tries to explain these deaths through several reasons: lack of “pre-departure orientation” (which leads to “road accidents”), lack of good accommodations, unhealthy lifestyles, work loads, depression, and the “unbearably hot temperature” which have extreme consequences on Nepalis, who are mostly from the hills.

One of the leading causes of death among migrant workers is heart failure. In 2009, the death of 174 Nepalis working abroad was attributed to cardiac arrest. But there is a darker side to this attribution. Most of those who died seem to have died in their sleep (suteko sutai marne). According to Bhattarai, this is because most labourers work in extremely hot desert temperatures of 50 to 55 degree Celsius, and when their bodies cannot adjust to their air-conditioned rooms immediately; hence, the deaths.

Many deaths are also attributed to road accidents. Bhattarai explains, “In the Middle East, normal highway speeds are around 140 km per hour. Most Nepalis are not used to such speeds and try crossing the road the same way they do back home.” A proper orientation to foreign country-bound workers can prevent this. Many migrant workers drive heavy vehicles and often die in collisions, Bhattarai says. “But these are not the only reasons,” he says, “There have been murders among Nepalis and some have committed suicides due to family tensions back home.”

It may be accepted that death is a part of life too, but for the families of most migrant workers, it is after their loved one’s demise that the real struggles begin. In the Gulf, where labour rights are practically non-existent and the notions of accountability and transparency are still foreign, the process of sending the dead bodies and claiming dues and insurances fall under the duties of the Nepali Embassy in the country. But there is a long way to go for the Nepali bureaucrats in the Gulf to execute these processes.

According to Bhattarai, language is the first barrier. Arabic is the sole medium of conversation. Hence, the Nepali embassy in Saudi Arabia has finally hired two Arabic-speaking non-natives who deal with the companies. According to him, in Saudi Arabia, there is evidence of discrimination between Muslims and non-Muslims when it comes to compensation. “The Saudis are uncooperative with foreigners,” he says, “It also depends on how much power you can wield on those countries.” Bhattarai says most migrant workers in the Gulf are not insured, while a few companies that do insure workers are often laidback even in the event of a death. “It’s a constant process of negotiations with them,” he remarks.

Back in Kathmandu, the relatives of the dead make rounds of manpower agencies and government offices hoping for a swift arrival of the body. Applications submitted to the Ministry’s legal section speak volumes of the tragedies that have befallen on the families of the migrants. A gloomy narrative emerges as you flip through the files: someone’s dead son, someone’s murdered husband. In most cases, the family often loses its sole earner. Even after the prolonged process of transportation of the bodies and its eventual cremation, the complicated process of procuring the insurance money and the due salary takes a toll on most families.

One such person is 56-year-old Lila Subedi of Jhapa. Tears trickle down his wrinkled cheeks when he speaks about his tragedy; he lost two sons to foreign shores. In April 2008, Bhim Bahadur Subedi, who had been working with the Al Mojaji Company in Saudi Arabia, died in a road accident. Six months later, in October, Dharma Subedi died in Malaysia. “I lost two sons in six months,” he says.

A subsistence farmer, Lila says he spent Rs. 150,000 to send two of his five sons abroad. Now, after their deaths, Lila has to take care of both families: Bhim left behind a four-year-old son and a 22-year-old wife, while Dharma had two daughters, aged 11 and five, and a 32-year-old wife. Ironically, Dharma, who had been in Malaysia for only three months, had spoken about coming back home for good. Lila had suggested otherwise, as “he hadn’t sent a single penny home.” Dharma was cremated in Kathmandu, but it took four months for Bhim’s body to arrive from Saudi Arabia. The family decided to cremate him in Jhapa, for which they paid Rs. 22,000.

Lila’s youngest son, Pushpa Subedi, teaches at a school in Sundarijal. The 30-year-old now helps his father navigate Kathmandu’s bureaucratic maze: there is insurance to claim, dues to procure. The deaths of his brothers abroad have destroyed the family. “After seeing the death of my two elder brothers, my family will never allow me to go abroad,” he says.

Related post: Death of Nepali workers abroad

A Jumli Carpet Seller in Kathmandu

2010-02-08T12:49:00.002+05:30

This appeared in The Kathmandu Post on Saturday.

An Invisible Man

DEEPAK ADHIKARI

At the crack of dawn, a lean man with a week’s stubble navigates the byzantine lanes of Naradevi. He carries a white rug on his shoulder, and dons a maroon hooded-pullover and cargo pants to protect himself against Kathmandu’s wintry chill. At Ratnapark, he lifts the rug and places it on the roof of the bus that’s heading towards Bhaktapur. Disembarking at Ghaththaghar, he lugs the rug on his shoulder again and walks briskly towards the buildings that dot the erstwhile fertile farmland of the Valley. Then, he starts pitching in a salesman’s voice: “Ayo Ayo! Galaincha Laijanus Sahuji! Ramro Chha, Nepali Galaincha!” (Come , come. Nepali rugs. Very nice Nepali rugs, master!)

For the past four years, 22-year-old Dhan Lal Chaulagai, originally from Narakot in Jumla—a remote district in the Mid-west—has been selling the export-rejected rugs to suburban residents of the Valley. Every winter, he leaves his home village and its abject poverty behind, and undertakes what seems like a seasonal entrepreneurship. But Chaulagai is also part of a category of migrant workers, people who travel all over Nepal looking for better opportunities, or creating them by selling carpets, Himalayan herbs, honey, and other ‘exotic’ items to their urban countrymen.

A Dickensian Tale

A semi-literate, Chaulagai’s childhood was ruptured in 1998 by the sudden death of his father Devi Lal. Like most Jumlis and Kalikotes, Devi Lal had gone to Faizabad in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh to sell shawls and radi (woollen Nepali carpets). A patient of asthma, the 40-year-old died in India that winter. “We heard about his death only two months later,” says Chaulagai—that too through a neighbour who had accompanied his father and had sent them a letter (because there were no telephone connections in his village). It was winter, and Narakot was blanketed with snow. His mother was five months pregnant with his sister (now 10 years old). Being the eldest son, Chaulagai quickly undertook the ritual of bratabandha (sacred thread wearing). Then, as soon as the ceremony was over, he was thrust into observing barakhi (the Hindu ritual of mourning).

“I was studying in the fourth grade but had to leave my school and help my mother,” he says. Two years after his father’s death, he went to Faizabad, he says “to complete the ritual because his body was not brought home”. Back in the village, he helped farm their 15 ropanis of land where they grew rice, wheat, maize and potatoes. But the harvest was only enough for six months for the family of four.

Kathmandu’s Allure

Like many Nepalis from remote areas who travel to India in search of work, Chaulagai became familiar with the southern neighbour. Barely a teenager, he, following his father’s footsteps, began to travel to India in the winter. He either sold radis or worked as a labourer.

Seven years ago, he became an apprentice to Lal Bahadur G.C., a village hand who sold rugs in Kathmandu. “I was afraid that I may get lost in Kathmandu,” recalls Chaulagai, “I might not be able to do business.” For two years, he cooked food for G.C.

His struggles in Kathmandu mirror the challenges faced by newcomers to the city. Language turned out to be a big problem. “I didn’t know how to communicate with people here,” he recalls. Even though Nepali evolved in Jumla (“People tell us that Prithvi Narayan Shah used to speak our language”), he was baffled by the hierarchy of modern Nepali language (tapai, timi, tan). “Back home, we call everyone timi,” he says, “But in Kathmandu, we are supposed to call everyone tapai.” Now, his Jumli tongue has adjusted to the capital’s formal ways: he addresses every man as sir, and every woman as aunty.

He lives with three others in a cramped, dank and dark room in Naradevi. A naked bulb on the ceiling illuminates the room where half the space is occupied by rugs. There is a gas stove, a sackful of rice, some shabby clothes hanging on a peg, and not much else.

The factories that lie on Kathmandu’s northeastern edge are famous for exporting rugs to rich Westerners. The origin of the Nepali carpet can itself be traced to the arrival of another disadvantaged community: Tibetan refugees. After the 1959 Chinese occupation of Tibet, several Tibetans crossed the northern border and found sanctuary in Nepal. They also brought their skills with them. Soon, their traditional skills of weaving morphed into a big industry after attracting local entrepreneurs to export possibilities. And, for a while, carpets were the top export items from Nepal. Poorer entrepreneurs like Chaulagai end up buying the export-rejected pieces.

These rejected rugs are, nevertheless, expensive, and much-coveted among the nouveau-riche who build new houses on the peripheries of the Valley. Chaulagai boasts a clientele that includes, among others, a former migrant worker who lived in South Korea for eight years and built (what else?) a concrete house, and a real estate agent who has purchased a spacious one-storey house. “Only those who have plenty of money can afford a galaincha,” he says.

The profits are miniscule in this trade. His six-month sojourn in the Capital fetches him around Rs. 15,000 to Rs. 25,000. But living in Kathmandu is equally expensive—at Rs. 5,000 per month for Chaulagai. And unlike vegetables, rugs don’t sell everyday.

The Long Way Home

Being the sole earner for his family, Chaulagai makes sure that he buys gifts and basic necessities for his loved ones. “They are very happy when I go home,” he says, “My little sister comes to receive me on my way.”

Chaulagai will shop in Nepalgunj, the border town, paying back the moneylender the sum that he borrowed to buy the carpets in Kathmandu (with a 3 percent interest rate). He will then board a bus to Khitkijyula in Dailekh, and from here, will walk for four days to reach his small village by the Sinja River, the river valley that was once the cradle of Khas civilisation and the summer capital of Khas kingdom that existed from the 12th to the 14th century.

Back in Kathmandu, some affluent clients demand to see a catalogue. Instead, he whips out his mobile phone, and jots down their numbers. Despite the ‘I hate cell phones’ message emblazoned across his pullover, Chaulagai evidently doesn’t.

A song blares on his phone as a ringtone:

Phone Aaunda Sangai Chhu Jhain Lagchha,

Phone Naaaunda Runa Man Lagchha

(When you call me, I feel I am with you,

When you don’t call, I feel like crying)

It’s his sister, calling from the village. In an instant, the carpet seller becomes a brother, a smile lighting up his face.

The Storyteller's Tale by Omair Ahmad

2010-01-23T15:26:00.006+05:30

Explaining the significance of storytelling, Anant Nath, the managing editor of The Caravan, a narrative journalism magazine from India, invokes the celebrated Iranian storyteller Scheherazade in its recent re-launch issue. He writes: “The greatest storyteller of all was Scheherazade, legendary Persian queen and narrator of One Hundred and One Nights. The title refers to the thousand and one nights that Scheherazade kept telling stories to the Persian king Shahryar — who would marry a virgin every day only to have her beheaded the next — and thus kept death at bay.”

Omair Ahmad’s novella The Storyteller’s Tale clearly falls into this tradition of storytelling. Indeed, the author has acknowledged the influences of Indian, Quranic, Biblical, and other tales. Like many of us, he had heard several stories of the old as a child. It’s another story that this tradition now seems on the verge of extinction.

A former features correspondent of Outlook magazine and now a freelance writer, Ahmad’s story unfolds in the backdrop of a war: it is 1700 and the forces of Ahmad Shah Abdali, the Afghan ruler, have destroyed Delhi, the beloved city of the unnamed poet and storyteller. He is devastated by the ruins and violence. He laments the loss of lives and the destruction of culture and civilisation. While staying with some merchants in ‘the badlands of Rohillakhand’, he steals a horse and sidles away. But he carries with him a burning need to talk about the devastation he saw firsthand.

On his way, he bumps into the haveli of a Begum whose husband is pillaging Delhi. At the haveli, he is given refuge and invited to tell a story. The Begum turns out to be a storytelling connoisseur. In a meta-fictional mould, the two take turn in telling stories, and retelling them with different angles and improvisations. Gradually, a slippery slope of stories emerges, adding new dimension to an already intricate plot.

Upon the Begum’s request, the storyteller first tells the story of two brothers, Taka and Wara. In a village by a forest lives the unwed daughter of the village headman. She gives birth to a child but refuses to disclose his father’s name. The entire village gathers to punish her. But her father saves her by sending her into the jungle, an act which costs him his life. In the desolation and wilderness of the forest, the child bonds with a wolf cub that was rescued by his mother. The cub is named Taka and the son Wara. They grow up together. The tale goes: “A year passed since the woman entered the forest, and it treated her well. She made a small home for herself by a lake filled with fish. She taught herself to make bows and arrows, and although her first experiments were failures, by the end of her first year, she managed to kill a deer.”

One evening when she is away from home, she has a hunch that her son is in danger. She rushes home. She hears the wolf’s howl and decides instinctively that Wara is under attack, possibly by Taka. She finds blood on his jaws. And, with a swing of an axe, she kills Taka. But it was Taka who saved Wara from two wild dogs. There’s a similar tale in Nepali folk lore- Nyauri Mari Pachhuto, which tells of the regret experienced by the family after killing their faithful mongoose.

The tale of betrayal, anguish, loyalty, friendship, and loss strikes a chord in Begum, who then replies with a tale of Aresh and Barab, the two friends whose faith for each other is boundless. The story goes thus: The queen of Thakir dies after giving birth to her son Aresh. The Amir of Thakir learns about the birth of a baby boy on his vicinity and summons the maid and her husband and tasks them with rearing his son along with theirs. Aresh and Barab grow up to become inseperable, until Aresh is sent to Yasurat at a magistrate's to further his education. As he learns the trick of the trade, Aresh’s reputation grows. But in a twist of events, the magistrate’s young and beautiful wife, who secretly loves him, accuses him of trying to rape after he rejects her advances. He is instantly arrested. In his solitary confinement, Aresh remembers his brother and friend Barab and the promise they made to meet each other again. Gradually, the magistrate comes upon the truth and Aresh is released and reunited with Barab.

The storyteller is stunned by the Begum’s storytelling, and goes on to weave her story into his own. In the retelling of the story, a mélange of characters — Barab, Aresh , Wara, the magistrate’s wife, and Nisia, a girl who at age 15 had visited Thakir and fallen in love with Aresh come together.

Thus the characters in the novel meta-fictionally add to the characters in the stories they tell, creating a never-ending pattern that always leaves room for further exploration. Deeply evocative with exquisite prose, The Storyteller’s Tale is a testament to our belief in the stories that never fail to fascinate us.

Originally published at The Kathmandu Post

Stranger to History by Aatish Taseer

2009-12-27T11:48:00.003+05:30

This originally appeared at The Kathmandu Post

I had just finished reading Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus when I started to leaf through Aatish Taseer’s non-fiction book, Stranger to History. In some ways, the books are strikingly similar. The legendary Polish journalist Kapuscinski’s posthumously-published book dwells upon his journeys during his time as a foreign correspondent for the Polish News Agency. As he travels to far away countries, The Histories by Herodotus, the Greek philosopher-historian, serves as his constant companion. But this was in the 60’s and 70’s, a volatile period in which Kapuscinski witnessed a staggering 27 revolutions and coups, mainly in third world countries.

Cut to 2005. Taseer, a former Time magazine reporter, embarks on an exploration of Islamic lands (Iran is the only country both these writers travel to). And, Islamic faith is to Taseer what The Histories was to Kapuscinski. But there’s an important historical as well as personal element in Taseer’s journey. Upon the publication of a cover story about the disillusioned Pakistani-origin youth in Beeston, a small suburb in Leeds in the U.K., at The Prospect magazine, he sends a copy to Salman Taseer, his estranged Pakistani politician-father. To his dismay, his father writes a scathing letter in which he asks: “Do you think you’re doing the Taseer name a service by spreading this kind of invidious anti-Muslim propaganda?”

This question, along with his long separation with his father who had an affair with Tavleen Singh, his Indian journalist mother, during Salman’s book promotion tour of India in 1980, and his meeting with radical Muslims such as Hassan Butt, a spokesman for an extremist Muslim group in the U.K., prompts the young journalist to search for answers. His father, who drank whiskey every evening, never fasted nor prayed, raises this question in Taseer who is torn between his secular upbringing in a Sikh household and an identity as a Muslim. “Caught between feeling provoked and needing to act, I thought of making an Islamic journey,” he writes.

In the first leg of his odyssey, he travels to secular Turkey, “to see how Islam has been banished from the public sphere since 1920.” Then, his itinerary takes him to nationalist Arab-country Syria, Islamic republic Iran, Saudi Arabia—the custodian of two holy mosques, and finally to Pakistan, his fatherland. What emerges is a portrait of Islamic countries steeped in age-old orthodox conventions coupled with vicious regimes. To read Taseer’s finely written book is to immerse oneself with civilisational fault lines. In Turkey, for instance, he runs into a Muslim neighbourhood called Fatih Carsamba, which he calls “a hilltop of radicalism.” He is baffled by the discovery of such a conservative settlement amid a secular Turkey.

In the first chapter titled The License-plate Game, his cousins discover that he’s been circumcised. This turns his small world topsy-turvy. He writes, “If there was a link between the missing foreskin and my missing father, it was too difficult to grasp.” Then, on another instance, when his mother takes him to his maternal grandmother, she bitterly remarks: “Yes, he is lovely but Muslim, nonetheless.” Incidents like these, in which he is treated like an oddity, cast a deep shadow and an aspect of melancholy in his life. But, on a positive note, this also triggers the exploration that culminates into this book.

Divided into two parts, the book (subtitled A Son’s Journey through Islamic Lands) is part memoir and part travelogue. The language is evocative, the observations minute, and the narrative gripping. In between the description of his journeys, he goes back to his past, to his roots, and to his father. To enliven the story, he brings characters from his other meetings into context.

Arriving immediately in Syria after the Danish cartoon controversy, he finds it “closed and depressed, with an autocratic ruler who allowed neither a free economic nor a free political life.” Then, the narrative is intercepted by his experience of visiting Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. “That’s Tehran,” is how he is introduced to Iranian capital where he runs into more trouble than he was prepared for. He meets his old family friend Muhammad who studied in India and took part in the 1979 Islamic revolution by capturing the Iranian Embassy in Delhi, just like many students of his generation who took part in the revolution that overthrew the Shah monarchy. But now, Muhammad is disillusioned with politics.

In Iran, he runs into trouble with the omnipresent regime. The Discplinary (sic) Force of the Islamic Republic denies an extension to his visa, thereby putting his plans to visit the religious cities of Qom and Mashhad into disarray. He is interrogated by the regime’s dogged sleuths. The interrogation is so thorough that every detail of his life in Iran is extracted. In the evocative chapters dedicated to Iran, he paints a horrifying picture of a country where the entire population is taken hostage while the resentment against the regime runs high. Despite the regime keeping an eye on every aspect of its citizens’ lives, Iranians are undeterred: there are homosexuals, they follow Hare Krishna, a Hindu cult, clandestinely, and whenever time permits, the hip Iranians love to party.

In Iran and Pakistan, he chooses to meet the ordinary people to get a sense of how the state’s policies are affecting them. The chapters that deal with Iran and Pakistan are rich in anecdotes. I particularly liked the one entitled Mango King about a landlord in Sindh, which evokes rural and feudal Pakistan superbly.

Taseer has framed his intensely personal questions into the larger historical, political and religious enquiry. The book can provide an impetus for authors who want to see the political from the personal prism and explore it.

Bhutanese Refugees: Starting Life Anew

2009-12-18T15:22:00.007+05:30

A year ago, I contributed a story on Bhutanese refugees resettled in US for Global Nepali. Then, the number of refugees resettled in Western countries was just 5,000. Now, it has swelled to 25,000. Also, check this fine piece on Bhutanese refugees published at Sacramanto Bee. My piece on the refugees at the Post-Gazette.

Deepak Adhikari in Pittsburgh

On a recent sunny afternoon, a group of 10 Bhutanese refugees walked through a winding road to Whitehall, six miles from downtown Pittsburgh. They had boarded a colorful Port Authority bus, getting off few miles away from their apartments. On Sundays, the bus doesn’t run along the route to Prospect Park (also called White Hall) where they live.

The group was a mix of middle-aged Bhutanese and young ones, newly arrived and old ones. Some of them had arrived over four months ago while some as recent as a week before. They had gone to a downtown market called Strip District known to Asians as Chinese Market, where shoppers look for cheaper fruits and vegetables.

Carrying bags full of grocery; they walked for an hour from the nearest bus stop, talking about new life in America. Once they arrived at the apartment furnished with old television sets, they shared the day’s shopping experience. Some of them had already asked others to buy some green vegetables they were used to in Nepal.

The ladies started to organize the grocery items on the refrigerator while the men sat on the couch. After a while, the sweet, milky tea was served followed by fried noodles.

Noticeably, this is a far cry from the life the refugees lived in the camps in eastern Nepal. More than 1,07,000 refugees from Bhutan live on makeshift bamboo huts with thatched roofs in seven sprawling camps managed by UNHCR in Jhapa and Morang districts . The dwellings lack basics such as running water, electricity, bathroom and kitchen. They depend on a fortnightly ration of rice, coal, vegetables, sugar, salt etc provided by World Food Program (WFP), another UN agency.

In November 2005, core working group of countries—Australia, Canada, Denmark, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and the US—proposed to resettle 80,000, US alone is resettling 60,000 of them over the next five years, in what United Nations describes as one of the largest resettlement efforts.

Officials with UNHCR--the United Nations agency dealing with the refugees, said by September this year, over 5,000 Bhutanese refugees had been resettled in the 'core working group' countries. "Out of the total of 1,07,000 refugees from Bhutan who live in seven camps in eastern Nepal, 50,000 have expressed interest in resettlement," UNHCR spokesperson William Spindler told a news conference in Geneva.

Regular meetings have been held with the refugees to discuss resettlement and other durable solutions, as well as provide information for women at risk or people with disabilities, he sad.

"Refugees are being offered English classes as well as additional vocational and skill-based training to prepare for a life in a new country," said Spindler.

UNHCR officials say they expect another 2,000 to 3,000 refugees to leave Nepal for third countries by end of this year. The agency is, however, quick to point out that it hasn't completely given up the option of repatriation of the refugees to their home countries. "We continue to advocate for the option of voluntary return to Bhutan for those refugees who wish to do so, and hope that talks on repatriation can restart soon." said Spindler.

But those watching the stalemate closely over the last several years say it is easier said that done.

'Ethnic Cleansing'
A tiny Himalayan kingdom wedged between India and China, Bhutan evicted nearly 120000 Nepali speaking Southerners known as Lhotsampa in late 1980s and early ‘90s. Bhutan’s ruling elite identified them as a political and cultural threat. Like any other South Asian country, Bhutan is multi-ethnic and multi-lingual. But the Druk regime imposed “One Nation, One People” policy, thereby suppressing the culture and language of their own citizens of Nepali-origin.

As the state unleashed systematic suppression in southern Bhutan, described by rights groups as 'ethnic cleansing,' pro-democracy protests erupted. The Royal Bhutan Army employed the methods including threats, torture, detention and persecution, and confiscation of property. The crackdown led to the expulsion of one sixth of Bhutan’s population.

The refugees left Bhutan, initially spilling over in India but ultimately landing in southeastern Nepal. Many refugees often recall of hardship and many deaths of refugees in the bank of Mai River in Jhapa. After languishing for seventeen years, the failure of talk between Nepal and Bhutan to resolve the issue and several unsuccessful attempts to return home has incurred a sense of resentment and desperation among refugees.

In such a situation, many see the third country resettlement as the only ray of hope. This also comes at a time when Communist Party of Bhutan (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist), has launched a “People’s War” in Bhutan. The Bhutani Maoists apparently are rallying against the third country resettlement. But with the numbers of refugees opting for third country growing in leaps and bounds, their slogans have been waning.

For Narad Mani Phuyal, a former school teacher, an opportunity to come to US meant a lot. “I always wanted to come here,” said Mr. Phuyal who arrived with his wife and a four year old daughter in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in July 11. He joined the growing Bhutanese community in Whitehall, where the families of his elder and younger brothers live a few blocks away.

He frequents a nearby library to check email. He is well aware of the American system, and is confident that he will get a job very soon and lead a decent life in the new country. “Life was miserable in camps” he said, “But here, it’s like a heaven.” His brother Kuber Phuyal shakes his head in approval. Kuber got job two months ago and with a salary of 8 US $ an hour, he hopes to support his family of four. Catholic Charities, the resettlement agency in Pittsburgh helps them with food, bus fare and housing for three months. The refugees have to pay for their air fare from Nepal as they start earning money.

At 55, Bhawani Prasad Odari is still eager start a job. Model Uniform, an apparel plant in Charleroi in suburban Pittsburgh, has hired him. A Nepali interpreter helped him navigate through the lengthy contract papers. Unlike his three young daughters and a son who assimilated to work place environment very easily, he is worried about the language. “I’ve asked the manager not to expect a work where I have to communicate a lot,” he said. For the elderly, language has been a barrier in communicating with non-Nepali speakers.

Perhaps because of the shared history and a common cultural heritage, Nepali communities in all over the US have been instrumental in helping Bhutanese refugees cope with an alien environment. News welcome programs organized by local Nepali communities have been trickling in. On July, Atlanta based Nepalese America Political Action Committee organized a barbecue for about 60 Bhutanese relocated in Georgia. Similarly, Sahayeta, a Bay Area Nepalese Alliance hosted a welcome program for the refugees in July 27.

As the Bhutanese are scattered around 33 states in America, finding them and helping them could well be an uphill task. Organizations like Association of Bhutanese in America (ABA) is also gearing up for assistance. Whether the refugee community will merge with Nepali Diaspora or it will be a distinct Nepali-speaking community--only time will tell.

Originally published in Global Nepali magazine, Oct/Nov 2008.

The Other Side of Bhutan

2009-11-22T16:47:00.010+05:30

Repressive regimes everywhere employ torture on political prisoners to both extract information and to weaken the dissent. From the notorious Abu Ghraib in Iraq to Guantanamo in Cuba, the contemporary politics is replete with torture chambers of many kinds. It’s ironic that a country, which conjures up an image of the Himalayan paradise in the Western psyche, can indulge in such bizarre yet brutal practices of punishment.

Yes, we are talking about Bhutan, and the person upon whom the horrendous torture was inflicted is none other than Bhutanese human rights leader Tek Nath Rizal. Rizal, a refugee leader in exile for more than a decade, has chronicled a harrowing tale of his prison life in Bhutan in his new book Torture Killing Me Softly. In nearly two hundred pages, he narrates his predicament while he was stuck in Bhutanese jails for a decade. The most startling aspect of the book—apart from the routine torture the state metes out to its opponents—is the use of sophisticated mind control devices by the ruling elite of Bhutan. One finds hard to reconcile the image of a pastoral country with its employing cutting-edge torture tools bestowed by modern science.

Rizal claims in the book that his Bhutanese torturers applied light sensitivity, very high sound decibels, and microwaves on him in order to destabilize his mind, induce anomalous behavioral changes and create disassociation. Dr. Indrajit Rai, a security expert and member of Nepal's Constituent Assembly, in the foreword to the book, notes that mind control devices are used on prisoners-of-war. He writes, “Bhutanese government practiced mind-control techniques on Rizal as a means to inflict physical and mental pain in order to destroy his life. With a view to deviating him from his goal of fighting for democracy, the Bhutanese government used these devices on him and pumped out all his thoughts and feelings.”

The book begins with the description of Bhutan’s scenic beauty. But soon, a picture of exploitation emerges beneath the beauty: People who are forced to work en masse on a road construction are stamped on their faces as a proof of attendance. “Such dehumanizing practice reminded me of numbering animals in the heard by tattooing onto their body,” Rizal writes. Then, he goes on to explain the composition of Bhutanese population—Ngalongs (the ruling group mainly living in north), Sharchhokpas (Buddhist inhabitants of eastern and central region) and Lhotshampas (ethnic Nepalese living in southern Bhutan). He notes then existing communal harmony, as he comments, “For centuries, people belonging to these groups have lived in perfect communal, religious and ethnic harmony.”

But the harmony, in the hindsight, began to fall apart in the late 1970s when the newly enthroned king Jigme Singye Wangchuk enacted several laws aiming at the disenfranchisement of Lhotshampas who then represented one-third of the country’s population. The so-called “One Nation, One People” policy, an anachronistic campaign in a country marked by a mosaic of cultures, religion and ethnicity, stripped many ethnic Nepalese of Bhutanese citizenship and curtailed their basic rights. This spawned a series of protests in the late 1980s and early 1990s in southern Bhutan,eventually resulting in the mass exodus of the Lhotshampas. First, they arrived in West Bengal and Assam, in India, and stayed there for a couple of years. But the local governments in those Indian states, in an unabashed show of complicity with Bhutanese rulers, loaded the refugees in trucks and sent them to Kakarbhitta, an entry point in Indo-Nepal border. As the flocks of refugees started to spill over in Jhapa, some of them taking temporary refuge on the banks of Mai River, the Nepal government invited UNHCR to intervene. Since 1991, around one hundred thousand refugees, the victims of what British scholar Michael Hutt calls “one of the world’s least known ethnic conflicts”, now languish in seven refugee camps in southeast Nepal (Many have opted for third country resettlement initiated by the US in 2008).

During this tumultuous period, Rizal was entrusted with several high-profile designations by the king: he was member of Royal Civil Service Commission, Royal Advisory Councilor, Member of the Cabinet and Coordinator of Nationwide Investigation Bureau. Under the last designation, he was tasked with investigating the corruption that was rampant in Bhutan during that time. But this job cost him very dear after he submitted his report in which he disclosed the involvement of royal members and influential officials in corruption. After a weeklong detention, he fled Bhutan in early 1989. But on November 16, 1989, he was arrested from his apartment in Birtamod, Jhapa, where he was spending his life in exile. He was arrested along with two Bhutanese youth leaders Jogen Gazmere and Sushil Pokharel and handed over to Bhutanese authorities. That happened under the auspices of Nepal’s autocratic Panchayat regime, which was about to collapse.

Torture takes us inside the poorly managed and decrepit Bhutanese prisons where Rizal undergoes inhuman persecution. “As I lay on the floor with my face covered with the blanket, it was as if I was in a comatose condition. I was not able to keep track of time, nor was I able to make any movement,” he recalls. The author quotes Jawaharlal Nehru, first Indian Prime Minister, who described the solitary confinement in Allahabad, India: “It is the killing of the spirit by the digress, the slow vivisection of the soul.” The book’s title seems to be derived from these lines.

At times, the book reads like a novel. The descriptions are vivid which made me wonder how the writer, without any note taking, was able to remember all the details. He even claims that 40 ethnic Nepalese from southern Bhutan were arrested after his interrogators were able to extract information from him using the mind control device. The well constructed narrative focuses on how the prisoners are treated in the kingdom’s jail. In Rabuna jail in Wangdi district, he writes, he had to struggle his hands through a small hole in the room to get hold of the food-platter on the otherside. And this he had to do, with his hands and legs cuffed in chains. He had to rely on other body organs: “Whenever I felt thirsty, I turned the water tap on and off with my teeth, the position of the tap next to the toilet made this an unenviable practice.”

The food was not only detrimental to health but was also adulterated with nails, pieces of glass, fish bones and dead insects. Here too, according to him, the mind control device that was applied on him in capital Thimpu, aggravated the harm. To further exacerbate the matter, he was positioned with the barrel of a gun pointed at him all the time. Once, he narrates, the prison authority allowed him to eat his food only after smoking 40 cigarettes. “This was the worst kind of torture I endured during my incarceration in Rabuna,” he writes.

Then, he was shifted to Dradulmakhang where on Bhutan’s National Day (December 17, 1997), he started his hunger strike. Following pressure from international human rights organizations including Amnesty International, he was released on December 17 1999.

But his ordeal did not cease. He claims that the effects of those torture techniques and devices persist in his life and continue to manifest in his health as he lives in Kathmandu or travels abroad.

There is no way to verify Rizal’s claims as the Bhutanese government that considers the refugees ‘illegal immigrants’ will surely brand it as another attempt to tarnish the kingdom. But we also can not call it entirely untrue when the account comes from a leader of Rizal’s stature. It’s evident from the annex under the heading of “suggested reading” that the author has researched a great deal about the use of electronic devices to control one’s mind. The epilogue reads: “The global agencies must verify the tall claims of the government of Bhutan independently whether it is ‘Gross National Happiness’ or the ‘Gross National Sufferings.” Indeed, the cases of gross human rights violations as documented by Rizal in Torture cast a shadow over the so-called Shangri-La.

This originally appeared in Nepal Monitor.

Somali Refugees in Nepal

2009-11-10T15:00:00.002+05:30

This appeared in Time.com

Mahad Abdullahi Hassan had never heard of Nepal before the day he landed there. When the 28-year-old Somali boarded a flight from Dubai to Kathmandu on May 23, 2007, he was hoping he would finally reach his dream destination: Sweden. He had, after all, shelled out $4,000 to a human trafficker who promised to smuggle him to the Scandinavian country.

Read more:

Bhutanese Refugees: Repatriation vs Resettlement

2009-11-08T12:12:00.004+05:30

Beldangi Refugee camp, JHAPA–Here, in this sprawling refugee camp, Bishnu Kumari Khadka (see pic) exudes a calm that doesn’t beget one whose husband has recently been murdered. Karna Bahadur Khadka, Bishnu’s husband, was stabbed to death one evening while returning home. But his murder seems to be just the tip of the iceberg in this largest concentration of Bhutanese refugees, a group that is increasingly becoming divided over the issues of third-country resettlement and repatriation back to Bhutan.

The seven camps scattered across Eastern Nepal were supposed to be a safe haven for the Lhotsampas (Nepali-speaking southern Bhutanese), who escaped the brutal repression of the Bhutanese government in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Now, death threats and criminal activities within the camps have made the refugees qualm, even as Karna Bahadur’s murder brought to the fore simmering tensions between the two groups.

Karna Bahadur’s murder is not the first inside the camp. In April this year, Shanti Ram Nepal, a former camp secretary was murdered. Today, those who oppose repatriation in favour of third-country resettlement have begun receiving death threats by underground outfits. One such organisation is the Druk Leopard, which began pasting computer printouts warning eight prominent refugees of dire physical consequences if they didn’t leave the camps with their families. Their crime: they were accused of betraying the cause of repatriation back to Bhutan and instead compromising on third-country resettlement.

Indeed, third-country resettlement seems to be a contentious issue among the refugees. At least 22,000 have been resettled in developed countries, mainly the U.S., as Bhutan vehemently refuses to negotiate and repatriate any of the 106,000 refugees (UNHCR 2005) from the seven camps. A 2007 Human Rights Watch report commented that refugees who have favoured resettlement have been threatened and intimidated by groups who see repatriation as the only solution.

In fact, the report is quoted as saying, “They (those in favour of repatriation) accuse those refugees who speak out in favor of resettlement of betraying the cause of the refugees and of aiding and abetting the continued oppression of the remaining ethnic Nepalis in Bhutan.”

The report also declared that resettlement simply meant that it allowed the Bhutanese government to get away with the expulsion of at least a 100,000 of its own citizens in violation of international law. The report quoted a camp secretary, Hari Adhikari Bangaley, as saying he had been physically threatened by pro-repatriation refugees. “They have damaged my motorbike. They have surrounded me and threatened to cut my throat.”

The motorcycle is for many the only means to commute between the various refugee camps, and on the evening of Sept. 8, Karna Bahadur was riding one on his way back home from Damak when he was attacked and stabbed by two assailants. “One tried to insert a rod in the front tyre”, recalls his nephew Dambar Karki, who was with Karna at the time, “while the other pushed him to the ground.”

Though Karna’s name wasn’t on the list of the eight refugees threatened by Druk Leopard, he seemed to have rankled someone else. On Oct. 2, the Armed Police Force, which is tasked with the security of the camps, arrested Yadav Gurung and Pahal Man Rai in connection with the murder.

The two confessed that S.B. Subba, chairperson of the Human Rights Organisation of Bhutan, was involved in the murder. According to the Bhutan News Service, a website operated by refugee journalists, Gurung also disclosed that Subba operated the United Revolutionary Front of Bhutan, an underground outfit that claimed responsibility for a series of bomb blasts that rocked Bhutan in early 2008, and was responsible for the murder, along with Gurung’s sister-in-law. Both were at large at the time of writing, and though the motive behind the murder hasn’t been revealed, it increasingly looks like a conflict between two separate schools of thought within the camps.

For Karna Bahadur was also a mediator, a go-between in several of the disputes that routinely cropped up in the camps. On the day he was murdered, he was returning from his nephew’s funeral. Now, people speak about Karna’s funeral—estimates say there were at least 10,000 participants.

Karna, his relatives say, was an ardent supporter of repatriation, which deepens the mystery behind his murder. His younger brother has resettled in the U.S., something he had been opposing so far. But now, with him gone and with four children, Bishnu Kumari says she may favour resettlement.

The police here say they have beefed up security following the murder, initiating foot patrols and installing several checkpoints with bamboo barriers on the road leading to the camp. The police are also taking an inventory of all the motorcycles owned by the refugees. “Refugee camps are by nature vulnerable places, but we’re doing our best to maintain safety,” says Inspector Gandhiv Raj Syangtan, in-charge of the Beldangi-based Armed Police Force.

In the murky milieu of the Bhutanese refugee camps, internal tensions may finally be reaching a boiling point.

Originally published in The Kathmandu Post on Saturday.

Stories about Modern Times

2009-10-25T13:49:00.005+05:30

This was published in The Kathmandu Post on Saturday.

Dabbling in Non-Linear
By Deepak Adhikari

Anamolmani Paudel, a journalist by vocation and littérateur by volition, has emerged with his first short story collection Neelima Ra Gaadha Andhyaro. This slim book contains a dozen short stories that revolve around urban life, love, trauma and the disorder of war, science, and cyber culture. But the most overarching element that encompasses these stories is conflict. There is conflict between tradition and modernity, between scientific invention (particularly test tube babies and cloning) and human emotions. Love is the recurring theme in Paudel’s stories.

The stories are mostly set in a thinly-veiled Kathmandu, and Paudel beautifully captures the sounds and sights, colour, and character of urban life. The language is simple yet very evocative. The first story titled Test-Tube Baby Ra Meri Premika, like several stories in this collection, is experimental. In it, he has not only introduced cyber culture in Nepali literature but has also questioned the encroachment of science in the realm of human relations. The narrator of the story comes across a chat mate in MSN Messenger. The chat mate turns out to be a test-tube baby. After his parents’ (both university professors) disagreement on bearing kids leads to their divorce, he was conceived in another woman’s body. His mother, in a letter which the central character sends to the narrator as an email attachment, explains that as a modern woman she wanted to exploit science’s advancement, i.e. she didn’t want to be impregnated. As a result of this, the chat mate is a test-tube baby. He laments the decay of humanity. Bordering on science fiction, this story with the details of semen banks, vaginal plastic surgery, and the buying and selling of sperm and ovum at times sounds morbid.

In Peeda Nayak, a young man narrates his love story that unfolds in the backdrop of an old campus building. Eventually the lovers part ways. The storytelling technique of this story is similar to the first one. The writer’s obsession with the foetus is repeated in another story titled Anuttarit. After the death of his mother, the protagonist’s foetus is transplanted in his 18-year-old sister’s womb. The unnamed central character is in dilemma: shall I call her a mother or a sister?

The title story Neelima Ra Gaadha Andhyaro revolves around Padam and Neelima. A long time after their separation, Padam calls up Neelima and tries to rekindle the olden days. But the girl turns out to be his former beloved’s clone. This story also has hints of meta-fiction with the mention of Kumar Nagarkoti, the seasoned Nepali fiction writer who is an inspiration to Paudel, who has confessed to Nagarkoti’s influence in his introduction.

The stories depict love lost, love regained, sadness, loneliness, consequences of war, crisis in human bond, and struggle between scientific innovations and human emotions. The author seems to suggest that science’s triumph is a loss of emotion.

Ustai too is an experimental take where Ibsen’s Nora (of A Doll’s House fame) and Nepal’s iconoclastic Charitraheen Chelis are invoked with equal aplomb. This story basically talks about suppression, exploitation, and marginalisation of women in our society. Zebra Cross Ma Ubhiyera deals with the consequences of Maoist conflict. Cynthia is a former Maoist combatant meets a lecturer at the psychology department of a university and shares her story. The story is told in flashback, and is about her fleeing the cantonment when a Maoist comrade rapes her, and her subsequent post-traumatic disorder. Cynthia leaves the mental ward of the hospital. This story is poignant, but it could have been better had the author delved deeper into the lives of the armed fighters and the internal conflicts in Maoist domain.

Though most of the stories provide glimpses into the characters’ small, private moments, some read like soliloquies. Take, for instance, the last story Carnation, Dhunwa Ra Timro Jhajhalko. Written in epistolary form; it reads more like a maudlin expression than a story.

Banki Prashnaharu is a fantasy, in which a headless man, in the backdrop of politically turbulent times, epitomises the Nepali everyman. Neelo Rumal Harayepachhi weaves a tale of love’s labour lost. There are some memorable lines and an abundance of details. But the stories are also marked by repetitions of phrases, metaphors, and similes, even descriptions.

Call me old-fashioned but I like the linear storytelling format with a well-constructed plot and clearly-drawn characters. I’m a big fan of O. Henry-esque stories, especially a surprise ending. Seen from this viewpoint, Paudel’s stories are essentially in a formalist vein. And with a decidedly post-modernist leaning.

Human-Elephant Conflict in Indo-Nepal Border

2009-10-20T12:25:00.004+05:30

My recent story on rampaging elephants in eastern Nepal, published in The Kathmandu Post on Saturday.

A Trunk Full of Misery

BAHUNDANGI, JHAPA, OCT 17 - Beneath the idyllic charms of lush paddy fields, looming green hills, rickety buses, and old wooden houses, lies a feeling of fear and trepidation. Here, in this impoverished village on the eastern fringes of Jhapa, night brings a horror that cannot be conquered by the human spirit, nor can it be subdued by wishing it away.

For a decade-and-a-half, residents of this village bordering Darjeeling district in West Bengal have endured the terror and mayhem of wild elephants that venture into their village mostly during the summer. “They come in droves, sometimes numbering 60 to 70,” says Shyam Karki, a school teacher. And leave behind a trail of wanton destruction and chaos.

Ask Gauri Maya Tamang, whose husband Surya Bahadur was killed by a rampaging pachyderm in 2005. Surya heard about the arrival of an elephant near a tea plantation a few metres away from his house. The 38-year-old went with other villagers to drive away the elephant that was dismantling a banana tree. Surya was the first to reach the place. But when the giant turned its head and chased the villagers, Surya was the last person, and the first within the reaches of the tusker’s trunk.

Gauri replays the story in anger more than in sorrow. The previous night, Surya had hosted a dinner party for his sisters—one of whom had more than an average fear of elephants. Surya went to chase the behemoth to ward off his sister’s fear. But it cost him his life. With her 21-year old son’s support, Gauri now shoulders the responsibility of bringing up three teenage children. “Life is hard without their father,” she says, standing in the doorway of her tin-roofed house built on a small patch of land.

Wild elephants are infamous along this belt of the subcontinent for their crop-raiding, especially during the harvest season for maize and rice. Elephant herds migrate from the Dooars jungles in northern Bengal to eastern Nepal. There have been border tensions because of the pachyderms’ relentless plundering.

Bahundangi—a village on the banks of the Mechi with a population of 50,000—has lost at least 24 inhabitants to the unruly giants in the past 15 years. According to Kul Deep Giri, the village secretary, this year alone, nine have been injured, 13 houses demolished, and nearly Rs. 10 million worth of crops have been destroyed by the elephants. “There’s not a single house which has not been damaged (by the elephant) in some way or the other,” says Arjun Karki, a local social worker.

There are other complaints apart from the loss of life and property. Anup Karki, secretary of the Nepali Congress’ Village Committee, says everyone knows this is an elephant-terrorised village, which makes it difficult for them to “sell their lands”. “Everyone wants to leave; unfortunately, no one wants to buy our land,” he says. In the shop where he is sipping tea; other villagers nod in approval. The presence of the pachyderms has brought on another vexing problem: The eligible bachelors in the village have a tough time finding brides as “no one wants to send their daughters to a village terrorised by elephants”.

It’s not that efforts haven’t been made to stop the elephants from entering the village. From shouting and screaming at the top of their voices, to beating drums, to even keeping bees as a deterrent (a study in Africa had shown that elephants tended to avoid bees. Unfortunately, African bees are more aggressive than the ones found in Nepal)—everything has been tried. Now, a nine-km long electric fence is being constructed along the Mechi river.

For those living on the frontier, the 1,880 km long porous open border between India and Nepal is both boon and bane. “Our life depends on the open border,” says Arjun. He points out that the necessities of the villagers’ daily life—from rushing to a hospital in case of emergency to buying daily supplies—depend on the towns across the border. But for those who’ve lost their kin to the marauding elephants which trample everything in their path as they cross the Mechi into Nepal, the open border is a reminder of misery and pain.

Eighty-year-old Dhan Bahadur Thapa is one of the victims. His wrinkled, sun-bronzed face is a portrait of pain: he lost a newly-wed son and daughter-in-law to the elephants. Nine years ago, his son Shambhu, then 21, fell in love with Durga, a 16-year old from Duwagarh, Darjeeling.

Shambhu found love across the border, but death too came from across. Two months into the marriage, an elephant trampled upon Durga first, then on Shambhu. “At first, it grabbed Durga and killed her,” recalls Dhan Bahadur. “We thought at least Shambhu survived but he didn’t.” Toothless and wheezing, his wife Jag Maya sobs at each mention of her son. The landless couple’s sole property now is a pair of male-buffaloes that they rent for a living. Their remaining son works in the Gulf. “We don’t know whether we will be alive tomorrow, for elephants can come in any time in this part of the world,” says Dhan Bahadur.

Battle for Bhutan

2009-10-08T12:03:00.006+05:30

Recently, I was in Bhutanese refugee camp in Beldangi, Jhapa. The camp area looked tense due to the recent murder of KB Khadka, former camp secretary. I'm working on a story about refugees. Below, I've reproduced my story on a Bhutanese leader's wife's struggle to find the whereabouts of her husband who could be in jail in Bhutan.

Also check this fine piece on Bhutanese refugees in New York at NY Times.

A Lone Battle

By Deepak Adhikari

Kathmandu, April 29—On a recent morning, a diminutive woman wearing long, black and blue Tibetan skirt and a white sweater arrived at the Bouddha monastery’s gate to talk about what seemed like a one person mission. Prayer flags fluttered as she sat to speak amidst the incessant chanting of om mani padme hum that emanated from the several cassette and CD shops in this tourist destination.

The serenity of the Buddhist temple could hardly hide the severity of Karma Zangpo’s predicament: her Bhutanese refugee husband Tenzing Zangpo was rearrested by Indian police immediately after being freed on bail from a jail in Guwahati, the largest city of Assam state in northeastern India. And, she was witness to the bizarre incident on April 6 when Zangpo, the General Secretary of Druk National Congress (Democratic), without having a word with her, was whisked away in a van to an unknown location.

Ever since that day, Karma has made it a point to fight for her husband’s release, albeit with a little achievement but a lot of hope. She has sought the help from DNC leaders, Bhutanese leaders, fellow refugees and media. Her tiny telephone diary is scribbled with phone numbers of supporters from Kathmandu, Jhapa in Nepal to Siliguri, Sikkim and Guwahati in India. After sending her 12-year old daughter Sangye and 8-year old son Minjure to nearby Pegasus School in Boudhha, the 48-year old embarks on the solo mission to find out the whereabouts of her husband. She fears that the Assam authority might have deported Zangpo to Bhutan where he is likely to face extreme form of punishment, even torture.

The 49-year old leader who was on his way to meet his in-laws in Arunachal Pradesh in Indo-Bhutan border was arrested on November 10 from Guwahati under the Explosive Substance Act and Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967. He was arrested along with Sabin Boro, a leader of National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), a separatist outfit active in northeast India. In an attempt to sensationalize this arrest as a link between Bhutanese refugees and the terrorist group that was uprooted from Bhutan in early 2003, Indian police projected Mr. Zangpo as a terrorist involved the serial bomb blasts in and around Guwahati in October last year.

“I even asked him if he had committed such acts (of terror) being a devout Buddhist,” said Karma who herself follows Buddhism. But, he denied any wrongdoing, she said and recalled him reiterating his commitment to fight for his country. A member of Sarchop community from eastern Bhutan, Zangpo had met Karma 15 years ago in Arunachal Pradesh where she had gone to visit her maternal uncle. At that time, he had already been a refugee registered in Timai camp in Jhapa, one of seven refugee camps run by UNHCR in southeastern Nepal. Until last year, they had lived in Birtamode, Jhapa from where Zangpo often travelled to India (they have even secured a travel document from Indian Embassy in Nepal for all four family members). In Kathmandu, Karma ran a restaurant to support her family while her husband kept himself busy in party works. Without her husband to support, she has sold the restaurant.

Hem Lall Bhandari, a Harvard educated advocate pleaded on behalf of Zangpo. It didn’t take long for Bhandari to prove his client’s innocence. After the expiry of the 90 days in Guwahati central jail, he was granted bail by Subhabrata Datta, Special Judicial Magistrate (CBI Court) on March 20.

His wife stood bailer at the court depositing IRs 10,000. The court passed the release order on April 3 but Zangpo was released on the evening of April 6 only to be rearrested shortly. “How long can he remain in jail when there are court orders for his release,” asks advocate Bhandari, a native of Sikkim.

Similar questions must have occurred to Karma, all alone in Kathmandu.

Courtesy: The Kathmandu Post/April 29, 2009

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

2009-10-06T11:39:00.010+05:30

This appeared in Ekantipur:

A Fine Balance, the second novel by Rohinton Mistry, a Bombay-born writer now living near Toronto, Canada, moves between the four characters caught in the whirlpool of events unfolding during the emergency imposed in India by Indira Gandhi in 1975.

These four unfortunate characters are Ishvar Darji and Omprakash Darji, uncle-nephew duo who hail from an impoverished Indian village; these cobblers-turned-tailors struggle in the unnamed city by the sea (a thinly veiled Bombay), Dina Dalal, a widow from middle class Parsi family, and Maneck Kohlah, a Parsi teenager from mountainous village in northern India. The Emergency looms large like a shadow in the life of these four central characters. The 603-page novel that was the finalist for a Booker Prize revolves around them.

Dina is a vivacious young widow who lives on her own after her husband’s death. She lives on an apartment left by her late husband Rostum who was killed in an accident while cycling to fetch ice-cream for the guests at his home party. Ishvar and Om are the victims of the cruelty that is caste system in India--they have fled the caste-violence of their village. Maneck, fed up with the ragging and filth of hostel is a paying guest at Dina’s. The tailors are hired by Dina who supplies clothes to Au Revoir Export Company. Thus, necessity forces these four characters to share a cramped apartment. But they also share their stories that are marked by sadness, loss, poverty, hunger and other tragic aspects of life.

Mistry reveals the theme of the novel through the character of Valmiki, the former proofreader at The Times of India who loves to quote WB Yeats:

“You see, you cannot draw lines and compartments, and refuse to buzz beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping-stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.”

The novel--first published in 1995--is divided into 16 chapters; each chapter has a title such as City by the Sea, For Dreams to Grow, In a Village by a River, Sailing Under One Flag, Return of Solitude etc. It has a prologue dated 1975 and ends with an epilogue of 1984. This time frame reminded me of Aravind Adiga’s story collection Between the Assassinations that is set in the period between the murder of Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi. When one of the characters, Maneck returns from Dubai after working for 8 years towards the end of the book, we are told that Indira Gandhi is killed by her security guards. Maneck encounters a country ravaged by communal violence whereby his Sikh cab driver has to shave his head and beard fearing the backlash. The novel ends as her son Rajiv takes over.

What struck me most with Mistry’s story is whenever I thought the characters have finally overcome all the obstacles, terrible things happen to them. When a defiant Om finally agrees to get married, the two tailors embark on a journey to search for a suitable bride. But soon, they are caught in a state sponsored terror. They are forced to undergo sterilization spearheaded by Sanjay Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s infamous son. As if it was not enough, Ishvar’s legs have to be mutilated whereas Om is castrated. In the very beginning of their work with Dina, both of them are arrested and taken to a rally to attend prime minister’s speech.

It is no exaggeration to say that Mistry is a master storyteller. The descriptions are vivid, the dialogues sharp and the narrative well constructed. The chapters dealing with the struggle of Dukhi, Ishvar’s father in the feudal, superstitious and tradition bound village are very poignant, hence superb. Dukhi’s shack is put on fire by high caste people killing the family members except Ishvar and Om.

Though the character of Maneck, unlike other three, is not well drawn, there are others who complement the story. There is Ashraf Chacha, the amicable mentor of Ishvar and Narayan who pay him back by saving his family from massacre during the Hindu-Muslim riot following the partition of India and Pakistan.

There is Rustom, who meets Dina in a concert; they fall in love and marry despite the objection from Dina’s family. His fondness for cycling leads to his death. Ibrahim, the rent collector who indulges in looking back at his life with regret and bitterness because his malicious job involves threatening the tenants like Dina. The plethora of characters adds to the story that is both evocative and condensed. It also has characters like Rajaram who changes his profession only to deceive people, Monkeyman who kills the ruthless Beggarmaster—the latter runs a begging industry and even justifies the disfigurement of beggars’ organs. There is Dina’s nagging brother Nusswan.

But ultimately it’s the four main characters that are at the heart of the novel.

It is said that it’s better to read Charles Dickens (with whom Mistry is often compared) to learn about Victorian England; similarly, one should read Shakespeare in order to know about life in Elizabethan period. Echoing these lines, I would recommend a reading of A Fine Balance to know what life was like for ordinary Indians during Emergency in India. Though at times dark and melancholy, it’s a rich, rewarding book.

Happy Dashain 2066

2009-09-26T03:13:00.002+05:30

I wish you all a very happy Dashain 2066. Below is a memoir I wrote for The Kathmandu Post on Saturday on celebrating Dashain in Dubai a decade ago :

A Middle-Eastern Dashain

Celebrating Dashain as a migrant worker meant watery-thin tikas, Filipino friends mouthing swear words and seeking out liquor in an Islamic state

Deepak Adhikari

Dashain usually brings back the most pleasant memories of my life. I grew up in eastern Nepal and spent my childhood shuttling around the three districts of Panchthar, Taplejung and Morang--we had our ancestral home in Taplejung, we tilled land in Rajghat, a dusty village in Morang, while my father taught Nepali in a government school in the almost-town Phidim, Panchthar. Life seemed to revolve around these three places as a child. I grew up mostly in Phidim in the late 1980s. Every Dashain, we would pack our bags and head to Thumbedin, a hamlet on the banks of Kabeli River in Taplejung.

Dashain meant the bamboo swings; new, shiny, Rs. 1, 2 and 5 notes compiled from dakshina; and an abundance of food especially home-cooked goat meat. It also meant a long-awaited holiday of kite-flying and other fun-filled activities.

But the Dashain of 1999 was totally different. That was the worst period of my life: my fledgling-career in a weekly Kathmandu tabloid was threatening to die out with an editor-cum-publisher who demanded a lot of work but paid a meager salary, and the hard times that my family was going through. Unsurprisingly, I did what most Nepalis do--I sought a job abroad. To my family’s delight and my journalist friends’ surprise, in the autumn of 1998, I boarded a Qatar Airways flight to United Arab Emirates (UAE). I landed in Dubai to work--where else?--in a McDonald’s restaurant (we called it a store). The whole process was nearly free: I didn’t have to pay for the visa, for the air tickets or for the sundry payments to the labour agency agents. A village boy from the margins of the eastern corner of Nepal, and someone who hadn’t travelled much beyond Kathmandu--I grabbed the moment as a golden opportunity.

There were three of us Nepalis who were sent to Al Ain, a small desert town in Abu Dhabi, capital of the seven emirates that make up UAE, to work as a crew at one of McDonald’s dozen stores in the whole of UAE. The first memories of that dusty desert town are the many lonely moments wondering if we were the first and only Nepalis there. We were delighted on the rarity of our tribe, but also feared the claustrophobia it entailed.

A year later, I was transferred to Sharjah, where the cricket stadium nearly brought a slice of homely reminder, though I was never a cricket fan--but more than that, it was a gaggle of Nepali friends that seemed to make life easier in Sharjah. There were also the amicable, even effeminate, Filipinos who because of their Mongolian features reminded me of my Limbu friends in Phidim. The sturdy South Indian colleagues who followed Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, were in contrast to them. It was hard for me to maintain a delicate balance between these two sets of people who were often at odds with each other.

But the Dashain of 1999 changed it all. We turned our accommodation into a hub of festivities, bought chicken from the nearby grocery, and cooked Nepali dishes. As if that was not enough, we also asked a few Filipino friends to join us. Prem Gurung, a very jovial fellow from Tanahu, managed to conjure the tika--which was not as dark red and thick as in Nepal, but the best that we could manage in the alien desert. We also convinced our Filipino and Syrian managers that Dashain was akin to Christmas or Ramadan and to give us the day off--and then, went to a coastal bazaar called Rolla. Boats were anchored; but the area also reeked of fish and slaughtered animals. But on the roadside and near the shopping mall, it was surprisingly green--a temptation to believe we were not in a sandy desert town, and instead, at a so-called Arabian oasis.

Eric was a lean Filipino and even a just-arrived-from-home Nepali could have mistaken him for a mate because of his fluent Nepali. Of course, the fact that he was taught the choicest of Nepali swear words didn’t help much--he often mouthed them liberally and embarrassing us in front of a few Nepali female colleagues at times. Like the Nepali language that he had mastered, he relished the dal-bhat-tarkari. We had smuggled very-sour tasting liquor from the neighbouring emirate of Ajman (alcohol was not allowed in Sharjah). A few pegs down, I was gripped by nostalgia, with the recollections of good times back home flooding my mind. Then, someone began belting out Nepali numbers from the DVD player that almost every Nepali working at McDonald’s possessed. We danced to the Dohori tunes, our bodies sweating in the sweltering heat. We did our best but most of our moves were awkward--the pictures can prove that.

The next morning, we ventured out to Dubai to visit a Hindu temple near a creek. We boarded a boat and were mesmerized by the sight of the never-ending Arabian Sea. Across the creek, Indians who easily outnumbered other expats thronged the temple. The area had an air of a busy Tarai bazaar in Nepal. And after blessings from the South Indian pujari, we returned to the drudgery of McDonald's.

Dashain ecard courtesy: Ujjwal Acharya.

In Memorium: Ashok Bhattarai

2009-09-20T12:47:00.004+05:30

It feels very sad to recall it's almost been a year since the death of Ashok Bhattarai, a talented Nepali student who was killed in US. Update: His family has received the compensation from US but they haven't been able to get around 10 thousand USD that Ashok had deposited in his bank account in US. Below is the story I wrote for the Kathmandu Post after meeting his parents:

Mother laments son’s death in US

BY Deepak Adhikari
KATHMANDU, Oct 12 - Sitting on the bed in a dilapidated lodge at Guashala Friday afternoon, Lila Bhattarai, 42, recalled the last words from her dead son.

"I will come home very soon, Mom," he had told her on the morning of September 28 over the phone. "I will regularly send pictures."

The conversation had veered off to the festivals and he had wished his dear ones a happy Dashain. He told her that he had sent two mobile sets--one for his 20-year-old brother and another for his brother-in-law--with his friend travelling to Nepal for the holiday season.

Surrounded by her female relatives and daughter Srishti Gautam, Lila's voice quivered as she talked about her son, Ashok Bhattarai, 21. Just two hours before his death, Ashok had called her in Parasi, Nawalparasi district.

At 3 pm the same day, her phone kept ringing. There were a number of long-distance calls from the US. "First, a friend of his said Ashok had met with an accident," said Lila. "Then another called to say he has died."

Two weeks ago, Ashok was shot dead by a masked gunman, Raymond Whitcher,17, while he was about to close his counter at the First Food Stop in Missouri City, Texas. The killer was arrested last Wednesday.

On September 28 at 10 pm, Raymond barged into the convenience store and opened fire at Ashok. After shooting him, the gunman walked behind the counter, robbed US$ 5,000 and fled. Ashok's co-worker, apparently, was back in the cooler restocking, and didn't hear anything.

The convenience store did not have a bullet-proof glass at the counter, said the slain man's roommate Sudeep Paudel, who is in Kathmandu for Dashain. "It could have saved his life," he said. An undergraduate student of biomedical engineering at Houston Community College, Ashok had dropped him at Bush Continental Airport in Houston, Texas and driven an hour to start the evening shift at the store where he worked part-time for $8.50 an hour.

His relatives and friends described Bhattarai as an honest, religious, hardworking and talented person who loved to sing. "He would hum Sugam Pokhrel's songs," recalled his mother. Soon she let loose a shrill, full-body wail. "Can you feel the pain of losing a son?" she asked, her words punctuated by sobs.

His father, Gyanraj Bhattarai, 53, an accountant at District Land Reforms Office in Nawalparasi, is numb with grief. A soft-spoken man with pepper-and-salt beard, he has been hit by a double blow: loss of a young son on a promising career track and the huge debt incurred to finance his now lost career. Having spent Rs 900,000 for Ashok's dream trip to the US, he expects to be in debt for the next several years.

After completing high school from Parasi in 2002, Ashok had enrolled at NIST in Lainchaur as a student of biology and dreamed of becoming a doctor.

His dream was shattered in 2005. Despite scoring 76 percent in I.Sc. exams, he could neither get admission at TU Teaching Hospital nor a scholarship to India. He did not want to place a huge debt - anywhere between Rs 2 million to 2.5 million - to self-finance the MBBS--on his parents' shoulders.

It was at this point he decided to shift his career goals to bioengineering. On January 2, 2006, Ashok left for Oklahoma, and six months later moved to Texas where he shared a one-bedroom apartment with two Nepali students, Sudeep and Angikar Karki. In Texas, he did not change the subjects but found more Nepali friends to spend time with.

On Friday, Sudeep had come to Gaushala to hand over the two mobile sets Ashok had sent for his relatives. Instead, he found his roommate's grieving parents who had several questions about their son's death. (Sudeep came to know about the death in Singapore while on his way home).

He said black Americans lived in the neighbourhood where Ashok worked. "It's a good neighbourhood," he said. He also said that the two discussed the safety measures of the store. "My store has a bullet-proof counter", he said. "We had discussed whether it would be a good idea to quit the job," he said, "But he [Ashok] thought it [was] safe as the police patrolled the area all the time." Moreover, Ashok also wanted to save money to go to college in autumn.

Ashok's death has triggered an avalanche of Internet activities. A facebook group, "Help send Ashok Bhattarai's body to Nepal," opened by Sakar Bhusal, now has over 1,700 members. A picture of smiling Ashok dressed in a yellow T-shirt, sporting a V sign, is posted on the group's homepage.

Nepalese Association of Houston has created Ashok Bhattarai Memorial Fund that has raised over $41,000 in an Internet based donation drive. According to Kamal Pandey, a Houston based Nepali, a portion of the fund has been spent to ship his dead body to Nepal.

His dead body arrived in Kathmandu Friday at 9.30 pm and was cremated at Pashupati Aryaghat on Saturday morning.

The remaining portion of the fund, according to Pandey, will be sent to the dead man's parents.

The murder has also sent shockwaves to Nepali students in the US. Many of those who posted their messages on the facebook group were furious at the killer. One Nepali student from Colorado was happy that Texas allows capital punishment, hinting that the gunman deserved it. "No one can bring Ashok Dai back, all of us can help ourselves to remain as safe as possible," a Nepali student remarked. "It's a festive season and they (Ashok's parents) had to bear this irreparable loss," one student wrote.

On October 4, Nepalese Association of Houston organised a memorial service in the First Food Stop, the store where Ashok worked and was killed. Pictures of the memorial service posted on Facebook show white and black Americans and local Nepalis, among others, flocking to the store to pay tribute to Ashok. His casket is adorned with Nepali flags, his posters hanging. People with flowers in hands were seen queuing up in front of the store.

While waiting for two days in Kathmandu for her dead son's casket to arrive, Lila lamented the death not only of her son but also of a young man who believed in prayers.

"He would always ask for blessings," she said. "He believed in God. He went to Manakamana temple after receiving the [U.S.] visa." Following her son's death, she said, she has lost faith in God.

Sunidhi Chauhan in Nepal

2009-09-05T15:10:00.004+05:30

Sunidhi Chauhan, a popular Indian singer, is set to rock the Kathmandu Valley on Saturday. Thousands of Nepali music lovers are expected to throng Jawalakhel in Lalitpur when the 26-year-old singer will be performing her fast numbers in an open stage.

Her counter-question whether we could talk after 20 minutes reflected how busy she remains, when I made an international call from Kathmandu to interview her at Mumbai this Sunday.

Chauhan has recorded more than 2500 songs in several Indian languages. She started singing at the tender age of five, thanks to her father Dushyant Chauhan, who noticed her talent and shifted to Mumbai from Delhi to groom her.

Chauhan’s voice was first aired through India's state-owned Doordarshan Television when she took part in a singing competition. After winning it, she got an opportunity to record her first album titled "Aera Gaira Natthu Khaira" from the HMV records. Though she debuted from Shrastha, a 1996 movie, she became popular after the release of song 'Ruki Ruki Si Zindagi' in Ram Gopal Verma directed Mast. Since then, she has not looked back. After Mast, she lent her voice in many hit films including Jang, Veergati, Dahek, Bade Dilwala, and Raja Ki Aayegi Barat. At the age of 19, she had recorded 350 songs.

"Singing just happened in my life,” she said, “It was my hobby and I always loved to hymn." A versatile singer, Sunidhi has sung rock, pop, classical and semi-classical songs.

She first visited Nepal five years ago. However, this time she has an opportunity to perform here and entertain her fans in a neighboring country. She is the cynosure of the free live concert to be held in Kathmandu under MTV Europe's campaign MTV Exit against human trafficking.

She will be accompanied by fellow Nepali singers Nimba Rumbha, Kranti Ale, Nalina Chitrakar and others.

She said it will be her first participation on the MTV Exit, though she has already performed at MTV’s other programmes .

When asked how she is feeling about the concert, she said, "I'm feeling great." She has lent her voice in recently released Bollywood movies including Love Ajkal, Dil Bole Haddipa and Kaminey.

The MTV live concert sponsored by the Kantipur Publications and USAID Nepal will try to raise awareness through music on youths about the human trafficking. "I exactly don't how human trafficking is curbed, but I feel really proud that I am one of the members of this awareness campaign," she said.

She is aware that many Nepali women are trafficked to Indian cities and are forced into sex trade in the brothels there. "I feel really sad about this," she said, adding, "I am also a woman and I feel that their ordeal should be ended ." According to her personal website, this good-looking singer believes that God is her guiding force and angel that protects her.

Her love life seems straight out of a movie script. At 18, she secretly married to choreographer Bobby Khan. As it was more of an infatuation and that her family too was against the marriage, she divorced the next year. "Both Bobby and me were looking for different things in life."

Nominated for as many as 12 times for India’s prestigious Film Fair Award, she succeeded bringing home the bacon three times. She has also bagged awards at Star Screen Award, IIFA Award and Zee Cinema Award.

When asked if she ever thought about any career other than singing, she said," I didn't, but I wanted to be a dancer." Recently demised pop icon Michael Jackson and Maria Carey are amongst her favorites. Going by her beauty, some believe that she can do well in Bollywood as well. But she said, "Right now I am concentrating on singing and I want to keep working hard on it."

This singing sensation thinks that her voice suits with all the actresses. She says, “I am what I am because of my fast numbers." Be ready for her fast numbers!

This profile appeared as a cover story of Hello Shukrabar, the weekend supplement I edit. Kantipur daily's Hello Shukrabar is one of the partners of MTV Exit Live in Nepal.

Biker and Bonhomie

2009-08-29T14:48:00.002+05:30

On a recent sun-soaked Saturday afternoon, I found myself dragging my motorcycle on an almost empty road in Thamel. Unlike Friday nights, when Thamel bustles with pulsating discotheques and dance bars, Saturday afternoon was utterly desolate. Even the roads of Durbarmarg and Kantipath were nearly empty with only a handful of vehicles plying. I arrived at the parking lot, my eyes automatically searching for the black and vermilion coloured-bike. It was there, lonely among a few cars that had been parked overnight. I was glad that the bike was there: sahisalamat, alright. I paid the parking boy Rs. 50 and headed to Chhetrapati, where I was told I will find a repair shop.

I must interject here to talk about the nature of my current predicament: All hell had broken loose the previous evening when the 10-month-old motor-cycle, for the first time, suffered a puncture. I was there to cover a lounge and spa whose slogan read, ‘An oasis in the heart of Thamel’, and I couldn’t help but notice the irony. By the time we were done with the interview, it was already nine in the night. The boy at the parking lot said there was no way I would find a mechanic. I was left with only one option: leave the bike at the parking lot overnight.

I shuddered. I thought about the several cases of motorcycle thefts in the Valley, where ever-vigilant thieves didn’t choose between the brands or the colours and stole whatever two-wheelers they could find. I recalled some of my colleagues recounting their experience of losing their vehicles, a must for anyone these days.
As I was locking my motorcycle, I realised the investments a biker must make for the safety of his vehicle. Helmet locks, wheel locks, handle locks. The list is endless.

But back to my current status; back to dragging the bike along a lonely stretch of road. While I was doing so, I thought of what had been missing in the city lately: helping hands. I had convinced myself that the flip side of the ever-growing metropolis was indifference.

How wrong I was! As I negotiated the narrow, grimy streets towards Chhetrapati with rickshaws, bikes and cabs, people voluntarily directed me towards a repair shop. I shouted to a man resting on his rickshaw. He instructed me to take a right turn. I approached Juddhodaya Public School, one of the oldest schools in Nepal, and also once my exam centre. But it wasn’t the right time to bask on bygone days. Here I was, the man with a mission and a destination.

I’d forgotten to take into account one thing, however: it was Saturday, the day of almost (official) banda. Hauling the awkwardly oblong motorcycle on an abandoned street, I cut a forlorn figure. But to my delight and surprise, there were folks to guide me. One after another, they came to my help and led me through Kathmandu’s labyrinth. A man pointed out a row of closed shutters where, according to him, there was a repair shop. The owner must have been enjoying his hard-earned weekly off,

I supposed. Another local man assured me there were some shops on the way ahead. Finally, after encountering three closed mechanics, I ran into a shoemaker at Paknajol who pointed out a ‘bicycle on hire’ signboard. Some events take you to unusual places.

I felt exhilarated when the slim young man at the bicycle shop told me he’ll try his best. I watched him work as he executed his deft skills to repairing the punctured tyre. Half an hour and Rs. 35 later, I thanked him profusely and left, thrilled at getting to ride my prized possession at last.

But the helping hands didn’t just stop at that. Another night after the afternoon, my bike skidded on the slippery Koteshwar road. As I was picking it up and strengthening myself, I heard a voice: Ramrari chalaunu pardaina! I turned towards the source of the voice. Under the dim street lights, I found that it was a fellow biker. His was less a scolding and more a caveat. Take that for brotherly love!

Published at The Kathmandu Post on Saturday

Apocalypse Now

2009-08-16T12:17:00.003+05:30

This past spring, English language writer Sushma Joshi, a graduate of Brown University (a member of the Ivy Leagues in the US), burst upon the literary scene with two books: Art Matters and The End of the World. Art Matters is a collection of her art related articles published in Nation Weekly (now defunct) and Kantipur Online. But the book I am going to discuss is the short story collection The End of the World which was longlisted for this year's Frank O'Connor short story award.

The collection of eight stories reverberates with the contemporary Nepali society. She borrows the characters from everyday life and weaves them into stories in order to give them a structure of imagination. “Waiting for Rain”, for example, deals with a village near Kathmandu that has been affected by Maoist ‘people’s war’ and the buying and selling of votes in an upcoming election. Most of the stories have water like flow. There is an abundance of imagery.

The first story “Cheese” brings to mind a Nepali proverb: Umkeko Machho Thulo (A missed fish always seems big). Ten-year old Gopi is shepherded from village to work in a relative’s house in Kathmandu. Gopi doesn’t get his share of a slice of cheese brought by Prakash Babu, the son of his masters, all the way from Switzerland. When he is not even acknowledged as a member of the household, how would he be entitled for the precious cheese? The foreign food even comes in his dreams. Twenty years after this incident, Gopi fulfills his dream of having cheese. By now, he is not dependent on others but is self-reliant. Now a worker at a hotel, he leaves for Nepal Dairy in Lainchowr in order to fulfill the long unfulfilled yearning. He buys a piece of cheese for three hundred rupees but immediately starts vomiting. Did he sweeten his mouth for years for this? The untasted turns out to be a choicer wine.

“Betrayal” chronicles the story of a friendship that flourished between the central character Gautame, and Mahesh in Mumbai, India; their struggle in the foreign land and their experiences of being recruited in the Maoist army after returning to Nepal. But the denouement of the story is completely different. Gautame, who is returning from Hong Kong after he left the Maoists and went abroad, is arrested at the airport on Mahesh’s instruction. Confined inside a cell in a jail, he mulls over his past, intimate moments with Mahesh and the betrayal by a friend who he thought was very close to him.

“Law and Order” revolves around Bishnu, a new recruit at Police Headquarters. He steals vegetables from a neighbor’s courtyard, in what seemed like a huge effort. Then he is bewildered. Is that because of his hunger for the vegetables or for the young lass who lives there? The title story “The End of the World,” reflects a set of Nepali attitudes: words circulate and rumors fly fast in Nepal about the end of the world every now and then; the superstition; and Nepalis’ wish to eat good food before dying. “Matchmaking” depicts how women are examined like goods kept for sale before their marriage.

For me, the best story of the collection is “Blockade.” In it, the hunger for food is presented in two ways: Ram Bahadur Bomjom, who is meditatating without any food for several months, has drawn crowds. National and foreign media persons to god-fearing and inquisitive people to his place of spiritual repose in a forest of Bara. On the other hand, Hasta Bahadur Kathaya who hails from remote Kalikot district in Karnali region visits the meditating man in order to extract the secret of living without food, in the hope that it will solve his village’s perennial problem. How could he survive without food for so many months? Hasta Bahadur embarks on the journey to unravel the mystery so that the problem of hunger will be solved once and for all. He’s so dedicated in his mission that he leaves for the forest in Bara straight from his work in India. He doesn’t see the ‘Buddha Boy’ and seeks help from a monk who says: “The boy is sitting for world peace. He cannot be disturbed.”

Unable to meet the boy, let alone extract the secret of living without eating, he downs local raksi on a roadside stall. Then, he dozes off under a banyan tree only to be woken up by policemen who for a while mistake him for Bomjom. And then, he is suspected of being Maoist. Towards the end, when he is about to reach his home, Maoists force him to donate his money. He arrives home empty handed. Still, he cannot heave a sigh of relief. His wife has eloped, leaving their child dead. Hasta Bahadur, who sets about eliminating hunger, becomes its victim: his child dies of starvation.

These stories reveal a society in flux. After the restoration of democracy in 1990, the hitherto complacent Nepali society is increasingly moving towards one seeking justice and equality. The old hierarchies, ways of life and feudal systems are gradually crumbling. Deeply evocative, the stories present glimpses of small, private dramas that are shaped by larger political happenings.

Compared to neighboring India, the tradition of writing in English is a very recent phenomenon in Nepal. (Even in Pakistan, writers like Mohamed Hanif, Nadim Aslam, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Mohsin Hamid are recently making mark in English writing—I believe this is a renewed thurst mainly because Pakistan is back on the world radar). As a result, in Nepal there are very few writers who write in English. There are only two Nepali fiction writers whose books are published internationally: Samrat Upadhayay and Manjushree Thapa. But a strong possibility is evident in Sushma. The other good point she scores from her stories is that it tries to fill the void in literature about the ten-year long Maoist insurgency. However, it is not conflict-focused and it does not depict the incidents of violence and counter violence, and its direct impact on people who were caught in it.

Unlike other works by English writers in Nepal, Joshi’s stories are firmly rooted in Nepal’s soil. Published by FinePrint, The End of the World (price 250 Nepali rupees) has some grammatical errors here and there.

First published in Nepal Monitor.

Red Sun: The Road Less Travelled

2009-07-26T11:16:00.007+05:30

This appeared in The Kathmandu Post yesterday.

In the summer of 2004, a journalist friend of mine travelled to the Maoist headquarters of Rolpa, hoping to meet the combatants. After a month-long journey through Rolpa and Rukum, the hinterland in the Mid Western region, he could not stumble upon a single combatant. He returned empty handed, and talked about it with his colleagues in cosy Kathmandu newsroom. Nevertheless, his travelogue was published in the Nepali language weekly newsmagazine, titled: “A Red Fort without Combatants.”

This came to my mind while reading Sudeep Chakravarti's book Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country. Despite several attempts, the author fails to meet the combatants holed up deep in India's backwater. Towards the end of the book, he embarks on a tour of Jharkhand, hoping to meet gun-toting guerrillas. Instead, he ends up pondering the beauty of the place: “Photography was born for this.”

However, this should not deter a tenacious reader from enjoying the fascinating book that blends travelogue and reportage to tell the stories of atrocities committed by both the Maoists and the state. The Indian government's lackadaisical response to the threat caused by Maoists seems to partly propel his inquiry.

It was only in April 2006 when Nepal's Maoists had already joined hands with parliamentary political parties to undertake peaceful mass protest to overthrow the monarchy that India awoke to the magnitude of Maoist crisis. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh termed the Naxal violence 'greatest internal security threat.'

Sudeep writes in the preface: “Maoism is not our greatest security threat. Poverty, non-governance, bad justice and corruption are. Maoist presence in a third of India merely mirrors our failings as a nation.” He further elaborates on the goal of writing the book: “I wanted to adopt a role of a storyteller, to attempt to tear the veil of denial that urban, middle-class-and-up, policymaking India lives behind without realising there's a poison pill inside the nation—of the nation's own making.”

On his flight from Mumbai to Raipur, the capital of Chhattisgarh, the state most ravaged by 'people's war,' the author meets his potential readers: Ritu Jain and SD Karmalkar, the former a graduate of India's top business school and now an employee at American Express and the latter a manager at ACC Limited. The two are the epitome of “urban, middle-class-and-up” India that he aspires to inform through his book. He strikes a conversation and both like him seem worried about the violence and counter violence especially in the mineral rich and tribal dominated Chhattisgarh. The state has also become a laboratory for state sponsored vigilante groups thanks to the formation of controversial and notorious Salwa Judum in which the tribespeople are pitted against the Maoists. (The notion of arming civilians to crush rebels also found its way into Nepal's Maoist insurgency. In 2005, retaliation forces under the name of Pratikar Samiti were formed in Tarai districts of Kapilbastu and Nawalparasi. Mohid Khan, a leader of such vigilante group in Kapilbastu was later killed in a communal violence).

But Chhattisgarh is only the tip of the iceberg. The Red Corridor (dubbed “Pashupati to Tirupati” by LK Advani), covers 12 states, from Bihar in the north and West Bengal in the east, to Andhra Pradesh in the south and the edges of Maharashtra in the west. It is also home to India's underbelly where casteism, corruption, injustice, poverty and illiteracy hold sway. And, Maoists with their ideology of encircling city from village, easily bank on the state's apathy and its absence in those areas.

The Naxalism or Naxalite movement can be traced to a small village called Naxalbari, near Siliguri in West Bengal. In 1967, a group of Bengalis launched an armed uprising led by Charu Mazumdar and Kanu Sanyal. The rebellion was quickly suppressed. Mazumdar died in detention, but Kanu, who dissented with the former is “among the few on-ground leaders and participants who still live in and around ground zero.” The writer even manages to sneak into Nepali border side of Kakkarbhitta where he runs into a Maoist pro-democracy protest in the spring of 2006.

Had the writer travelled a little further west in Jhapa district, he would have come across a remnant of Naxalbari in Nepal. In 1971, a handful of young communists from Jhapa, inspired by Naxalite movement, launched an armed uprising. But after the massacre of a few local 'feudal lords', the movement was swiftly crushed. This incident which is considered precedence to Maoist 'people's war' is not mentioned in the book.

By juxtaposing Indian Maoists with their Nepali counterpart, the writer suggests Indian comrades to follow Nepal's path. But this seems like a wishful thinking. Of late, the gulf between Indian Maoists and Nepali comrades has widened. CPI Maoist's recent decision to call Nepali Maoists 'revisionist' says it all.

Visiting Palace-Museum in Nepal

2009-07-06T11:49:00.004+05:30

A year after Nepal’s last king, Gyanendra Shah, vacated the royal palace in Kathmandu, I queued up for hours to see behind the walls of the building that for years remained shrouded in mystery. Soon I noticed that it’s not the large, ornate rooms that draw the most attention, but the site of a royal massacre eight years ago that threw the country into political upheaval.

It had been three and a half months since the government opened the palace-turned-museum to the public. Three teenage girls stood before me. One of them peeked through the iron fences for a glimpse of the sprawling palace area. Inside, manicured lawns were visible, birds were chirping in the spacious garden. I overheard the girls talk about former princess Himani Shah’s recent adventure at paragliding in Pokhara, a popular tourist town. The cacophony of vendors scrambling to sell mineral water bottles and ice-cream seemed to be subdued by endless honking of the vehicles on the adjacent road. It was just past noon and the sun was merciless.

Lonely amidst the crowd that moved in snail’s pace, I mulled over the ill-fated monarchy. I was in Dubai’s International Airport in an early June 2001 night when I heard the news of the royal massacre. I lived there in a self-imposed exile, working at a McDonald’s, hoping to earn some petro dollars, trying to gain my share of the Arabian boom. A combination of circumstances—joblessness and the desire to cross the oceans—had taken me to United Arab Emirates in the autumn of 1998.

At the outset, I could not believe the news of the massacre. I thought it could be one of the rumors circulating back home. It was mid-night in Dubai’s state of the art airport that welcomed the passengers from almost every corner of the world.

In the night of June 1, 2001, Crown Prince Dipendra, clad in combat fatigues, armed with assault rifles and pistols, and high on drugs and alcohol, killed most of his family including King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya. Upset, apparently because his mother did not let him marry his sweetheart, he had entered the shooting frenzy. He later shot himself. The prince was anointed king as he lay unconscious in a military hospital. He died two days later. The throne passed to his uncle Gyanendra who was absent from the royal banquet, fueling the suspicion among common people.

It was a difficult time for Nepal’s monarchy. The virtual obliteration of royalty happened in the midst of a ruthless Maoist “people’s war.” The country seemed on the brink of collapse. One Maoist ideologue even wrote an obituary of the institution of monarchy. A year after the mass murder, I was planning to return home winding up my four year sojourn in the Gulf.

Many of my well-wishers said it was not the right time to go back to Nepal. I did not pay heed to them. But even as I was booking my airline ticket, King Gyanendra dismissed the elected government and formed a caretaker government headed by his loyalists. His bloodless coup of February 1, 2005 was the final act in his effort to begin an autocratic rule in the country. A joint struggle by political parties and Maoists a year later forced him to step down. Following the Constituent Assembly elections in April 2008 in which Maoists won by 38 percent, the king was booted out of the palace. The king’s exit fulfilled one of the major demands of the former rebels.

As I stood in line, these recollections and images of the past flashed in mind. After paying 100 Nepali Rupees (USD 1.33), I entered into the palace. On my way, the security men asked to switch my cell phone off; taking picture was strictly prohibited, they told me. Visitors comprised kids, young men, women and the elderly. School children, ferried in buses, easily outnumbered them.

A big hall down the entrance overwhelmed me. I was greeted by huge portraits of former kings in their heavily jeweled regal garbs. There the walls are mirrored while the floor is covered with red carpet. As I negotiated the narrow passageways, I came across several rooms named after Nepal’s 75 districts. Most of them seemed reserved for the visiting dignitaries. Other rooms have porcelain knickknacks and family snapshots.

I learned that currently the museum employs, but it does not have trained guides for the tour. Employees are stationed each room to guard the valuables. The museum, it appears, will soon be able to collect its own resources to afford to recruit the needed personnel. In the four months since February end this year when it opened to the public, the museum has earned over USD 1, 25, 000 from entry tickets. So far, 1, 56, 087 people have visited the landmark.

In a corner of a shelf, in the book-lined room, I found a series of tomes by Joseph Conrad, Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo and William Shakespeare. I wondered if any of the royal members read those classics. After the massacre, a few writers drew an analogy between Shakespearean tragedies and the bloodbath that took place inside the palace.

I entered the royal bedchamber which actually underwhelmed me. It’s not very big and the room is rather congested. Many middle class urban Nepalis favor king-sized bed and theirs can easily outsize the one I saw for the king. But the banquet hall with a capacity of 110 guests turned out to be impressive. Another attraction was the gold-and-silver crafted ceremonial throne. But the specter and the crown were mysteriously missing. A palace official told me it will be on display soon. But his body language betrayed his assurance.

Still, the most important item—the site of the shooting—turned up only at the end of the tour. An army man, with an assault rifle slung in his body and dressed in battle fatigues, guarded the entrance. This eerily reminded me of Dipendra whose action on the midsummer night paved the way for the end of monarchy in Nepal.

It is an open site, without most of the original structure. The building was dismantled after Gyanendra took over as monarch. At the time, nobody could question anything that happened inside the palace, which remained inaccessible even to the Prime Minister, let alone the common folk. A culture of secrecy pervaded the royal premises. But even in this newfound freedom after my country was declared a republic, I was dismayed at what lay ahead of me.

It’s a patch of a leveled-ground beside the main palace. Visitors threw curious glances and tried to locate the spots where each royal was killed.

A tall man who was guiding his elderly parents seemed like a perfect guide.

The queen died here, the king fell there, he told them, matter-of-factly.

The barren land looked an unlikely site for the nation-shattering massacre. Bullet marks were visible at the wall of the palace. I could not believe that an entire clan was wiped out in this non-descript place.

It is a small part of the 753-ropani (over 37 ha) Narayanhiti palace, named after a water-tap (“hiti”) for Narayan, the Hindu god of preservation, remains off-limits to the public. The area also includes royal gardens, foreign ministry offices, military quarters, and a home for Ratna Rajya Laxmi, the former queen mother. The actual museum area occupies only 219 ropanis (about 11 ha). The museum is still in the making for a wider public access. Officials told me so far 44 sets of CCTVs have been installed in the interior of the palace. More will be added. A Daimler Benz car gifted by Hitler to late king Tribhuvan, too, will be on display.

The palace I saw betrayed the grand public perceptions of monarchy and its institutions. I guess it's got to do with our culture in that we are in awe with someone who rules. In Nepali language, someone pampered or important is called “raja” (king). Similarly, “sarkar” also denotes both to government and royal members. A raja cannot be ordinary, although he could be just like everyone else living in his ordinary palace.

As I came out of the ill-fated building, I found out that people had varied reasons for visiting it. Some came out of reverence for monarchy. Others, like me, out of curiosity. I found myself contemplating about my country, an awkward republic we have where the talk of revival of monarchy haunts us, every now and then.

Originally published in Nepal Monitor.

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

2009-06-14T12:17:00.008+05:30

This appeared in today's The Kathmandu Post.

Life lessons

Deepak Adhikari

What would you do if you learned you have only a few months to survive? What wisdom would you share if you knew it was your last chance? What legacy would you like to leave?

Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, mulled over these questions. At age 47, he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He was going through the treatment of chemotherapy and his most recent treatment hadn't worked. He had just months to live. He was asked by the University to give a last lecture as per the US tradition in which professors give talks titled "The Last Lecture". Randy writes in the introduction of the book by the same title: "If I were a painter, I would have painted. If I were a musician, I would have composed music. But I am a lecturer. So I lectured."

What would a dying man talk about? Death, you may think. But the audience which consisted of his wife, friends, journalists, colleagues and students were pleasantly surprised when he gave a highly motivating and life assertive lecture assisted by PowerPoint, titled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams." He listed his childhood dreams: being in the zero gravity, playing in the NFL, authoring an article in the World Book Encyclopaedia, being captain Kirk, winning stuffed animal, and being a Disney imagineer. Surprisingly, he had been able to fulfil all of his childhood dreams. The slideshows and the follow up book talk about how he succeeded in fulfilling them. In the first chapter, he writes: "I won a parent lottery. I was born with the winning ticket, a major reason I was able to live out my childhood dreams."

One of the audiences in the Carnegie Mellon hall was a Wall Street Journal columnist. When Jeffrey Zaslow heard about Randy's last lecture, he knew there was a good story behind it. So, he asked WSJ to fund for his travel to Pittsburgh. It rejected the idea citing lack of budget. But Jeffrey was undeterred. He drove 286 miles from Detroit to Pittsburgh to cover the event on Sept. 18, 2007. The event featured in the WSJ under the title: "A Beloved Professor Delivers the Lecture of a Lifetime." He not only wrote the story but also collaborated with Randy on a book. Jeffrey talked to Randy when he rode his bike around his neighbourhood in south-eastern Virginia. He turned those conversations to the stories that were published as a book, making it to the bestseller's list. Apart from Randy's heart-warming story that defies death, there was also a story of journalistic dedication that surfaced from the last lecture.

I was in Pittsburgh when Randy lost his battle to cancer on July 25, 2008. I was working at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette under a six-month fellowship programme. In course of exploring the city, I visited Carnegie Mellon University in Oakland, Pittsburgh. But I came to know about Randy only after his death. Mark Roth, a staff writer at Post-Gazette wrote a moving obituary on Randy, an award winning teacher and researcher who had worked with Adobe, Google, Electronics Arts (EA) and Walt Disney. So did Jeffrey Zaslow.

When I returned home in early September last year, I made sure that The Last Lecture was one of the dozen books I brought along with me. Back in Nepal, I would discover Jagdish Ghimire, a seasoned author who has almost become a Nepali version of Randy Pausch. After knowing that Ghimire is diagnosed with terminal cancer, I borrowed Antarmanko Yatra, a memoir-cum-autobiography that won prestigious Madan Puraskar, from a book-loving friend. While reading the book, I could not help but compare Ghimire with Pausch: though oceans apart, the zeal of life, positive thinking and enthusiasm are the hallmark of both individuals. Listening to Ghimire's lecture in several literary gatherings, I realised that he too was full of life, humorous; there was no hint of his imminent death. He has even remarked in a recent programme organised by American Embassy that he has defied death.

At one point in the book, Randy says: "Time is all you have. And you may find one day that you have less than you think." This coming from a person who knew he was soon going to die. The book is full of anecdotes, motivational tips, and life-lessons that Randy hoped would illuminate his children's life in his absence. Randy had married his sweetheart Jai (pronounced "Jay"). They had three kids: Logan, Chloe and Dylan. In his final days, he made sure that he devoted his time for his family. He left no stone unturned to secure a good future for them.

The Last Lecture combines humour, inspiration and intelligence. It forces you to pause and ruminate over your own life. The anecdotes and vignettes linger long after the final sentence is read. Schedule your time with this book.

Sold: A Novel by Patricia McCormick

2009-05-17T13:47:00.006+05:30

This appeared in The Kathmandu Post today:

A sold daughter
Deepak Adhikari

In Sold, American author Patricia McCormick's coming-of-age novel, the harsh reality of life in a mountain village in Nepal is presented in stark vignettes. The story of Lakshmi, a girl in the village of Goldhunga, narrated in first person, is deceptively simple yet very poignant.

A graduate of journalism from Columbia University, Patricia embarked on a research of Nepali girls' trafficking into India (some estimate says 12,000 of them are trafficked to India every year), through a grant by New York Foundation for Arts. The result was a heart-wrenching story of a girl, mired in poverty, sold into prostitution in an Indian brothel. The characters are thinly veiled real life people.

The 269-page novel, which was a finalist for the US National Book Award 2006, depicts the tragic life of women and girls in rural Nepal where a cruel combination of illiteracy, poverty, superstition and backwardness force them to survive in very tough circumstances.

Flipping through the pages of Sold, I was reminded of Sandra Cisneros, the Latino author of The House on Mango Street. In several vignettes, Cisneros weaves the stories of Esperanza, a Mexican-American girl growing up in the United States. The only thing common in these two novels is the method of storytelling. Unlike Esperanza's, Lakshmi's world is that of deprivation, abject poverty and hardship.

However, a vignette titled “Difference between a Son and a Daughter” can be likened to the one in The House on Mango Street: “Boys and girls live in two different universes.” In Nepal too, during childhood, a son is pampered while a daughter has to follow strict rules in the patriarchal setting. In the story, it emerges that the difference is stark: “A son will always be a son, they say. But a girl is like a goat. Good as long as she gives you milk and butter. But not worth crying over when its time to make a stew.”

Some of the pieces are as short as 3-4 lines; they can be read like poetry. There are white spaces here and there in the book. The author has remarked that the empty spaces are meant to play with the reader's imagination.

In the vignette titled “Maybe”, the mother and daughter indulge in a luxury. It turns out to be a cigarette her mother has hidden for the rainy days. But the euphoria soon ends when the incessant monsoon rain destroys their mud house, rendering them hapless and helpless. Lakshmi's irresponsible stepfather sells her to a strange city woman for eight hundred rupees. Gullible Lakshmi, only 13 at the time, is deceived by everyone: she was thinking all along that she was going to work as a housemaid in the city.

After crossing the border and ending up in a brothel probably in Calcutta, she undergoes inhuman torture at the hands of Mumtaz to whom the so-called uncle-husband (she was instructed to call the trafficker her husband in the Indo-Nepal border in order to deceive the police) sells her to. Before that there are layers of transaction that show a complex web of trafficking. She ends up in a jail-like brothel ironically named Happiness House.

The girls in the brothel, ranging from a 10-year-old to middle aged women, are forced to have sex with strangers. They are caught in an endless cycle of threats. At times the hell-like atmosphere is lightened up with small pleasures. After all, once you are familiar with the surroundings, you grow used to it. Lakshmi meets a boy named Harish with a David Beckham haircut who teaches her some English words. There are characters like Shilpa who loves movies, and Monica who is friendly with her clients. They learn things clandestinely and hide their memorabilia.

When Pushpa, a fellow inmate falls sick, Mumtaz says, “If you don't get out of the bed and see customers today, you are on the street.” The brothel owner's cruelty knows no bounds. Pushpa begs not be thrown out. Mumtaz demands that she sell her daughter. She thunders: “In a few years, when she is old enough, I can make a lot of money with her.”

A vivid scene of police raid in the Happiness House reminded me of a documentary I watched on BBC a few years ago. In it, underage girls were shown emerging from a cave-like room. When tipped off about police raid, Lakshmi and other underage girls are kept in a structure where it's difficult even to breathe.

The story ends as Lakshmi is waiting for a kind-hearted American who promises her to rescue from the hell-hole. In the denouement, Mumtaz is already nabbed by the police but Lakshmi's fate is left ambiguous. The novel poses a question on its beautiful yellow cover: Can she ever be free? The answer probably is no because the cross-border trafficking still goes on unabated.

Q&A with Samrat Upadhyay

2009-05-08T12:28:00.010+05:30

In mid April, I received an email from US based Nepali-English writer Samrat Upadhyay. In it, he informed me about an upcoming event in Washinton, DC in which he was reading excerpts from his book for a charity organization Committed. He wondered whether I was interested to cover the event for Kantipur Daily (Nepali version of this interview is published at Koseli, the daily's Saturday supplement). I mailed him a set of questions and he replied them after the event on April 26:

In an email you said, this is the first time you are reading an extract from your book for a charity event. How did you feel?

It was great to be reading for Community Members Interested (COMMITTED, an all-voluntary nonprofit organization focusing on Nepal run by a group of young, dynamic Nepalis living in the Washington, D.C. area and led by Jayjeev Hada. COMMITTED helps Nepali communities in areas of poverty alleviation, land use, health, and public facilities. It is doing some very valuable work in Nepal. Currently, it’s working with Open Learning Exchange, Nepal, to provide computer-based education to all of Nepali children. I was happy and humbled to be supporting COMMITTED in doing what is clearly encouraging work that’s providing tangible benefits to underprivileged communities in Nepal.

What was the most interesting question from the audience and what was your answer?

The most interesting question was from a waiter at The Himalayan Heritage restaurant in Washington, D.C., where one of the readings was held. The young man had read all of my books and asked me whether the decrease in depiction of sex in my subsequent books after Arresting God in Kathmandu had to do with any external pressure or criticism I might have faced. I was struck by how eloquent, and forthright, the young man was. I answered that I was younger when I wrote Arresting, and that a writer’s interest and focus can, and should, change with books. I also cautioned him not to discount erotic scenes from my forthcoming books entirely.

What is your thought on art as an instrument of social change? Are you for Art for Art's sake?

I advocate neither art for art’s sake nor art for social change. Art that’s merely self-reflective can be experienced as narcissist and closed; on the other hand, art that’s geared toward social change can also become pedantic and propagandist. On the whole, I do believe what Nobel Prize-winner writer Nadine Gordimer, quoting Barthes, has said: that a writer’s enterprise is his “essential gesture as a social being,” that the creative act is not isolated and self-enclosed, that “history evidences it, ideology demands it, society exacts it.” Art, if used properly, can provide both aesthetic pleasure and be a tool for social change.

Can you tell us about your upcoming novel Queen's Pond?

The Queen’s Pond (now named Buddha's Orphans) charts the life-history of two characters from their childhood to old age, and in the process covers several decades of recent Nepali history. It’s the story of an orphan haunted by visions of his mother who abandoned him, of a young woman who abandons her life of privilege to marry for love—of a country’s rapid, whirlwind transformations. It’s the longest work I’ve written; it was close to 800 pages in its original draft, but now it’s whittled down to a little bit more than 500.

Your last book was titled The Royal Ghosts, your upcoming novel is The Queen's Pond? Why this fixation on royalty? (at a time when Nepal's been declared a republic)

The Queen’s Pond is a reference to Rani Pokhari, not to the royalty that was booted out of the palace.

On your visit to Nepal two years ago, you mentioned about The Queen's Pond saying "it's baffling me." You hinted that the form is new. Can you elaborate on this?

The Queen’s Pond grew out of my desire to write a novel that played with narrative time, that moved back and forth through the history of my characters. My previous novel, The Guru of Love, had been a strictly chronological affair, with a plot structure that was linear and uncomplicated, and with three characters around which the story revolved. The Guru of Love was the perfect tale for a first-time novelist. But for my second novel I wanted something that’d use the capacity of the novel form to stretch our conventional notions of time, especially in relation to Nepali history. In retrospect, it seems that I wanted to demonstrate that our lives are intertwined with lives from the past, that “life repeats itself,” if you will. For this reason writing the novel was difficult and challenging. And at that time when I talked to you, I was still struggling with it.

The recession is hitting every industry in the US. Is book publishing affected?

Certainly. If anything, it’s even more difficult to get published in the current economic environment. The big American publishers are suffering, and mid-sized publishers are faring badly. Literary fiction in particular is not doing well.

Tell us about your upcoming visit to Nepal.

I will be visiting Nepal the first two weeks of July, and I will be bringing with me two of my graduate creative writing students from Indiana University, poet Magda Sokolowski and fiction writer Andres Sanabria, for a literary/cultural trip. The trip is a result of a grant provided to me by Indiana University, and the project is titled, “The Writer in the World: Cultural Space and Displacement.” During their stay in Nepal, Magda and Andres will, apart from visiting cultural sites, conduct writing workshops with some school children as well as participate in literary interactions. Once they return to the U.S. they will write creative pieces that address their transformative experience. It’s the first time this has happened in our program, so the students here are very excited.

Links: My piece on Samrat published at OhmyNews International
An old blog post after the release of The Royal Ghosts

Check out pieces written by Magda and Andres after their Nepal trip:
Pic courtesy: COMMITTED.

Between the Assassinations

2009-04-19T11:54:00.003+05:30

Below is my piece on Aravind Adiga's short story collection Between the Assassinations published at The Kathmandu Post:

The stories of Kittur

Deepak Adhikari

Set in the period between the killings of two Indian prime ministers (Indira Gandhi in 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi in 1991), Between the Assassinations weaves the tales of Kittur, a small town in India's south-western coast, in between Goa and Calicut. Although Aravind Adiga wrote these stories before The White Tiger, which won the 2008 Booker Prize, they came out only after his debut novel.

A collection of twelve untitled short stories, Between the Assassinations is populated with characters that range from an illiterate Muslim teenager working at a train station, a terrorist who lures him into a potential act of terror, a rich, half-caste student who decides to explode a bomb in a college to an editor unable to come to terms with truth. There are little misunderstandings and twists of fate, like the one where a young boy looking for a bride ends up with a mysterious disease. But the most important character in the book is the town itself.

Kittur with its diversity, its social fabric woven in each story, is almost personified. It is given a lifelike quality. It also plays a central role in each story, its presence is felt everywhere. Every story is preceded by an introduction of the setting. For instance, in the first story, the train station is introduced thus: “The arches of the train station frame your first view of Kittur as you come in as a passenger on a Madras Mail (arrival early morning) or the West Coast Express (arrival afternoon). The station is dim, dirty, and littered with discarded lunch bags that stray dogs poke their noses into; in the evenings, the rats come out.” What follows is Ziauddin's struggle to find work in a hostile town. A chance encounter with a 'stranger' leads to his complicity in a possible terror attack.

Like RK Narayan, another South Indian novelist who set most of his stories in Malgudi, an imaginary town, Adiga has clinically examined the life and characteristics of this real South Indian town. The book unravels the characters' frustration, corruption, faltering relationships and search for elusive truth. But unlike Narayan, whose stories are set during a rather peaceful period of colonial India, Adiga depicts an India replete with cruelty, banality and division along ethnic and religious lines. Adiga's fictional world is more complex and therefore more authentic than that of Narayan, who centered his stories on the simple life of a small town that seemed unaware of the world outside its boundary.

However, Adiga's characters are also everymen who grapple with life's challenges. One such character is Abbasi. When the story opens, Abbasi is entertaining an official from the Electricity Board (“He was a fat, black man in a blue safari suit, with a steel ballpoint pen in its pocket”). Abbasi, a Muslim “with a streak of grey in his beard which he did not attempt to dye”, runs a factory that produces export-quality shirts.

But the most important task for him seems to be bribing corrupt government officials (“Corruption. There is no end to it in this country.") Abbasi laments that “ever since Mrs. Gandhi died, this country is falling apart.” He then drives his white Ambassador to Canara Club to play snooker and have drinks with friends. After many pegs of whisky, he realizes he cannot go home for fear of his wife's nagging. He drives to the port where he meets smugglers, car thieves and thugs. He feels at home with them because “while they sipped tea, nothing would happen to Abbasi.” Camaraderie among Muslims has pervaded the area: “The sense of solidarity among Muslims at the port had deepened since the riots.” Through the character of Abbasi, Adiga has uncovered the all-pervasive corruption that has plagued Indian bureaucracy.

Mixing reportage and narrative (Adiga is a former Time magazine correspondent), the Indian author creates a big canvas with a wide range of finely drawn characters. A chronology dating from 31 October 1984 to 21 May 1991 is included at the end of the book.

The stories in this collection delve deeper into the extraordinary transformation of India. What emerges is a group portrait of individuals whose lives are shaped and damaged by casteism, corruption, terrorism, injustice, communal riots, extreme poverty and underdevelopment. Adiga offers a microcosm of India that is brutal, and hence credible.

In fact, Adiga's short story collection is more nuanced than his better known novel. Every fiction writer struggles with form i.e. whether to write long fiction or short. For Adiga, the verdict is out: the short story is his forte.

A Love Letter After a Long Time

2009-03-21T15:43:00.002+05:30

Today afternoon as I was working on an upcoming suppplement on youth, I received an email apparently a junk but could not resist its lure and flowery language. Below, I am reproducing it in its entirety:

Dearest

Dearest, Kind regards, I am julle , tall, slim, fair and a very good looking girl that loves travelling and dancing, a student, that loves to be loved, kindly permit my contacting you through this medium I am compelled to contact you via this medium for obvious reasons which you will understand when we discuss details of my proposition.

Pls I will like you to reply to me through my mail address (julle06kyahoo.com) so that we will know each other very well, I am looking forward to your positive confirmation to enable us have an important discussion the we will start from there which will include my introduction, I will send my pics later.Thanks and God bless, julle (julle06k@yahoo.com)

India Express by Daniel Lak

2009-03-13T13:22:00.005+05:30

Here's my review of Daniel Lak's India Express published at The Kathmandu Post:

In India Express: The Future of a New Superpower, Canadian journalist Daniel Lak blends history and reportage to present a close up portrait of contemporary India. Lak’s is basically an outsider’s view of India, which in recent decades is undergoing unprecedented transformation. Anecdotal and lucid, India Express takes the reader on a journey of India at a time of flux.

Like Mark Tully, BBC’s legendary India correspondent who has made India his home, Lak who has covered South Asia for BBC, has been tirelessly documenting India’s many facets. He sets the tone of the book very early in introduction where a glimpse of the rising India is given through Ram, a presswalla in South Indian city of Chennai. Ram with the tenacity and hard work, has climbed the economic ladder. For Lak, Ram is an epitome of contemporary India that is shedding the old hierarchies, caste system and backwardness and reinventing itself as agent of change.

While discussing India, an axiom probably uttered by former Indian foreign minister K Natwar Singh comes to mind: “Everything you have heard about India is true and so is its opposite.” India is a paradox—poverty and affluence rub shoulders; centuries-old custom and latest fad jostle for space. At one point, he writes, “India’s vastness, its complexity, its sheer chaotic momentum can overwhelm efforts at understanding.”

Lak is quick in attributing India’s status as superpower-in-making to its knowledge economy, diversity, democracy, problem solving skills, family values, among others. “Daily life is a constant process of negotiation, reassessment and acceptance of hardship that makes people tough, resilient and focused,” he remarks in the introduction. He is equally at ease whether talking to experts, entrepreneurs or villagers. Having reported from the subcontinent for nearly two decades, he’s developed a solid understanding of the region.

When the author first visited India in 1989, he discovered an India devoid of multinationals. But thanks to the then finance minister Man Mohan Singh, whom the writer credits with spearheading India’s economic reform, the county opened up its vast resources that led to the present day prosperity. “How did India manage to transform itself in less than a generation from a stodgy, disaster prone repository of the world’s images of poverty to a thrusting economic giant in making?” he wonders. In turn, he offers several explanations. The very first chapter among the book’s eleven chapters is one such where he talks about the millennium bug notoriously known as Y2K. India’s IT sector immensely benefited from so-called Y2K phenomenon that never happened.

In the chapter, he even draws an analogy between IT and Hindu ritual while trying to demystify the sudden rise of South Indian Hindu Brahmins in the Silicon Valley, IT hub in the US. “Like Hindu rituals, IT involves coded language and veritable priesthood of initiates to resolve problems and reconcile the mysterious and mundane.” He rather implausibly quotes Gurucharan Das, who sees similarities between immense complexity of Hinduism and ability to network and get to know what works and what doesn’t. “That’s perfect IT world behavior and that’s why we’re best at it.”

In the chapter titled “Democracy, Dynasty and Devolution”, he writes about his visit to a polling station in Bihar where he finds “gunmen—five or six men with rifles held on their shoulders, pointing them straight at the voters as they emerged from a building in hamlet.” These were the Maoist guerillas fighting security forces in India’s hinterland. Despite witnessing this incident of armed men disrupting the polls, Lak places high hopes in Indian democracy.

Lak is also an interpreter of India’s myriads of maladies. He cites Rig Veda to prove “that caste was intended as a discriminatory system from the very beginning.”In modern India, he says, discrimination because of caste is illegal but widespread. Even though he dwells upon India’s various problems, what Lak really likes to do through India Express is to paint a rosy picture of a nation with more than one billion people. It’s also clear from the book’s subtitle: The Future of a New Superpower.

The last chapter titled “Becoming Asia’s Superpower” deals not with the India of today but an India of tomorrow. He takes us to the year 2040 when our southern neighbour will be “the most powerful country in the world.”

In his much acclaimed book, Post-American World, Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria predicts that in coming years, America will no longer be the superpower. In his second nonfiction book on India, Lak foresees ascent of India in the coveted position. We will be around to see how things unfold.

Curfewed Night By Basharat Peer

2009-02-15T12:54:00.002+05:30

Here's a review I wrote for The Kathmandu Post on Kashmiri author Basharat Peer's memoir Curfewed Night:

Curfewed Night, a memoir by Kashmiri journalist Basharat Peer, is an attempt to tell the human side of the story. Every now and then, Kashmir and its protracted insurgency make headlines. But most of them talk about the tragedy as if it were mere statistics. While working as a journalist in Delhi in early 2000, Peer tells us, Kashmir was the almost daily death count in the newspapers.

Basharat grew up in the foothills of the Himalayas in the beautiful Valley, reading Shakespeare, Stevenson, Dickens, Kipling and Defoe. He has a fond memory of a blue Willys jeep driving to a village called Seer in southern Kashmir. “It would follow the black, ribbon-like road dividing vast expanses of paddy and mustard fields in a small valley guarded by the mighty Himalayas.” He had adoring parents, cricket playing mates and a familiar milieu. You may think his upbringing was nearly perfect. It was, almost. But the winter of 1990, when the author was just 13, brought war in the valley and his world went topsy-turvy. His idyll was shattered. He writes, “The war of my adolescent had started.”

Kashmir was a princely state under British rule in India. In 1947, when India and Pakistan were separated after the British withdrawal from the subcontinent, Kashmir's fate was left in limbo. A predominantly Muslim state, it was ruled by a Hindu king, Hari Singh.

Meanwhile, Sheikh Mohammed Abdulla, Kashmir's most popular leader, sought India's assistance after tribesmen from the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan invaded Kashmir in October 1947. A fighting ensued but ceased in January 1949 after the United Nations' intervention. In order to end the conflict UN recommended a referendum to determine which country (India or Pakistan) the Kashmiris belonged to.

But things took an ugly turn in 1953 when India jailed Abdulla, dashing Kashmiris' hopes of a mature and competent leadership. His release a few years later was unable to bring smiles on the people's faces as he abandoned the issue of referendum. Over two decades later, Indian government rigged the elections, arrested opposition candidates and unleashed acts of terror. This led to the formation of insurgent groups like Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) whose militants Peer and his friends revered in their adolescent days.

Peer's fascination with the militants was shattered when his whole family objected to the idea of joining the insurgents. His grandfather, he writes, fixed his watery green eyes on him and asked, “How do you think this old man can deal with your death?” In order to save him from death, he was sent farther and farther from Kashmir, first to Aligarh Muslim University near Delhi, then to the Indian capital in the newspaper offices, from where he often ventured back into Kashmir to report. Like many journalists who at some point are frustrated with the limits of their medium, Peer realized that Kashmir's stories cannot be fully told in a newspaper or magazine format. Thus, to his parents' dismay, he gave up the newspaper job and travelled to his war ravaged homeland. As he went about writing a book on Kashmir in his head and a notebook in hand, he was often haunted by the past, at times unable to write and ask the questions he wanted to.

Trained as a journalist (he is a graduate of Columbia University and has worked at Rediff and Tehelka in India), Peer has the poet's sensibility and the journalist's eye for detail and the elements of reportage. He writes, “Outside, the curfew night lay in its silence like a man waiting in ambush.” What struck me was its similarity with our experience during the Maoist insurgency.

The book is divided into fifteen chapters. Of them Chapter twelve resonated with me most strongly. It has an anecdote about a mother's courageous attempt to save her son. A mother runs towards a battleground where the army was going to use her two sons Bilal and Shafti as human bombs. She sees Bilal about to be sent into the militant's house with a mine in his hands. She throws herself at Bilal, removes the mine from his hands and holds him in her arms. The soldiers let them go.

The book contains several stories of betrayal, survival and courage, disappearance, displacement and destruction. It speaks of deep tragedies. It is as much about the author's life as about Kashmir and its people. Peer, who may well be the best chronicler of Kashmiri tragedies, however ends the book in a positive note. After all, hope still floats in the Valley.

At one point in the book, he writes: “I was carrying a copy of Homage to Catalonia with me and gave it to him (Ahemed). 'You will find Kashmir in its pages,' I said." War sparks creativity. But Peer often laments the lack of good books on Kashmir.

The case is the same in Nepal where the decade-long insurgency has found very little space in art and literature. Therefore, echoing Peer, I would say: You will find Nepal in the pages of Curfewed Night.

Adiga's White Tiger and Nepali Identity

2009-01-18T17:36:00.002+05:30

My take (from a Nepali's perspective) on Aravind Adiga's Man Booker winning novel is published in The Kathmandu Post. Here's an IANS report on it. Below is the article.

Stereotyping Nepalis
Deepak Adhikari
As fellow South Asians, we may take pride in the achievement of Arvind Adiga who won this year's Man Booker Prize for his novel The White Tiger. But read it closely and you will find the novel quite shocking. In his debut novel Adiga has blatantly misrepresented Nepalis in several pages.

He has peopled The White Tiger with a bunch of Nepali characters. But surprisingly, all of them have been left without names. His marginalized characters are only “slant-eyed” Nepali security guards or prostitutes “with Chinese eyes”. Here is Adiga describing the protagonist, Balram Halwai, navigating “from house to house” for a job: “A sly, slant-eyed Nepali with a white moustache peered at me through the bars of the gate.” Then he sees the Stork, the master from his village: “I knew he was coming down to save me. I just had to divert this Nepali fucker as long as possible.”

Earlier in the novel, Balram is taken to a brothel by his driving instructor. In first person narration, Balram comments: “A blinding flash of light: a blue door opened, and four light-skinned Nepali women, in gorgeous red petticoats looked out.” Here, his old driving instructor reveals his penchant for foreign girls by which he clearly means Nepali women. This stereotyping of Nepali women as prostitutes does not end here. At the end of the novel, the notion of Nepalis as lowly servants and prostitutes is reinforced. After being frustrated with his master's debauchery, the murderer-turned-entrepreneur protagonist visits a brothel in New Delhi. He runs into a pimp who says, “You look like you can afford a Nepali girl. Aren't they beauties?” Then Balram thinks that “the Nepalis up there, behind the barred window, were really good-looking: very light skinned and with those Chinese eyes that just drives us Indian men mad.”

Many English-educated urban Indians -- and this Madras-born writer is one of them -- have a distorted view of Nepalis. They think Nepalis are modern-day slaves -- women languishing in brothels and youths keeping vigil at the “house with ten-foot-walls” in India

Yes, Nepali girls are trafficked into Indian brothels and unemployed men cross the border in search of jobs. But it is an attack on Nepali identity to present them as Nepalis without names. He presents these characters as if they were generic Nepali specimen. Granted, a novel is a work of imagination. But when a novel gets a prestigious award, it climbs further up the bestseller list. And the readers may come to identify Nepali men with wily security guards and Nepali women with those who sell sex for livelihood.

The numerous references about Nepalis in the book cast them in a negative light. Adiga, a former Time Magazine correspondent who has attended prestigious universities in the West where literary theories are in vogue, should know this.

The only good thing for Nepalis to come out of the novel is Balram's origin. Thankfully, the driver who kills his master is not a Nepali but an Indian from Bihar's backwaters. However, the murder, committed out of jealousy and frustration, is eerily reminiscent of similar incidents in India in which servants have killed their elderly masters. In such cases, Nepalis have often been framed as culprits. The recent case of Arushi's murder and the Indian police charging a Nepali worker with the crime grimly reminds one how things can go wrong for Nepalis in India.

Coincidentally, this is not the first Booker winning novel by an Indian projecting Nepalis in a negative light. Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, a novel set in Kalimpong during the '70s, a turbulent period in its history, is replete with misrepresentation of Nepalis in India. The Inheritance of Loss is a story of a retired judge Jemubhai "more lizard than human"; Sai, an orphan teenager from Dehradun; Gyan, a Nepali tutor of mathematics; a nameless cook and his son Biju, the quintessential illegal immigrant stuck in New York.

Gyan Rai, Sai's lover, the protagonist of the novel, is depicted as a rebel who does not hesitate to rob his lover's house in the name of freedom. Wade through to the fourth page and you will see rowdy Nepali insurgents barge into the judge's house. Desai, who had lived in Kalimpong for a few years, was condemned by the locals for her work.

If these novels are anything to go by, Indian writers' perception of Nepalis seems utterly stereotypical.

A Month at Kantipur Daily

2008-11-21T14:57:00.002+05:30

It's been almost a month since I've started working at Kantipur Daily. Many friends of mine have asked me to share the experience. I would like to share some of them here.

Part of the reason I have been lackadaisical lately in updating this blog is due to my busy schedule. I am just feeling the daily rush. Though, I worked at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in US for more than five months, I hadn't realized how busy one can be in the national daily's newsroom. Post-Gazette was a rather slow daily, there was not much happening in and around Pittsburgh. I was stationed at features section where stories were prepared in advance.

In early October, I was offered the job of features bureau coordinator of Kantipur Daily, Nepal's largest selling newspaper. I accepted the responsibility of overseeing Arts and Style section and Koseli, the daily's Saturday supplement. My predecessor blogger- friend Dinesh Wagle headed to New Delhi to take charge of Kantipur Publications' India Bureau. This change comes at a time when new media houses are coming up in Nepali market, at least four dailies (two English and two Nepali) are in the pipeline.

I have written two front page feature stories (bottom anchor) for Kantipur and the response has been overwhelming. Magazine (I worked at Nepal Weekly for more than four years) has a different set of readership and the working style is in contrast to a daily newspaper. In-depth and long stories are required in the magazine while daily demands short stories with either new info or a fresh angle.

It's definitely fun to work with Kantipur. Here, one can be a part of the team that decides what to put in tomorrow's newspaper. It sets the agenda for the days to come. The newpaper that has the highest readership in Nepal also has a serious job of providing correct information to the public, thereby helping them understand things happening around them.

I had always wanted to have a byline in this daily. I have contributed a few stories as well. But being part of the team is entirely different from being an outsider. The experience so far has been exciting and I hope it will remain so in future.

Adieu Agnishikha

2008-09-23T18:03:00.008+05:30

I first met Agnishikha (real name Sukdev Nepal) in 1994 when I was working in Drishti Weekly, a left leaning Kathmandu newspaper. He had been a foreign affairs columnist of the weekly for years. He had resigned from a government job in order to continue progressive writing/journalism after the People's Movement in the Spring of 1990.

Yesterday morning, my Nepal Weekly colleague Saroj Adhikari called me to inform that he had passed away. I was shocked to hear this because he was only 54 and was regularly writing columns on international affairs for Naya Patrika, a Kathmandu daily tabloid. The cause of death was heart attack. On Tuesday at 2 a.m. he was rushed from his house at Chabahil to Shahid Gangalal Heart Center in Bansbari. But it was alraedy too late.

On Tuesday morning, his dead body, wreathed in flowers, covered by a communist flag of hammer and sickle, was placed on a makeshift pyre in the front yard of CPN UML head office in Balkhu. Agni Shikha was a very loyal cadre of the liberal communist party. Here are few adjectives that can be attributed to him: honest, softspoken and complacent. After a little chat on anything interesting, he would smile, the smile often lingering for a while.

At Drishti office in the dark alleys of Bagbazaar, he introduced me to English magazines such as Time and Newsweek. He was very well-read in Russian and Chinese literature. The magazines had been his staples since years. He would often translate English articles into Nepali, giving a local flavor. By doing this, he helped vernacular readers understand the world affairs. For Nepali raders, he opened a window to the outside world.

He introduced disparate world events to Nepali lay readers. I think this was the greatest contribution he made to Nepali society. His passion lay on supporting communism and condemning anti imperialism. A prolific writer on international affairs, he wrote about the little known communist movements in the third world countries.

I had contributed a couple of stories to now defunct Ekkaisau Satabdi (21st Century) when he edited the monthly journal. He made sure I received the payment, no matter how little it was. My work at the magazine also drew me toward magazine journalism which I later pursued in Nepal Weekly where I am working now.

He was also my mentor at Drishti Weekly. I was influenced by his poetic writing style. His prose sounded like a poetry. He was a gifted writer. When I wrote such evocative pieces, often following his style (on Mother Teresa and Diana after their death), readers mistook my writing for his. It was a nice compliment for me because I looked up to him as one of the best Nepali writers.

I last met him more than two years ago in an inaguration of a primary school. A cocktail party followed the opening. Drinking was his Achilles' heel. After the sundown, he would often resort to drinking alcohol which also deteriorate his health. He was also a chain smoker, often smoking cigarettes in quick succession.

He has published several books on foreign affairs, two plays, one collection of poetry. He was a veteran left intellectual. Communist Party of Nepal (UML) and media organizations paid tribute to him. He is survived by his wife, a son and a daughter.

Final Days, Final Thoughts

2008-09-03T21:50:00.006+05:30

How was the experience in US? I have been asked this question several times after my arrival in Washington, DC to wrap up the Alfred Friendly Fellowship. As we learned in our final seminar, this question can be answered either in one sentence and or in a paragraph.

"It's been wonderful," I have said, plunging into the recollection, selecting the best and the worst moments. On a blog post dated March 8, 2008, I wrote: "To a third world journalist like me, the fellowship means a lot. It means that it is possible for a journalist working at a vernacular magazine to make it to the byline in one of respected US newspapers."

Even after I left Pittsburgh, a profile I filed few weeks back, has been published. Now I realize how prescient I was.

I am fortunate to take stock of the things I learned and things I am taking back to Nepal. Living in a friend's apartment in Springfield, Virgina, I am preparing for a culture shock which I still believe would not be that tough to overcome. I am returning home on September 7. I will be entering to a whole new Nepal, rather a democratic republic Nepal. With caveats, I would say, the democratic and republican credentials of my country are yet to be tested.

The media scene in Nepal has changed, too. The en masse resignation of five top editors and a prominent cartoonist of Kantipur Publications and the split in the biggest media house has paved a way for new possibilities. The breakaway group has launched a new publication that will publish two broadsheet dailies: Nhu Nepal in Nepali langauge and New Republic in English.

Meanwhile, Sudheer Sharma, former editor of Nepal Weekly, the magazine where I work, has been appointed as the editor of Kantipur daily, Nepal's most influential newspaper. Prashant Aryal, former assistant editor of Nepal Weekly has been elevated to the magazine's editor.

With these developments, I can't wait to be back in Nepal amidst the changes and challenges.

Nepal Updates

2008-08-16T22:03:00.002+05:30

Finally, Maoists chairman Prachanda is elected Prime Minister of Nepal.

A joint piece on Prachanda by Tilak Pokharel and Somini Sengupta at IHT.

Chitra Tiwari writes on the same topic for the Washington Times.

Meanwhile, Times of London on selection of Kumari. I don't understand why Western media are obsessed with Kumari, so-called living goddess. I think, by highlighting this, they want Nepal to be an exotic place where a girl is worshiped as a goddess.

Nepal Round-up: Nuggets from the Net

2008-08-02T21:04:00.003+05:30

At a time when mainstream Nepali media are not giving the due coverage to food crisis, Sky News, a UK based news portal, has run a series. Sky News reporter Kitty Logan spends a day with a Nepali family to study the food crisis. Read also this and this. The situation looks grim.

Ironically, there are restaurants for vultures in Nepal.

Anna Haig, a former reporter with Keene Sentinel, a US daily, has launched a blog to help the students of a school at Jharuwarasi in Lalitpur district. The story reminds me of John Wood. Looks like a few Americans are changed after they come to Nepal.

How I Covered Bhutanese Refugees

2008-08-02T04:22:00.010+05:30

On the chilly winter mornings in Kathmandu, I would nurture a dream. It was not an American Dream per se. But it was in many ways related to America and somehow connected with American Dream. I was gearing up for my maiden tour to America to participate on Alfred Friendly Press Fellowships. And, an interesting development was taking place with a beat I was attached to in Nepal. I had covered the Bhutanese refugee issue for my magazine--writing cover story, visiting the camps and talking to the refugees, watching closely Bhutan's elections.

The offer for resettlement from US and six other western countries--Canada, Australia, Denmark, Netherlands, New Zealand and Norway--to resettle nearly eighty thousand of them (US alone 60,000), had triggered a rift among refugees (those favoring and opting for third country resettlement and opposing it).

Sipping tea in a dusty roadside cafe near my office in downtown Kathmandu, I would talk with T P Mishra, an editor at the Bhutan News Service, about covering the refugees even in the US. When I was preparing for my maiden voyage to US in early March, the first batch of Bhutanese refugees had already left Nepal. I was flying on March 12, 2008. At the time, the dream seemed far fetched.

Little did I know that a group of about 25 Bhutanese refugees will be my co-passengers. As I was queuing up on the immigration at the Tribhuvan International Airport for the evening Dragon Air flight to Hong Kong, I heard an official say: "Refugees this line please." When I turned my head toward the source of the voice, I saw more than two dozen nicely dressed men, women and children making a beeline. After furnishing with the information required by the immigration official, I headed to the last security checking at the airport. The refugees were sitting there in a row of chairs; excited about their new life but a little worried about the journey.

I watched their every move. A white man and a Nepali guy were briefing them on their flights. I sat near them, projecting an image of a relaxed passenger while suppressing my journalistic instincts. As any reporter trying to figure out the best person among many in a group to talk to, I was looking out for such a reliable person. And that is how I struck a conversation with Tika Ram Chhetri, a Bhutanese refugee heading for New Zealand (All of them were flying to New Zealand after a seven hour transit in Hong Kong). I asked Tika Ram, a former teacher, about his destination, his expectations and how he felt about the resettlement, after those 17 tough years in the camps.

Then came the scream from the Nepali lad. First he scolded Tika Ram: Why are you speaking to him? I have told you not to speak to strangers. Don't do it next time. Now it was my turn: Who are you? I said: I'm a passenger. There was no way I could have revealed my identity because I knew very well how International Organization for Migration (IOM) that was screening and transporting the refugees, was keeping mum about any information on resettlement. Perhaps because of fear. Perhaps they wanted to promote a culture of secrecy that pervades these organizations.

Nevertheless, I was able to note down his email address (He communicated with me from Auckland, New Zealand). In Washington, DC, just before departing for our respective newsrooms, I showed a list of potential story ideas to Samuel Siringi, a Fellow from Kenya. "They are good story ideas. But see how you can relate issues of Nepal and Bhutan to your host city -- Pittsburgh -- if the ideas are to be accepted," he had said, sounding authoritative and a little disappointing to me.

I did not give up. I kept on pursuing for the Bhutanese even in Pittsburgh. When I discussed the issue with a Nepali friend in Pittsburgh, he remarked that he had heard of their arrival in Pittsburgh. He turned his laptop on, signed in a gmail account and showed me that Catholic Charities, a resettlement agency in Pittsburgh, had contacted the Nepali community in Pittsburgh, looking for translators. Lo and behold, I got the contacts! I returned to my apartment, realizing that my dream was coming true.

But I had to wait for a month before I would be allowed to meet three young Bhutanese who hadn't seen a Nepali in a month or so. Later, they would dwell upon how difficult it was for them to live in an alien surrounding, feeling cut off from their loved ones. I wrote the story for the Post-Gazette for which I received several responses, from Nepal, at the Post-Gazette newsroom and from Nepalis in US.

Recently, I wrote a follow up piece for which, among others, I am thankful to Thomas Huang, an Ethics and Diversity Fellow at Poynter Institute. Tom was the coach for me in our mid-term seminar at the Poynter. He went through my pieces and suggested to me ways to improve my reporting and writing. He taught me a technique called "fly on the wall" in which the reporter, like a fly on the wall, observes the character and takes notes. Some journalists call the technique immersion journalism.

Tom has remarked that on that part, I have succeeded but there's a long was to go. I need to write more precisely. Tom in his email says: "You know how to report by observation now. The next step is to be even more precise. I don't mean that you should write more sentences -- I mean that you should choose the more precise words." I am grateful to him for being such a great mentor.

On a lighter note, recently I received a memento from David Shribman, executive editor of the Post-Gazette.It is a slightly large laminated copy of the front page of Post-Gazette's magazine section that had my Bhutanese story. I was among a dozen journalists ( many of them interns) commemorated for their work this summer. Mr. Shribman remarked he learned a lot about Nepal from me. I was stunned and embarrassed!

Three Days in Gettysburg

2008-07-16T02:34:00.007+05:30

"Welcome to Historic Gettysburg," read a signboard as we entered the city in July 10 on a hot and humid afternoon.

The three-hour drive from Pittsburgh to Gettysburg was a fun. Samuel Siringi at The Kansas City Star had come all the way from Kansas City to participate in the Keystone Multimedia Workshop. Melissa Tkach, a multimedia journalist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was kind enough to drive us to the historic city, which was a battleground during the civil war (1861-65).

The workshop, organized by Pennsylvania Newspapers Association, coincided with the biker's week (July 10-13). I come from a city (Kathmandu) where motorbikes outnumber the cars. So, it was great to see several Harley Davidson bikes (not many of them in Nepal, though) swarming Gettysburg with loud sound, stars and stripes fluttering on the bike. Most of the bikers and their lady partners had tattoos, and covered their heads with bandanas.

Somehow the sound of the bikes reverberated to the workshop we were going to attend. It was also about sound and Will Yurman, a photographer with Rochester Democrat and Chronicle aptly showed how sound is important for multimedia journalism. He has been doing sound slides for the New York newspaper. His series on homicide is superb.

After we checked into Country Inn hotel, we were asked to go out and find a story (a challenge indeed). Cosmas Nakuta, a Nigerian American, drove us around the city that eased our difficulty for transport. Sam and I were both worried about the food. I longed for homely food. But at nearby Friday's, we found food that we liked - it was a mix of macroni and chicken sausage. The restaurant's waitress, Chelsea turned out to be pretty good at serving difficult customers like ourselves.

What I learned from the workshop? A lot, I would say. I learned how to edit videos (though, I have yet to master it), had some idea about sound slides. I also learned that with a help of a little knowledge, you can produce wonderful interactive (Seth Gitner of Roanoke Times displayed that skill). There was, however, some confusion on the trainers' part as there were pros and college students and print guys like Sam and I all given the same kind of training. The organizers failed to provide one on one guidance and the presentations at times were boring, the presenter talking about what he did than teaching.

Overall, it was good and apart from the multimedia, it provided a window into the American civil war.

Fireworks in Pittsburgh

2008-07-05T08:25:00.003+05:30

Today, the evening sky in downtown Pittsburgh was blasted with fireworks as the residents of Allegheny Center apartment watched it from the rooftop. It was a part of Independence Day (July 4th) celebrations.

A Slice of Summer in New York City

2008-06-23T17:40:00.019+05:30

A Cabbie's Carelessness
My first impression of New York City turned out to be a bad one. First, my American Airlines flight from Pittsburgh was delayed for an hour. And, when I arrived at LaGuardia Airport, it took me a while to find out my luggage. After coming out of the terminal, I had to queue to get into a cab.

As the ubiquitous yellow cabs lined up on the road, it soon became clear that the cabbies don't know the route and as a result the passengers have to direct them. It was my first visit to NYC; so there was no way I could direct the cabbie. I was rejected by a Bangladeshi cabbie. Finally, I got into a Pakistani's but he too did not know the route. So, I called my friend Sahadev Paudel and asked him to direct him. That also did not work and after much negotiation, he dumped me on an intersection which was located just below a train track.

I was not expecting my tryst with NYC to be this bizarre. I had to spend an hour on that area which looked like a ghetto. Policemen were hovering around, all sorts of people were coming and going. But when Sahadev showed up, I heaved a sigh of relief. We headed to his apartment in Ridgewood.

SAJA Conv at CUNY
I was in town to attend SAJA convention 2008 at CUNY. On Friday, Sahadev and I left early morning for the venue. We were a bit early. So, we hung around Manhattan. At 8:30 a.m., I left him and entered CUNY building. While registering, I realized that Kashish Das Shrestha just preceded me. I had watched my former colleague Shekhar Kharel's documentary "December Blues" which featured Kashis as a lead character to portray the young and restless of Kathmandu city. So, it was easy for me to recognize him. I introduced myself and we started to hang around. There was Anup Kaphle too, our man at SAJA. He was pretty busy. I also found two Nepali students (Sneha Pradhan and Bibek Bhandari) volunteering as bloggers for the convention. As there was plenty of time and my not-so-good networking skills were not working, I was restless. Kashis noticed it and commented: "bore bhayo?"

But soon, I would discover a bunch of interesting people. One of them was Lajwanti Khemlani. She turned out to be a blogger. We exchanged some info but it was time to hear keynote address by Robert Thompson, managing editor of Wall Street Journal. He gave an excellent speech where he talked about future of South Asia and future of newspapers."Newspapers are under a digital duress," said Thompson who left Times of London six month ago and joined WSJ. He also said that a journalist should question himself, question the authorities and fulfill the objective of being objective.

When asked about his suggestions to young journalists, he said: "Read widely, know digital, be flexible, be a storyteller and increase your vocabulary." He also mentioned that almost all the regions as significant while addressing a query on lack of international coverage.

I was wondering what to attend next as there were several workshops going on. I was fascinated by Amar Bakshi, a young journalist who traveled from Asia to Latin America to probe "How the World Sees America?" Anup introduced me to him and we went together to his presentation. His was an enriching experience which he shared with the participants. But the highlight of the salon for me was my friend Umar Cheema's entry into the room. We met and soon found ourselves hanging around. Umar's friend Salman Masood, a NY Times reporter in Pakistan, turned out to be a jovial and cool person.

After talking to Sandeep Junnarkar, president of SAJA, we headed to attend Amitava Kumar's presentation on narrative writing. His was also a wonderful presentation with several examples of good writing.

An Evening at NY Times Building
When I knew that the NY Times is hosting a reception at it's new building for SAJA participants, I was excited. I had read the superb piece by Nicolai Ouroussoff, on the new building. My blogger friend Dinesh Wagle posted a blog comparing Times building to our own Kantipur Complex in Kathmandu (the analogy might seem odd, but analogy it is). Before joining the reception, Umar, Salman, Sahar and I went to the Times newsroom, met few Times staff and spent a few hours at the cafeteria.

At the reception on the 15th floor with a view of Hudson river, I sipped red wine, ate delicious samosas and listened to the speeches of and Q&A with Michael Golden, vice-chairman of NY Times and John Geddes, managing editor of the paper.

Poynter: An Eyeopening Experience

2008-06-19T02:32:00.004+05:30

I was sitting with Tom Huang, a deputy managing editor of Dallas Morning News and a Fellow at Poynter, when I realized I was hearing something new. Tom was telling me that I had problems in reporting not in writing. And, here I was, thinking that because English is my second language, it is the language that I am unable to master.

I had to pester Tom to be critical. He had already read my profile, an assignment for all the Alfred Friendly Fellows as part of training at Poynter. Later, I would learn that it was introduced only this year. I interviewed Omar Schwanzer, an IT expert at Poynter. His story was interesting. But I was not able to do justice to him.

As I was sipping beer at Bill Mitchell's house adjoining the bay in St. Petersburg, Florida, he told me the truth and I was glad to hear that. I would try my best to improve my reporting skills. He said it's the reporting that really matters, no matter how good a writer you are. He suggested to me several ways to hone the reporting skills.

Roy Peter Clark and Chip Scanlan were equally good. These two are also the best journalism teachers I have ever come across. I had finished the first two chapters of Roy's book (50 Writing Tools) before attending his class. I liked his idea of tools instead of rules. He also showed how one can organize the writing. His reading text with an x-ray was quite fascinating.

Chip was very engaging and at times hilarious. His idea of asking tough questions is going to be a useful for me. I came to know "My Favourite Meal" can be an interesting writing exercise and it's underlying theme can be broader and stronger than what I have thought. Thus, the mid-term seminar at the Poynter was truly an eyeopening experience.

An Evening at the PG Newsroom

2008-06-04T02:15:00.011+05:30

Watching the work of Hugh Cutler, the international and national editor at Post-Gazette, is fun. You go through a plethora of news from around the world.

He starts his work from home. He wakes up at around 11 a.m. (having left the office at 11 p.m. the previous day, which seemed fair enough). As he prepares his breakfast, he listens to NPR, reads wire news in his computer and watches TV news.

At the office, the final budget meeting takes place at 4:30 p.m. By then, Frank Reeves, his colleague at the section, would have prepared a rough budget. “When I attend the evening budget, I have usually an inkling to the stories for the next day,” said Hugh. At around 5 p.m., he starts gleaning an array of news from around the world. He reads the lead of each story and goes further if it draws his attention.

His main worry however is the space he is allotted to in the newspaper. The international page (usually one page) has room for only about three to four news stories (and a picture) and five briefs of world news. He also looks after the national page, which has three pages with five news briefs.

By 6:30 p.m., he prepares a one-page budget (“I hate a budget that is more than one page”) which he circulates to his colleagues. Hugh, an ex-US Army who was a Japan correspondent of Stars and Stripes, a Pentagon mouthpiece, is waiting for his slice of pizza to arrive. Friday is a pizza day which makes work a bit of fun, he said.

As the evening surrenders to the night, the newsroom of Post-Gazette looks busy, middle aged editors hurrying to complete the job at hand and head home. Hugh relishes the 90s when newspapers were not shrinking (“those were our heydays”) and had enough space for news coming from outside America.

Post-Gazette which has a history of almost 200 years--is a local newspaper covering mainly Western Pennsylvania. But Hugh’s job is to provide the PG readers a window to the outside world. How does he give priority to/select the news? “I ask myself, why is this news important for American readers?” he answered.

As it clocks at 7 p.m., he starts editing the news provided by wire services: AP, McClatchy Newspapers, Washington Post, and LA Times, among others. On that Friday evening, the headlines were as follows: China’s earthquake (a day drill to relocate a million Chinese), Burma (junta forcing cyclone victims out of refugee camps), withdrawal of Fulbright grants from Palestine (it was published on that day's New York Times). These were the long stories Hugh selected from the wire services while Pakistan, Bolivia, Iran, Vatican made it to the brief news section.

At 8 p.m., I left the office. At that point, Hugh was in the middle of editing one of the stories, having the pizza. I was rushing home imagining a delicious Nepali meal I was going to have.

The Week That Was

2008-06-01T18:51:00.010+05:30

Last week, my mentor Greg Victor and I sat at his desk and discussed on how to make the best out of the fellowship as I already had hopped a number of sections and wanted to enliven my stint which was bordering on boredom.

I suggested to him that I wanted to spend time at Art/Design, Photography and Wire/International sections. I also expressed my desire to learn some copy editing and watch the production of the newspaper. I am doing this hoping that the knowledge and experience when shared with my colleagues back home would be fruitful and enriching. We postponed the copy editing and production schedule for a week or may be after the mid-term seminar at Poynter.

On Wednesday, PG photographer Pam Panchak and I drove to Washington County through the thick Pittsburgh woods. She said she had two assignments to cover. We reached an elementary school where kids were going play with chicks as part of life cycle education. As Pam took pictures, I watched the kids' reaction (and wonder). I also got a chance to see how kids are taught in an elementary school. The teaching method and the environment are entirely different in Nepal. Here was a quiet school in the middle of woods. In Nepal, schools are located in the city area (partly because of easy access) and are chaotic and noisy.

The way the teacher treated the students gently is also a contrast to the schools back home where teachers are prone to beating students with a stick. In my school days, most teachers were (and I guess they still are) feared by the students because of their cruel teaching method coupled with punishment and fear psychosis. But the strictness often resulted on breaking the rules and indiscipline.

In US, more emphasis is given to slow natural learning whereas in Nepal the kids bear the brunt of piles of homeworks and the method is largely a parroting the text instead of understanding.

After a coffee break at a Starbucks, we headed to our second destination: Children's Therapy Center of Washington Hospital in Peters, PA. The hospital was organizing a pet therapy session for the kids with autism. Pam said: It's an animal day today. But to me it was also a children's day. Here's the link to the story (there's no byline, I wondered why). I was particularly impressed by Drue Tepper, an autism patient who seemed pretty good at caring and training animals. When his mom showed us the photos of his several excursions to zoos where he caught all sorts of animals, he reminded me of legendary crocodile hunter Steve Irwin.

Art Director Chris was waiting for me on Thursday morning. He was designing Forum, a Sunday section of opinion and ideas edited by Greg Victor. We talked about several issues on newspaper/magazine layout. Chris said that he favored simple and plain style of layout. His favorite magazines were The New Yorker and The Spectator. He disliked the way New York Times Sunday Magazine did it's layout. It puts a lot of emphasis on design and reduces the significance of the text, he said.

He said it's been PG's policy not to publish pictures of dead bodies in the newspaper. He said while designing the front page, he makes sure that there are at least six news pieces and one main photo in the page. According to him, the selection of one good picture in the front page adds to the beauty and focus of the most important page. Then, I spent the day talking to his colleagues at Art section. I was impressed that women comprise almost half of the section (FYI: PG's half of the staff are women). In Nepal, this sort of work is done mainly by men. I have never seen any woman designer in Nepal.

End of Monarchy in Nepal

2008-05-30T18:45:00.003+05:30

Here's a round-up from news (obits?) on Nepal's transition from a kingdom to a republic. This is a significant achievement for a country marred by a decade long Maoist insurrection that claimed lives of 14 thousand Nepalis.

But, what next after the end of monarchy? The question is very pertinent and the Maoists, who became the largest party by the virtue of republican agenda, fear mongering and violence--should shoulder the Herculean task of making Nepal a peaceful and prosperous nation.

Forbes says that economy should be Nepal's upcoming agenda.

Globe and Mail: Trading a Monarch for a Maoist.

LA Times reports: King Gyanendra out.

BBC: Have Your Say.

Ameet Dhakal's take on rise and fall of the Shahs.

Picture story at Le Monde.

Feature Is My Forte

2008-05-23T22:10:00.010+05:30

In my last post, I wrote on my first day at multimedia section of Post-Gazette. I spent the week there but I have realized that I am basically a print guy. I told to my editors at features section: "Multimedia doesn't seem to be my cup of tea." One of them remarked, "but that is where the future is!"

I agree that the Internet may very well be the future of journalism. Yet, many American journalists I spoke to have repeatedly said: "We don't know the answer yet." The usual answer is: "we're trying to figure out."

My week long stint at multimedia was a part of my own figuring out. I am curious to know how American print media are coping with the challenge. Now, people get information through a plethora of mediums: TV, Internet, podcast, videos, blogs to name a few.

At Post-Gazette, almost every reporter is required to do either a podcast or a video of the story that is running in print. Allan Walton, the editor at multimedia section, said, "We try to run the print version and the video on the same day." I was aware of this, thanks to David Bear, a travel editor who also worked for NPR. He encouraged me to do a podcast concurrently with a piece on Nepal. My accent is terrible (perhaps at times not comprehensible to native ears) but it was a unique experience.(To listen click the left side of the write up).

On the second day, after I saw Nate Guidry handle the hand held movie camera, I ventured out of my office, searching for a subject to shoot. I came across the Visitor Information Center. I entered the booth hoping to shoot something newsworthy. But Ron Koch, a retired Pittsburgher and volunteer, turned out to be a perfect person for an interview. I told him that I was only learning to shoot. I shot the vicinity; interviewed the volunteer and also bought a Pittsburgh postcard.

I returned to office and showed the video to Andrew Rush, a brilliant multimedia reporter and to Allan. Allan suggested me to expand the video by furnishing it with more info such as interviewing the director of the agency that is running the info center and finding more info on tourist arrival in Pittsburgh. But I was not able to do so partly because the agency was not willing to help.

I chose Bhutanese refugees (here's the story I wrote) as my second subject. I spent one Saturday shooting their lifestyle and interviewing those who could speak English. But, the video turned out to be pretty bad, according to my colleagues. The reasons: I was not focused and their English was not audible (I did not have a microphone). So, I thought a day's labor was lost. But I'm compensating by writing about them for my home publication. However, Allan suggested me to do another video on how refugees (there are Burmese, Iraqis and Bhutanese) in Whitehall area mingle among each other. I am waiting for the permission to shoot. A publishable video is well within the sight.

This week and last week, I also did two stories. I wrote an obituary of a local nurse. I was waiting for a chance to write one because unlike here we don't write obituary of an ordinary person back in Nepal. I still remember Reginald Stuart who ran a boot camp for all the Fellows in Washington, DC before embarking to the newsrooms. He had said: We Americans love death, which is why we have a huge readership for obits.

PG reporters are often assigned to write obits. I look forward to writing more. But it's hard to talk to the relatives of the dead at a time when they are mourning.

On Sunday, I volunteered as a photographer at Silk Screen Asian American Film Festival where I also got a chance to watch Chop Shop, a superb movie by Ramin Bahrani, a director of Iranian origin. The story has been published in Mag&Movies section of Post-Gazette.

The other day, Susan Albrecht, program director at Alfred Friendly Fellowships visited Pittsburgh. I invited four of my colleagues on a lunch in Oakland. The meal in the Indian restaurant was delicious. In the evening, we were invited by my mentor Greg Victor to talk to journalism students (graduate) at Point Park University where he teaches international journalism. After a brief introduction by Greg, Susan talked about Alfred Friendly Fellowship Program. I started with a brief note on press in Nepal. The interaction grew interesting as students fielded questions.

In the evening Susan and I went to have dinner in a restaurant across the Allegheny River. Greg joined us after his class. Thank you Susan for such a wonderful time. Her visit reminded me of the good times we had in Washington and as we talked about the Fellows, the memory lingered on for a while. Hope to see you guys in Florida!

First Day at Multimedia

2008-05-06T03:17:00.008+05:30

It was a clear, sunny day. I heard everyone at newsroom and outside saying "it’s a beautiful day". Monday also happened to be my first day at Multimedia section of Post-Gazette. After working on stories in feature, local and op-ed sections, my mentor Greg and I decided that it’s time to learn some techniques of New Media. It would also be a primer for me as I’m attending Keystone Multimedia Workshop (July 10-12) in Gettysburg, PA.

When I was scanning through the mails in my desk, Mellisa Tkach and Nate Guidry showed up and asked me to join them. I headed to Multimedia section where I had already done a podcast. They had already lined up a couple of assignments. Nate asked me to shadow him. The first assignment being on a couple who fought on their wedding night. They were speaking to media at local station of NBC. Nate, an amiable guy who has left his wife in Colombia and missing her very much, was very helpful in answering my queries. We drove to a nearby gas station talking about rise in gas price.

Then, we made round of Allegheny Center (my apartment). Nate parked the car and took me to a roadside where I was introduced to Gul Kalaris who sells iceballs. As we sipped ice balls in the hot afternoon, Nate told me that he has covered him on PG video. Gul apparently hasn't watched the video yet. Back it Nepal, our magazine used to run a column called man on the street which talked about ordinary lives. It was nice to know Nate doing the same.

On our way, Gabrielle Banks, a PG reporter joined us. We headed to the North Hills. As we reached the venue, the bride and the groom who have become instant celebrities thanks to the wedding night brawl, turned up accompanied by their attorneys. But, they returned only to come half an hour later. Inside the studio of NBC, a lot of preparation was going on. The coordinator of the program was briefing us (which is rare in Nepal, we are simply thrust into a press meet) about the program. He told us that before beginning the actual program, the couple wanted to get familiar with the reporters (unheard of back home). Then, the cameras were set up, everything ready to go, waiting for the couple to arrive. The groom's eyes were still red from the injury on the night. But the bride looked gorgeous. They shared some of the intimate details of their lives and regretted on the most beautiful (supposed to be) event of their lives turning to a nightmare.

The conference took place in a sophisticated studio at WPXI in Summer Hill.

To me, the incident (despite having some human interest element on it) was not worth a tiny bit of newspaper space, let alone a front page story, video and column on it. But, at Post-Gazette my colleagues have done a number of stories, Tony Norman even wrote a column on it. What was interesting to me was how the reporters ask questions, what do they focus on in such topics and how a press conference is handled (I missed the reception after the meet we are used to back home). But, there were only five reporters. It was odd for me because in Nepal we see several media persons jostling for bites and info.

The groom, Dr. David, a dentist by profession, said that the media coverage was responsible for ruining his career. The bride, Christa, an assistant at his dental clinic, also blamed media for giving too much attention to a wedding party turned into a disaster. It's also an example of how ordinary people (after an incident) find themselves chased by reporters in this media-saturated world. Watch out the video here.

My Birth place, Bungy and Blvd of the Allies

2008-04-27T17:10:00.000+05:30

These three have one thing in common: river. My birthplace and hometown Phidim, a small and idyllic hill station in eastern Nepal, is a place of three rivers: Hewa, Pheme and Tamor. Boulevard of the Allies, where the Post-Gazette office is, happens to be near the confluence of two rivers. (Forgive me if I'm talking too much about rivers, but I can't help it).

Ah, the bungy! I did'nt make it but I have written a travel piece on a bungy jumping tour. Here for the links to the photos. As you can see, the bungy in Nepal is in the natural surrounding above a river!

It's been nearly a month, I'm in the Steeler's city, but there's not a single moment of boredom (Despite the fact that single people often complain about Pittsburgh not being hip and happening). I usually get bored with things very soon (blame my short attention span) but Pittsburgh has been fascinating me since day one. Perhaps, because it is so similar to my hometown in terms of geography and obviously river (sorry folks, I don't have a photo to share).

Perhaps the title of this blog should be Feeling at Home in Pittsburgh!

In Washington, DC, I met my buddy Ganesh Timalsena who's been living in the US for more than a decade. He's settled here with a nice job, a caring wife and a lovely daughter. We talked till late night about our hometown Phidim. A slice of nostalgia engulfed us as we talked about our childhood days; we went to the same school and did the same sets of peccadilloes. Strangely, the golden phase of our lives began to reverberate in his apartment in Virginia. At midnight, after emptying many pegs of whiskey, we were already drunk and decided to hit the sack.

On the second week of my arrival, my mentor Greg Victor took me to watch Pirates at PNC stadium which I pass by every day on my way to office. Nikhil and Peter, Greg and Rekha's wonderful sons were also there. To me the baseball match looked similar to cricket (I am not a fan of cricket, either). Nikhil was at pain to explain the score and later I ceased to ask any more nonsense question. Before the match, Greg had told me: You will see many drunk Americans today. True to his prediction, one young guy was able to draw attention of many viewers through his idiosyncrasies. At times, his gestures turned out to be more attractive than the match. Pirates won against Cincinnati Reds (Greg was in dilemma whether to support home team Reds or local team Pirates) and we came out, a bit tipsy with beer. Food was in abundance in the stadium and it seemed that people not only came to watch the match but also to eat. A food for thought, indeed.

Credit for making my stay a pleasant experience also goes to Nepali folks in Pittsburgh. Thank you Sanjay Dai, Sureshji, James Dai et al. I was not prepared for this. I did not know that there is a vibrant Nepali community in the city. I've already written a story about their reaction to the election in Nepal. They also have a football team and I'm going to watch some of their games.

Meeting Obama at Post-Gazette

2008-04-16T02:06:00.010+05:30

Post-Gazette office today was abuzz with presidential candidate Barack Obama's visit. My colleagues here often talk about Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Obama.

I'm not someone who runs after celebrities (be they politicians or sportsmen/artists) and ask for an autograph. But, the excitement here forced me to take a chance and see him. Many of my colleagues were disgruntled that he was meeting only with editorial board. So, as the hullaballoo grew, I ventured out of the office in Boulevard of the Allies to catch a glimpse of him.

Half a dozen young people were waiting accross the road from our office. Then, the secret service people asked me to go to the other side of the road where I ran into several colleagues and Obama supporters standing and talking animatedly. It was 2:30 p.m. At one point, I received a call from Samuel Siringi, a Fellow from Kenya. I told him that I was expecting Obama's arrival outside the office. But he didn't believe it. After an hour or so, Obama arrived, flanked by his people and the omnipresent secret service. He waved to us and entered the office.

It seemed I was merely seeing him in person instead of TV. So, what's the big fuss? But, a surprise was awaiting me. I was busy working on my training plan which is due Wednesday. I saw colleagues running toward the hallway saying "Obama is meeting personally everyone in the newsroom". For a moment, I thought of staying in my desk. But, as eveyone flocked to the place where Obama was, I could not resist.

He was shaking hands and moving toward where I was. As he approached me, I introduced myself. I said: I'm from Nepal. He said: Oh, it's a beautiful country. I said: Nice to meet you. He said: Nice to meet you too. Then, he moved ahead.

Now almost every one in the newsroom is talking about how he looked like, how his handshake was etc. Comments vary from his handshake being soft to he looking young. To me he appeared a guy-next-door, attending to everyone. Back home, politicians are a different tribe; they don't relate to the people. They think that they are superior to the people who elect them. I think part of the reason many of prominent leaders lost the recent election is they are not attached to the common people the way Obama is.

My colleagues congratulated me on meeting a person who has already created a history.

Related Links:
Post Gazette's endorsement of Obama.
Post-Gazette report on Obama's visit.
Obama on different issues.

Second Week at Post-Gazette

2008-04-11T06:46:00.013+05:30

I’ve been asking Steve Massey, the editor at feature section of Post-Gazette to assign me whatever comes up. He's been trying his best. But sometimes things really don't work as per your wish. On Monday, I attended the budget meeting of local section at 10:30 a.m. Lillian Thomas and her team exchanged info on what stories reporters were working on. But, at 11, there was another meeting of all section heads. I attended that meeting too.

So, on April 8, I was all set to go; go out and see how American reporters work. I was told to shadow Moriah Balingit, a crime reporter at Post-Gazette. Moriah turned out to be as new in the newspapering as I am in the city. So, both of us headed to Pittsburgh Police Headquarters "just to hang out".

How different--the police office back home is a mess, literally. But, here it was, a swanky office, no crowd. To me it didn't look like a poilce office, it rather looked like an office of a corporate house in Nepal. We entered the office, Moriah asked for a key and opened the door of press room. A while ago, she was refering to an office and I was wondering what office she was talking about. After a while, Jill King Greenwood, a reporter at Pittsburgh Tribune Review, a competitor of PG, arrived in the office. We exchanged hellos. Then, the telephone rang, Moriah scribbled something in her notebook. Off we were to a crime scene.

I have very few experince of covering a crime scene in my eight year long career as a journo. But, here I was also anxious to know how crime is handled by police. As Moriah confessed, she happens to be a directionally challenged person. So I am, I said. After roaming some places, we reached the scene. But, it turned out that it was not a homicide as she was frequently refering it to.

The neighbors could not tell for sure what happened inside a house in Lawrenceville, Calvin. It also showed the apathy of people. For a person coming from a close knit society that relies on one another in difficult times, it was quite baffling. Back home, there would have been a huge crowd gathered to mourn the deceased.

Then, it took us a while to know what happened inside the house. It turned out that an elderly mother and a young daughter who presumedly cared for her, lived there. The young woman died while sleeping and the mother was taken to a hospital.

A policewoman said: It's a female and a natural death. That was that. Nothing more. Moriah lamented that being new in the city is pretty hard for a reporter.

In the evening, Steve had instructed me to speak to a couple of Americans about the economy; its impact on middle class Americans. There was a Pew Report about American middle class having tough time. Following Steve's instructions, on April 9, I went to interview few people in the foodcourt at PPG. Out of ten people I approached, only two persons agreed to be interviewed. Among them, one turned out to be quite vocal, maybe because he was old and therefore free to talk to. But the other gentleman was not aware of the major issues.

With a happy feeling that I got a few good quotes for the story, I returned to the office. I filed the story hoping that it will be incorporated. But, it occured that I was out of sync.

Today, however, turned out to be an excellent day. David Shribman, executive editor of Post-Gazette invited me for lunch. We went to a restaurant nearby. Greg Victor, my mentor accompanied us. We talked about Nepal's politics, (I reminded Mr. Shribman that it was an election day in Nepal), China, America's image abroad, newpapers shrinking, PG's mission and how he felt about being the editor of a daily with a circulation of 240 thousand. He said: We've been only talking about money but not about news. He felt good in that he didn't have even a minute to waste. So it seemed: He was going to deliver keynote speech in a program.

Nepal at a Historic Juncture

2008-04-10T03:42:00.002+05:30

On April 10, just three days before the new year 2065, Nepalis are voting for constituent assembly elections. I feel a bit sad about it—that I am eight thousand miles away from my country.

The election seems to be marked by violence. Here’s a round up on news on Nepal:

On April 6, I wrote a piece for Pittsburgh Post-Gazette where I’m spending five months as an Alfred Friendly Fellow.

It’s very rare that Nepal makes front page news in New York Times. In today’s Times, you find a story by Somini Sengupta who is covering the election.

Former US president Jimmy Carter is in Nepal spearheading an international monitoring team.

Even Indian media like NDTV are thronging to Nepal; talking about the end of monarchy.

Sanjay Singh of Indian Express has a beautiful story on Indo-Nepal border in the light of election.

Training Days

2008-04-04T23:22:00.005+05:30

How are my days going on in Pittsburgh? Ah, that's a difficult question to answer. Personally, I am alone, which has both advantages and disadvantages. Professionally, I’m learning a lot. I joined Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on April 1 and there seems to be no looking back.

After my arrival here, again I was pretty tired of simply seeing new things: buildings, roads, bridges and rivers. Greg took me to departmental store nearby, showed me the downtown and even drove me to an Indian grocery so that I can buy some "weird" spices that can be useful in preparing homely food.

Talking about rivers, in Pittsburgh two rivers—Allegheny and Monongahela-merge to become Ohio River. The Monongahela River passes the South Side on the right and Uptown on the left just before entering Downtown Pittsburgh. Allegheny runs through the New York and Pennsylvania. Umar, if you would like to send me a letter (wrapped in a plastic), just place it on the Allegheny River.

My office is near the confluence of these two rivers.

The first day, Cede trained me on computer system. It wasn't tough. I also attended a budget meeting, got introduced to a lot of PG people. They are pretty friendly. Second day, I got my ID and got email address. I am working at feature section. My co-workers at this section are Mackenzie Carpenter, LA Johnson, Monica Haynes and Christina Rouvalis; very nice people.

I am working on a couple of stories. I’m getting familiar with the stories covered by PG. On April 2, I got a chance to watch how podcast is done when Bob Batz, food writer, talked to Brenda Franklin, the woman behind Big Mama's House of Soul. David Bear, travel writer at PG, edited the audio. I found it quite interesting.

I plan to go out with a reporter and watch how he/she reports. I would probably shadow someone covering presidential primary. My mentor Greg Victor has been a tremendous support during my trials and tribulations here.

Adieu Washington, Hello Pittsburgh!

2008-03-29T22:51:00.005+05:30

My sojourn in America has turned out to be an exploration in itself. I’ve been learning things, meeting new people and tasting new foods.

Ah, talking about food, there is very little I really like but I’m gradually discovering that I can develop taste for new foods. Lack of Nepali food initially drove me nuts but things are getting better now.

Yesterday, we went to a restaurant called Front Page. Old copies of The Washington Post hung all over the walls. For a moment, I felt like I was inside Newseum. The dinner was part of familiarization with mentors who have come to Washington from various cities of America. We will go to our respective newsrooms with each of them Sunday.

So, the real-life experience as a journalist in American newspaper is all set to begin. Yesterday afternoon, I had a good time with my mentor Greg Victor, an Op-Ed and Forum editor at Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. We went to nearby Starbuks and discussed story ideas, politics back home et al. He has brought a few copies of PG and I was very happy to go through them.

On Sunday, Greg and I are flying to Pittsburgh. I’ve been hearing a lot about Pittsburgh’s beauty. I am sure that it’s not going to match my country. But, I am dying to explore the city. Yesterday, we had a training plan session at National Press Foundation. I had a couple of ideas in my mind which I shared with Greg. I’m glad that it worked out. I’m planning to learn Multimedia reporting. But, I would also like to hone my feature writing skills. Though, I’ll be hopping from one section to another at PG newsroom, my focus will be these two areas.

On Wednesday afternoon, we attended a two-and-half an hour program titled “Training to Share.” Deborah Potter of Newslab talked both about our traning expectation as well as the needs of our newsrooms back home. We got some pearls of wisdoms from her.

The other day, Hari Bansha Dulal who frequently writes opinion columns for The Kathmandu Post, invited me for a lunch at his World Bank office. The lunch was delicious. After the lunch, we went to attend a talk program organized jointly by East-West Center and George Washington University. Among the speakers were two Nepali scholars and an American anthropologist. I also met Govinda Bhattarai, a student there and my former teacher in the postgraduate classes at R R Campus, Kathmandu.

Saubhagya Shah, an associate professor at Tribhuvan University, sounded quite pessimistic in his presentation whereas Mahendra Lawoti, an associate professor at Western Michigan University--a self-confessed optimist--portrayed a positive image of Nepal. His main agenda was social inclusion. Saubhagya pointed out that the translation of Shanti Samjhauta to peace agreement in English was incorrect. “Why is it translated in English as peace agreement whereas it should be peace compromise?” he said. He had a caveat to seven party leaders: "The changes that may look radical are only cosmetic. Like in the post-1990 Nepal, the political bickering has again started which can derail the peace process."

So very true!

Early Days in Washington

2008-03-18T15:33:00.002+05:30

Spring is in the air in Washington. The other day, Katie wowed when she saw a few flowers blooming at Lucinda's courtyard where we went for lunch during the very first day of our fellowship program.

Surprisingly, I am not homesick. The so-called jet-lag it seems is only for frequent flyers. At the outset, Umar, a Fellow from Pakistan gave me company; we went for food together because both of us liked Indian food. Ah, a Pakistani and a Nepali looking for Indian food in Washington! But soon like a promiscuous lady, I changed my partner. In Samuel Siringi of Kenya, I found a person full of sense of humor and we clicked very easily. The other day, he said: Do you know why I brought a few copies of my home newspaper with my byline in it? To prove that we are not sweepers back home.

It was at Lucinda's that I laughed wholeheartedly. Susan joined us wondering what made me laugh so loudly. I said I must have smiled a lot but that was the first time I broke into the peals of laughter after coming here.

My only problem in Washington is I don't know the city. But this is also a blessing in disguise. I can explore it. But I am also afraid of getting lost in the capital of the world err the US. Recently, I read an article in The Economist that talked about upcoming mayoral election in two great cities of the world: London and Paris. I think these cities are truly the capitals of the world.

Anyways, the days are passing by. I feel a little lonely in my room but I try to get rid of it by calling Nepali friends here and of course my betterhalf back home. My friends and colleagues have been generous enough to drop me few lines every now and then. Few days back, my friend Dinesh Wagle responded to my mail. His title was: Washinton memo. I was delighted to hear that.Time magazine runs a brief news column under that title. By the way, we are attending a press briefing at State Department on March 24. I eagerly look forward to that occasion.

The first day at AFPF office, Katie mentioned that Dr. Gary Weaver is a fantastic cross cultural expert. He definitely proved to be one. His lecture on American culture was awesome. Nowadays, we are attending a journalism seminar by Reginald Stuart of McClatchy newspapers. We have a dinner party at Newseum. I very much look forward to it.

Off to America

2008-03-08T14:39:00.001+05:30

Here's a self congratulatory note– yours truly has been selected as an Alfred Friendly Fellow 2008.

What does this mean? To a third world journalist like me, it means a lot. It means that it is possible for a journalist working at a vernacular magazine to make it to the byline in one of respected US newspapers. It means I will have opportunity to compare notes with journalists from eight countries: India, China, Pakistan, Turkey, Uruguay, Brunei, Hungary and Kenya.

It means I would be able to visit offices of, among others, The Washington Post; I'll attend a weeklong seminar at Poynter, a popular American institute for journalism training and visit places I've never imagined I would.

Let me come to the basic of the six-month fellowship program. I am flying on a Dragon Air flight from Kathmandu. I have a seven-hour stopover at Hong Kong Airport.

A Cathy Pacific flight will land me at Tom Bradley International Airport in Los Angeles, California. From there, I'll take an American Airlines flight to Washington, DC. This four-hour forty-five minute flight will literally take me from one end of America to the other. I'll reach the capital of the US in the middle of the night.

Once in DC, I will meet Susan Albrecht and Katie Ravenel with whom I've spoken to, exchanged mails but have not seen in person. At Club Quarters Hotel in Washington, I'll meet Alfred Friendly Fellows: Lucia Baldomir (Uruguay), Akos Beothy (Hungary), Utku Cakirozer (Turkey), Umar Farooq Cheema (Pakistan), Sopan Joshi (India), Sonia Kaur (Brunei), Andrew Kipkemboi and Samuel Siringi (Kenya) and Yunting Ivan Zhai (China).

The Fellowship kicks off with a two-week long orientation seminar in Washington, DC. During the seminar, we learn about American culture, American press and the challenges and rewards of reporting in America. As far as I know, Gary Weaver, a professor at American University will warm us up through his lectures for our sojourn in the US.

At the end of the seminar, I will be joined by my mentor Greg Victor, Op-Ed and forum editor of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Greg has mentored several Alfred Friendly Fellows and I look forward to a wonderful stint at Post-Gazette with his guidance and support. On April 1, (April Fool's day but I hope it's just a coincidence), Greg and I will embark on the much-awaited journey to Pittsburgh, a city of rivers.

If this is getting tedious, let me cut it short (by the way, I'll be posting about my fellowship in this as well as in a separate blog, so stay connected). During the summer, the fellows gather at Poynter (Florida) where we learn the techniques of good story writing, editing et al. Florida also offers a lovely beach where I gather we'll be having a lot of fun. Then, again back to the newsroom of Post-Gazette: honing my skills, sharing knowledge and experiences with my colleagues there.

Ah, talking about colleagues, I recall that two of my former colleagues of Nepal Weekly have made America their second home. I wish to meet Chandra Khatiwada, (our former layout designer) in New York and Dinesh Jung Shah (ex-sports reporter and now a wanderer in the US). It would be lovely to meet these two wonderful human beings in a faraway land.

Finally, at the end of August, we arrive in Washington, DC to wrap up the program and bid adieu to our newfound friends. Then comes the happy homecoming!

With this fellowship, I hope to turn a new leaf in my career.

Death of Nepali workers abroad

2008-02-04T12:00:00.001+05:30

Consider this: The gruesome murder of twelve Nepalis bound to Iraq on August 19, 2004 triggered spontaneous protests in Kathmandu and other parts of Nepal. The rioters attacked the offices of Qatar Airways, Gulf Air, hundred of manpower agencies, mosques and Kantipur Complex, the office of largest media house in Nepal.

We have a tendency to forget public events very soon. It's hardly been three and a half years but the massacre of a dozen innocent Nepali youths (who were duped by wily human traffickers) and its aftermath (read mayhem in Kathmandu and Jhapa) is fast fading from our public memory.

Everyday more than seven hundred Nepali workers go abroad. But, the hitherto unnoticed and unacknowledged fact is that each day also brings in average two dead bodies of Nepali workers.

January 30: I'm at the airport waiting for one corpse to arrive. The Gulf Air flight from Baharain has just landed. Nepali workers carrying VCDs, TV arrive in droves, their Nepali replete with Arabic words (one uttered Khalliballi, Arabic word for who cares). As they venture out of the Tribhuvan International Airport (it's drizzling outside), they are greeted by cab drivers, hotel agents who are only eager to grab a share of their hard-earned Riyals and Dirhams. These middlemen grab the belongings forcing the home bound workers to follow their footsteps: you become stranger in your own country. This unhealthy and shameful 'marketing' is an eyesore to the sole international airport of Nepal.

Amid these homecoming workers appears a coffin. Mani Kumar Subba is inscribed in English and Arabic apparently to identify the coffin.

On the midnight of September 29, Karuna Subba, a resident of Chandragadhi, Jhapa in eastern lowland of Nepal received a call from Saudi Arabia. Her husband Mani Kumar Subba was on the line. He informed his wife that they were having a birthday party of one of their friends. A jovial Mani asked his wife to come to Kathmandu on October 15 to receive him.

"Now on I would be entitled for vacation every year," he shared the good news. He also mentioned that he had a gift (a piano) for his daughter Chandani.

"What else should I bring," he said as if he was boarding a flight the next day.

"No need to bring gifts from there, we can buy in Kathmandu," replied Karuna.

She did not know that that would be her last conversation with her husband.

Karuna did not have any inkling about what was in store for her. Her phone rang at 11 pm the next day. It was not her husband's voice. The caller who identified himself as Manik Kumar's friend asked for her fax number in Nepal. When she enquired about her husband, the caller told her that he had gone to a remote area bordering Kuwait in course of his duty.

Karuna grew anxious. Later, she was informed that her husband was found dead in a swimming pool. She thinks something fishy must have happened. "How come a person partying the previous day can be found dead in the swimming pool the next day?" she asked me, as if I had the right answer (But I didn't have).

It took four agonizing months for the corpse to arrive.

Karuna made rounds of man power agency (Moondrops Overseas), Labor Department and Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) to arrange for the arrival of her husband's dead body. In this effort, she spent forty thousand rupees (Approx 650 US dollars). According to her, late Mani Kumar was the sole breadwinner of the joint family of eight (including college going son and daughter). Her mother-in-law is undergoing dialysis in Siliguri, West Bengal, India (another tragic blow to an already devastated family). Both of her kidneys have been shot and the transplant costs 1 hundred thousand rupees.

MoFA recieved twenty-two applications for the shipment of Nepali workers' dead bodies from abroad in the month of Poush (Dec 16-Jan 17). The consular and legal section of the Ministry (dubbed corpse section) is badly understaffed. So are the Nepali missions abroad. Most of the embassies are run by three to five staff, which is not sufficient given the massive volume of work trust upon them.

What needs to be done?

1.A permanent mechanism in conjunction with MoFA, Labor Department and manpower agency should be formed to look after among others the death of Nepali workers. The government must ensure speedy arrival of the dead bodies of the workers. This mechanism should also inspect the working and living conditions of Nepali abroad.
2.The illegal means (advertisements without the verification of the company, sending to Iraq while advertising for Kuwait etc) by which the manpower agencies are hiring workers must be stopped and the manpower agencies must be brought under close scrutiny. The orientation training must be mandatory for every workers going abroad.

Related Links: Chicago Tribune reporter Cam Simpson's investigative series on how the twelve Nepali workers (killed by a terrorist group) ended up in Iraq.
David Phinney, a Washington based journalist's in-depth piece titled Asia's Poor Build US Bases in Iraq.
My post on a Malaysia bound worker.
My story on OhmyNews about Nepali women's exploitation in Saudi Arabia

Notes of Life

2008-01-20T12:24:00.000+05:30

Is it a blog fatigue? Or a writer's block? (Though I don't claim to be one yet).The fact of the matter is I haven't been able to update my blog, lately. However, I received this mail which has few pearls of wisdom. I'm reproducing it. Written by American comedian George Carlin.

A Message by George Carlin:

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider Freeways, but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness.

We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.

We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've added years to life not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We've done larger things, but not better things.

We've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We've conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We've learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less.

These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete...

Remember; spend some time with your loved ones, because they are not going to be around forever.

Remember, say a kind word to someone who looks up to you in awe, because that little person soon will grow up and leave your side.

Remember, to give a warm hug to the one next to you, because that is the only treasure you can give with your heart and it doesn't cost a cent.

Remember, to say, 'I love you' to your partner and your loved ones, but most of all mean it. A kiss and an embrace will mend hurt when it comes from deep inside of you.

Remember to hold hands and cherish the moment for someday that person will not be there again.

Give time to love, give time to speak! And give time to share the precious thoughts in your mind.

AND ALWAYS REMEMBER:

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
(Received from Devendra Dhungana)

Death of a Diary (and many more)

2007-12-31T14:35:00.000+05:30

I'm not talking about death of Deepak's Diary (this will remain even after I cease to exist). I'm dwelling upon telephone diary (or directory if you call it). Since I purchased a Nokia mobile set three years ago, I no longer carry a telephone diary ( I also don't wear watches but that's different story). This human invention has been replaced by slick mobile phones.

I maintain a calling list of people and make sure that I call them as often as I can. As I insert this slim object variously called cell, mobile, hand phone into my pocket, the telephone diary and wrist watch become redundant. Recently while fumbling with my paraphernalia, I retrieved my old telephone diary; torn apart. Yet, it reminded me of my long forgotten acquaintances and friends. To my surprise, I also found old phone numbers still in use.

As new technology, devices pop up, there invariably arises the fear of losing the old things. Ah, another example is alarm clock. Mobile is such a handy device equipped with multi function. So, the colorful alarm clocks are another endangered species. What else? My Nokia set also at times doubles up as torchlight (this at a time when there is three-hour load shedding two weekend days a week). I don't even need a calculator to do small calculation.

When television hit the Nepali households in early 80s, people feared that newspapers and books would not be read. But, new inventions only reinforce the use of old ones (of course, there are exceptions such as the VCR replaced by DVD/VCD). Likewise, I prefigure music cassettes being replaced by CDs.

I don't know whether world is becoming flat or it is still round. But, it has definitely shrunk. Apple's iphone boasts of the convergence of mobile, ipod, digital camera in one device. People are increasingly carrying fewer things (another example, paper note replaced by debit and credit cards). After all, it's a good news in an otherwise overcrowded world.

Nuggets from the Net

2007-12-21T12:14:00.001+05:30

Here are few links that may interest you. Of late, I have been lackadaisical in updating blog. But, there are reasons; will tell you later.

Foreign Policy in its year-end issue lists ten underreported stories of 2007.

How did Time magazine start the Person of the Year trend? This year Vladimir Putin bagged it.

The news of death of journos again makes headlines. Check out here and here.

My previous posts:
Books: Kite Runner, Inheritance of Loss, Palpasa Cafe (its English version is coming)

Profiles: Sister Nirmala, Samrat Upadhyay, Laxman Shrestha.

Funny Searches through Google

2007-12-15T13:56:00.000+05:30

Strange as it may sound but people of different hues end up here for various reasons. Here's another round up from Google searches (with annotation).

desi kamasutra (I've never read kamasutra, forget about desi stuff)

Yubaraj ghimire indian express (I know he occasionally writes for that daily)

Journalist Sudhir Sharma email (Please mail me, I can provide it to you)

deepak showup (I'm Deepak Adhikari not Deepak Swarup er showup!)

wife of Dr. Palani Ravichandran (I vaugely know Dr. Ravichandran, a kidney kingpin, forget about his wife who must have been suffering after his arrest: read the post below)

early morning jog preparation (I used to jog till six months ago, but can't even think of it in this shivering Kathmandu winter)

Facing the Camera : An Experience

2007-12-02T16:06:00.001+05:30

On November 13, Alessandro Gilioli, an editor with L'espresso, popular Italian magazine, ringed me up and asked if he can meet me the following day. I had a very vague idea of his Nepal project. All I knew was he was accompanying a documentary film crew to shoot on kidney trade. I hurriedly asked: "Are you going to interview me?" He replied: "We may, we may not." I promised to meet him the next day at office at 9 am.

Nevertheless, I prepared for the red-letter day. The fact of the matter is, in my career spanning almost a decade, I've never faced a television camera, let alone give an interview. The thought of this two-minute-fame as they call it made me anxious.

At that time, my wife was away home and I was all alone. The previous day, I jotted some notes to use in my interview. I kicked off for my office at Kantipur Complex, Tinkune, Kathmandu.

Little did I know that half a dozen people had gathered in my office, waiting for me. The crew consisted of two still photographers, a cameraman cum director, a producer (and of course the interviewer, Mr. Gilioli) and an interpreter. They had arrived in a white van with a plate written 'tourist' at the back of the van. At office too, I was all alone, for my colleagues show up only after 11 am.

I didn't know that shooting a documentary would be an elaborate process. First, my cubicle disqualified for the shooting because it was narrow and congested. The director wanted some drama and element of fiction on it. So, my workplace was shifted to that of a colleague.

Lights, camera, actions! But wait, they insisted me to answer in Nepali while the questions were in English. I found this baffling. One reason I preferred English was that I had prepared notes in English. Secondly, one is expected to speak in English with a foreigner. But, the producer was adamant and I finally complied.

In the interview (I don't know how it comes out), I expressed my dismay at government's apathy in controlling human organ trafficking from Nepal to India. It turned out that the documentary had a global scope; they had a global perspective in human organ trafficking and Nepal was just a tiny part of the project. True, human organ trafficking has transcended geographical boundaries. Thus, in China you find surgeons extracting body organs from the prisoners. In Brazil, organ smuggling is rampant. Even in Iran, predominantly Muslim country, people advertise for sell of their kidney.

In India, especially Chennai where Scott Carney has been tracking the trade, post-tsunami saw a boom on organ sale. A big racket has been busted in India after the arrest of Dr. Palani Ravichandran, the kingpin of kidney mafia spreading across several countries including India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Alessandro was surprised to hear the news of Dr. Ravichandra's arrest.

In interview, I raised the pertinent issues related to Nepal-India kidney trade. I remarked that lack of transplant facility in Nepal coupled with abject poverty is driving poor Nepalis to sell their organs. Yet, the last two questions by Alessandro were tough to answer. The questions needed much soul searching but after pondering for a while, I answered them. They were somewhat like this: (1) If circumstances forced you to sell kidney, would you do it? (2) If you would have to undergo transplant, would you buy a kidney?

To the first one, I answered in negative. I premised that there are many ways to earn money and selling kidney should not be the last refuge. But, the second one was difficult to reply. I again answered in No but I know that the only way to save life after the failure of both kidneys is to undergo transplant. If one of your relatives doesn't donate you a kidney, there is no way but to resort to the racketeers. I secretly prayed that my kidneys would remain healthy all my life.

The good thing about the L'espresso cover story is that Deepak Lama, who was ready to sell his kidney to undercover reporter Alessandro Gilioli has been rescued, thanks to the support from L'espresso readers, Alessandro and all the Italians involved in this philanthropy. Now, Deepak runs a shop, is married to a beautiful girl. Kudos to you Alessandro for giving a new life to a desperate Nepali youth!

Sunday Musings

2007-11-26T18:10:00.000+05:30

To me, Sunday heralds a hectic day. I wake up at around 7 am and bring the sackful of newspapers making sure that Nepal Weekly is not missing. My wife knows that I love sipping tea while scanning the news. Therefore, as I flip through the pages, a sweet aroma of morning tea engulfs the room.

Strange but my own magazine happens to be one of my staples. I read my own write-ups–the design and possible mistakes are what I look for–and that of colleagues. Last week I did two stories–a cover story on former US president Jimmy Carter's Nepal visit and Bhutanese media in exile. These days, apart from feature stories, I concentrate on foreign affairs, diplomacy and Bhutanese refugee issues. My reading should have served as a background to comment on the magazine in our weekly editorial meeting. But, early morning, I SMSed my editor about my assignment for that day.

Veteran Kantipur lens man Chandra Shekhar Karki called me up to ask the time of our appointment. A rare phenomenon but he was ready to accompany me for a photo shoot. I am doing a feature story on successful disable to mark the World Disability Day on December 3. Mr Karki asked me to pick him up for he had run out of petrol. I drove to Lokanthali, two kilometres away from my apartment at Kaushaltar.

The seemingly endless traffic jam greeted me. In a piece recently published in Koseli supplement of Kantipur, my friend Subel Bhandari poses the question about the traffic congestion in Araniko Highway (really?) with a young lady lawmaker Lila Nyaichyain. I drive this road everyday to reach my office. Even the lawmaker sounded frustrated with our apathy towards the basic infrastructure. According to the lawmaker, she has raised this issue a number of times in the parliament. But, as usual, the government has turned a deaf ear.

I drove past Kaushaltar, Gaththaghar, Madhypaur Thimi and we finally reached Bhaktapur Hospital where Dr. Mahendra Bahadur Malla, a senior consultant paedetrician was waiting for us. Thi sdoctor from far western Nepal was infected by Japanese Encephalitis more than ten years ago. Since half a decade, his legs and hands hardly follow his directions. But, this has not prevented him from overcoming his handicap and excelling in his field. He is wheelchair bound but still performs the medical work with equal aplomb.

Mr. Karki snapped the pictures. Clad in a white gown, Dr. Malla performed the check ups: checking the X-rays, prescribing the medicines, everything seemed perfect. Later, I enquired in detail about his struggle and tribulations. He told me Dr. Mukul Verma, an Indian neurophysician was the inspiration behind his emergence from isolation. For a few years after the infection, he was in solitary confinement, his wife being solely responsible for his care. As we returned, we saw an ICC under nineteen-cricket tournament going on. Mr. Karki insisted we take some photos. I'm no cricket fan. To be frank, I do not understand the match. My friend Keshav Thapa, an avid cricket fan, once tried to teach me the rules but all in vain.

On our way back, Mr. Karki proposed me to go to his house and have a cup of tea. I happily agreed. From his three storey bungalow, one can see the breathtaking panorama of the Himalayas in the north of Kathmandu Valley. I am also privileged to have a look over the mountain from my veranda on a clear winter morning. But, here was more mesmerizing view. His rooftop provided a wider view of glistening himalays in late November Bhaktapur afternoon.

1. Here's the English version of the successful disable story in Ekantipur ( the original Nepali version in Nepal Magazine)

2.Read a blog by Dinesh Wagle: Viewing Himalayas from Kathmandu