Born in a remote village of Sindhupalchwok, 75 kilometers away in the east from Kathmandu, he has done every household chore a villager ought to do. Cutting grasses, working on the family fields at rice planting and wheat farming, and collecting firewood were more than normal to him. School was far away from his home, and despite the fact that he had huge inclinations to studies, it couldn’t be given the first priority in his schooldays.
“However, I was a good student and I’ve never failed my exams,” he says, recalling how good he was in Nepali language which made him his teacher’s favorite. “My teacher always asked for me if I wasn’t present in the class before he started his lessons of the day,” he says.
Volleyball was the only game played in his school. Other guys didn’t let him play because he was a bit shorter than them.
“So I used to take the ball and didn’t give them back believing that we had equal rights to hold it as we had paid equal fees at the school,” he says, laughing.
Being the youngest of seven siblings didn’t, however, give him any opportunity to get pampered by his family. Instead, as his older brothers lived in Kathmandu, he had to take care of the family and the works in and around the house. When asked how much mischief he used to get involved in, he says, “I didn’t have time for it. I had no girlfriends, either, but was definitely attracted to quite a few ones.”
He recollects his rural life. “When I was a teenager, I used to travel by buses that used to pass by our village. We traveled without paying the bus fare as we didn’t have any money,” he recalls. “Some of the conductors didn’t like it and threw us out midway. The next day, we took revenge by throwing stones at the bus from the hilltop.”
He also used to get a lot of beatings from his mother for fighting with his only sister and playing Dandi Biyo, a typical stick-and-cue game in Nepal.
“The game was banned in our village since the time when one kid died after being hit by the ‘Biyo’,” he recalls. “But we simply loved the game and somehow managed to trick the eyes of the villagers while playing it.”
He considers stealing fruits and selling rice as some worth mentioning mischief he indulged in during his teenage years.
“We made plans, and somebody distracted the owners of the orchards while others plucked the fruits from the tress,” he says, laughing. And while taking paddy to the mills to convert it into rice, he sold some of it and lied to his family.
“I spent the money I made from selling the rice playing marbles and buying good foods,” he says.
Jitu takes himself as an example when it comes to the statement, “Nothing is impossible.” Working very hard all his life, he has gone through the ups and downs of life, like going to India for about two years due to peer pressure and having to struggle there in his late teenage years, calling Santosh Panta for more than 30 times for a role in “Hijo Aaja Ka Kura,” and so forth and so on.
Now, to say the least, Jitu Nepal has succeeded in establishing himself as a well-known comic actor in his young thirties.
Related story
Officials kept mum about machine that could test 140 samples da...
