I have never been a person who feels the need to jot down the events of a day in a page with the particular date on its ‘header’. If things are worth remembering, I would anyway. Flipping through the pages of what we call a diary makes little sense to me. The best one can get out of it could be a wry smile on one’s face reading what had happened on that particular day. History or diary, as scholars would tell you, is important to understand the present but I guess that is something not applicable when it comes to one’s own diary. All it tells you is your own history and I guess we all know how we have lived our lives!
Habituated to a life in a place where exceptions are more of a rule, that particular evening turned out to be a truly exceptional one. For the first time since grade four, when writing diary used to be a regular assignment in the English class, I pulled out a notebook and wrote on the heading ‘D-day’ along with the date that was heavily underlined—all this happened almost subconsciously. This day, for some reason, seemed to be critical, as if my future depended on it. I just wanted to ensure that at least this event would not fail to register in my memory.
I started scribbling. Thanks to the giant leap we have made in ‘television communications’ in terms of numbers than the quality of content, keeping a close watch on events of that ‘historic’ day till night was fairly easy. I could easily switch to next channel the moment I was confronted with age-old ads and pick up the happenings where I had left. And I kept writing. Juggling between all those Nepali channels I landed in one of the Indian entertainment channels where a certain Bollywood star was busy biting his nails from one of the stands in a jam-packed stadium. Although there is no officially researched data to suggest how many times an individual TV viewer ends up pressing the wrong button of a remote control ending up at totally unintended channel, I am convinced that count must be pretty high. The reason I had landed in that particular channel was exactly the outcome of this.
How I landed there is beside the point. The point is, on many such occasions over the four years, even when my conviction on Nepal getting a new constitution was eroding and eroding pretty fast, for some reason I had found myself glued to the TV on certain key dates. As mentioned, since I don’t have anything called a diary, I do not remember the specific dates where I had sat in front of my old Philips set watching something so intensely. And again as mentioned, if it’s something worth remembering I would have remembered it any way, diary or no diary.
This time it was different and that rightly explained why I was writing down the events of the day. Perhaps, as must have been the case with many other Nepalis, my patience was running out; it had reached a tipping point.
The ticker kept scrolling, breaking news, one after another, a constant stream. Time kept ticking. The news came frantically, at a breaking speed. I did not realize that volume was high until I heard my mom shout from kitchen, ‘Lower the volume. And, you don’t have to follow that closely. Come midnight, they will find a way out (to extend the term)’. I thought that spoke volumes about the way Nepal was run. This too, I noted down in my diary.
My fiddling with the ‘remote’ was slowing down. Perhaps, it was the time where the other ‘remote’ that for some reason seems to have overshadowed whole of Nepali political spectrum was disrupting the frequency. I was being drawn to a match with every passing minute where the owner of eventual winner was biting his nails off frantically. The happenings being covered in local channels were equally frantic to a level resembling a ‘T-twenty’ match. One moment things seemed to be sailing swiftly and minutes later the team seemed to have lost it all. Probably, the only difference was that while real cricket was being played inside the rounded walls of the stadium with players running within boundary ropes, our players were playing it all over except in the place where they ought to have been playing. The news commentators, with a microphone in their hands, positioned at major nook and corners of the city, as if they were covering a ‘war’, seemed to be struggling to locate a place where the actual game was being played and hence were bereft of information to share with their viewers.
On the other hand, the game of cricket was nearing completion. The uproar in the stadium was reaching a crescendo. As I learnt, it was the final game of the tournament and with every ball bowled the game seemed to be getting more exciting. The seasoned commentators seem to be overloaded with information and describing all the events in what seemed like one breath.
The newest format of cricket was turning out to be a huge success, and here we were, churning one failure after another.
Cricket’s never been my game but that night with every passing minute, I could feel my irate, restless fingers, itching trying to keep up with the scores. With every passing moment, both my attention and interest seemed to succumb to the game which I had never followed so intently. Unfortunately, my interest in what I had been following so closely for years seemed to be fading fast, almost to a point of frustration. An hour before midnight, a Bollywood superstar was busy celebrating his team’s win. I switched back to local channel only to learn that out here no one had won and interestingly the entire nation had lost. I signed off my single page diary and threw it on the study table. What irked me was that the newest format of cricket barely conceptualized six years ago had turned out to be a huge success, completing yet another memorable season, here we were, churning failures after failures, displaying our most inept qualities to the entire world!
As and when I flip through the pages of my single-page diary decades down the line, this is what I would find. I have almost been forced to live my life thus far hearing stories about how things unfolded in yesteryears, during 2007 BS, the revolutions that followed in various forms, shapes and sizes thereafter. I would not do the same to my children. All I would offer them is to read this one page, that too if they are interested!
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